Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments The Scottsboro case has preempted the attention of liberals and scholars as the cause celebie of racism and its attendant violence in the South in the 1930s. Few remember a second event, the lynching of Claude Neal, a black, in Greenwood, Florida,October 27, 1934. The murder of Neal, which NAACP spokesman Walter White condemned as "one of the most bestial crimes ever committed by a mob," did not upstage the Scottsboro episode. Yet this incident, which prompted A. A. Brill, America's foremost psychoanalyst, to write, "De Sade in all his glory could not have invented a more diabolical situation," resulted in national news stories on the plight of the victim, produced an outcry from liberal organizations, and drew criticism from persons close to President Roosevelt.1 Both Neal and the Scottsboro boys had allegedly violated the South's most sacred taboo: sex between a black male and a white female. In retaliation, those who determined justice, the Alabama juries and the Florida lynchers, imposed severe penalties to deter further transgressions. Though discrimination against blacks characterized American life and was acceptable to most Americans at this time, Scotts1 . Walter White to William Rosenwald, November 16, 1934, A. A. Brill to Walter White, November 24, 1934, both in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. xxiii xxiv Preface and Acknowledgments boro and the Neal lynching produced denunciations of racial injustice . This message was carried principally by the national media and also by the threat of action by the federal government. Violence toward blacks, whether in a formal court of law in Alabama or under an oak tree in Jackson County, Florida, was increasingly unacceptable to the nation. The Scottsboro and Neal cases hastened the emergence of a society which more nearly practiced equality under the law for all its citizens. The book that follows is concerned with more than the violent death of Neal in the dark woods of northwest Florida. That story should be recounted because of its drama and because the incident and its aftermath are indices of racial attitudes in America at the time. But the presentation is concerned, too, with a larger issue. It seeks to explain, with the Neal incident as a case study, why the lynching of blacks persisted as a manifestation ofAmerican violence until the mid-1930s. New perspectives on this issue are possible through examination of the Neal lynching and its consequences, recent findings on racial aggression, and the decline and demise of lynching following the murder of Neal. Definitions of lynching vary. The sense of federal legislation to outlaw the practice in the 1930s sees lynching as an act of a mob, usually three or more persons, which punishes and kills its victim wholly without authority of the law. This definition was broadened by a special study group at Tuskegee Institute in 1940 to include motives for the mob, i.e., "acting under the pretextof service to justice, race or tradition." The meaning of lynching as it is used in this book is less legalistic and conveys a more popular connotation, but one which clearly distinguishes it from murder . The key to the phenomenon is community approval, either explicit, in the form of general participation by the local citizenry , or implicit, in the form of acquittal of the killers with or without a trial. Approbation by the community is also usually confirmed by such public activities of the lynch mob as a manhunt and chase and display of the victim's body in a conspicuous place. From this perspective the practice of lynching virtually disappears from the American scene after the 1930s. The reasons Preface and Acknowledgments xxv for that disappearance reveal new insights on the nature of lynching itself. Several people recall the 1934 incident. These include Neal's relatives and acquaintances and those of the white girl he was accused of raping and murdering, associates and friends of the lynch mob, and a few spectators. Only one of the lynchers is still living. No one interviewed wished to disclose his name. In fact information obtained about the lynching was conditional on his remaining anonymous. The author and his able research assistant , Walter T. Howard, obtained especially useful information from two persons, one the editor of a local newspaper at the time of the incident, and the other a close friend of the mob members to whom...