Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal

Foreword to the Updated Edition

Foreword to the Updated Edition Anatomy of a Lynching after Thirty Years In late October 1934, Jackson County, in northwestern Florida, became the scene of a lynching that evoked shock and disbelief all over the United States not only because of its unfathomable cruelty but also because it gave the lie to widespread assumptions that, at long last, mob justice was disappearing even from the Deep South. A group of vigilantes abducted Claude Neal, a twentythree -year-old black farm laborer accused of raping and murdering Lola Cannidy, a young white woman, from a jail in Brewton,Alabama , where Florida authorities had brought the prisoner for safekeeping . The vigilantes easily outwitted the jailers and drove Neal back to Marianna, Florida, the scene of his alleged crime. After their return, Neal's captors tortured their victim for hours, reportedly forcing the black man to swallow his own genitals. Eventually they shot Neal dead, tied his body to a car, dragged it through the streets, and then hanged it from a tree opposite the courthouse. After the lynching, a raging mob attacked African Americans on the streets ofMarianna until the National Guard halted the rioters. In Anatomy of a Lynching, first published in 1982, historian James R. McGovern (1928-2012) called the killing of Neal "one of America's last 'classic lynchings'" (15). Indeed, the Marianna mob murder included almost all of the key elements that Americans in the first half of the twentieth century had come to associate with the practice of lynching. Consider the site of the incident : the South was where more than 80 percent of all lynchings IX x Foreword to the Updated Edition occurred. According to the statistics kept by civil rightsorganizations , African Americans represented a staggering 83 percent of all southern lynch victims, amounting to roughly 3,250 fatalities between the 1880s and World War II.1 Moreover, the victim was a black male charged with a sexual crime against a white female, an offense most closely linked to the public perception of lynching . The vigilantes seized their prey from jail without encountering serious resistance from law enforcement. Before killing Neal, they subjected him to prolonged torture. The lynching enjoyed the approval of the larger white community and the murderers went unpunished. It is true, as one reviewer of McGovern's book observed, that the actual murder was not a "spectacle lynching" in the literal sense. While a crowd of several thousand was impatiently lusting for a public execution, Neal's abductors, supposedly fearing that they would lose control, decided to slay their prisoner before delivering his body to the crowd. Then again, in every other respect the lynching of Neal was a public event that involved not only the white community of Jackson County but also much larger audiences. Newspapers and radio stations had announced the impending lynching, and an Associated Presscorrespondent was among the waiting crowd, which collectively mutilated the corpse. Neal's disfigured body was put on public display and onlookers took numerous photographsthat were subsequently sold, offering viewers "vicarious access to the missed thrill of the lynching," in the words of historian Amy Wood.2 McGovern conceived his book about the story of Neal's death as a case study that, he hoped, would "facilitate understanding, with the aid of social and psychological theory, of the phenomenon of lynching itself" (15). Following a brief introduction to the most influential scholarly interpretations of mob violence, the author provides the reader with an in-depth portrait of life and race relations in Jackson County, an isolated and poverty-stricken Deep 1. For detailed lynching statistics, see Carney Smith and Carrell Peterson Horton, eds., Historical Statistics of Black America (New York: Gale Research, 1995), vol. I, 488-95. 2. See the review by Adrian Cook in Journal of American Studies, 17:2 (1983), 290-91; Amy Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 81. Foreword to the Updated Edition xi South community in the Florida Panhandle. Based on meticulous archival research, including the records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), newspaper accounts, and oral history interviews, Anatomy of a Lynching carefully reconstructs the events that unfolded in the fall of 1934: the murder of Cannidy, Neal's arrest and odyssey through the jails of...