Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal

Chapter 8 Conclusion

Chapter 8 What can democracyultimately mean except respect for the lives of people and recognition that onelife is as valuableas Conclusion Irvin L. Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder Before Claude Neal died, he had experienced in full measure the dehumanization which accompanied violence. He had been denied the legal sanctuary of a jail, a trial by jury, solace from his friends in his last hours, his sexual identity, and finally his life. The basis of that dehumanization had begun, of course, much earlier. In a sense, he was only its victim. It began with the institution of slavery and assumption by colonists and later American whites that blacks were inferior. Debasing images of blacks typically served aspirations of planters and whites. The use of vigilante justice by whites against blacks was consistent with the frontier spirit which animated the planters' attitudes throughout the antebellum South. When the secure rewards of white supremacy were threatened by abolitionists and the Civil War,and then undermined during Reconstruction, whites fought back after 1877 and quickly reestablished their supremacy. The new social order, which was firmly established by 1900, assured continuous gains by whites from blacks, especially those of obtaining a menial work force, enjoying feelings of social superiority , and using black women sexually. These gains explained the insistence of southerners on conformist attitudes toward race among their fellow whites. This process resulted in near extinction of free thought on matters which even remotely affected race relations and, in Cash's words, in a "crushing of dissent as it has 149 another? 150 Anatomy of a Lynching not been established in any Western people since the decay of medieval feudalism."' Impressive findings have related conformist pressures in childrearing and social organization to violent attitudes and vigilante action against marginal groups. A person raised in this type of society is shown little tolerance, and when he grows up he extends little to others. But since he has developed small confidence in his own value because of constant pressures to do what is socially acceptable, he cannot become psychologically independent . His anger over his raising is easily displaced on weak people who cannot fight back, in this case the inferior social caste. He is readily disposed to calling another person "nigger" and, after having done that might next, if he feels he can get away with it, consider lynching that person. Violence of this type might also result, as Fromm suggested, from joylessness as well as cowardice since exploitatory societies breed lifelessness. Lynchings from this perspective provided a skeletal feast, at times almost enough life to be a carnival. The negative images of blacks were fixed points in the social and intellectual compass of whites in the South of 1900. Stereotypes of their being ignorant, shiftless, and thieving were surely damaging enough to keep them under continuous suspicion, but allegations that they had abnormal cravings for white women served as a virtual call to arms. Whites used rape as an alarm signal to preserve their own solidarity as well as to attack uppity blacks, but their frequent lynching of blacks accused of rape established that they had real fears for the safety of their women as well. Indeed, in some instances, "insolent blacks" may have been lynched for rape simply because whites believed that they were aggressive enough to seek white women. The small number of actual rapes of white women by black men, however (if blacks lynched for rape is an index), suggests that white males were genuinely bedeviled by anxieties of caste and sex. The startling increase in lynchings of blacks in the South in the period 1880 to 1900 is partly explainable as terror to secure 1. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 134. Conclusion 151 effective power for whites which had been briefly undermined by Reconstruction. After 1900, lynchings became less prevalent as the South became more urban and modern. There was, however, widespread persistence of the practice into the 1930s despite the fact that white dominance was clear-cut and mob rule was an affront to national ideals and human progress. The sociological school of the 1930s, as well as later historians and sociologists whom they have influenced, generally assumed that southern whites employed lynching whenever they sensed their power was slipping. Like a whiff of grapeshot in Napoleonic times, a good lynching cleared the air and comforted white people with...