A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940

Notes

191 Notes Introduction 1. Patricia A. Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 86. 2. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “The Case Stated” (1895), reprinted in Lynching in America: A History in Documents, ed. Christopher Waldrep (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 4. The sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck agree with Wells-Barnett that the “key to the beginning of the lynching era rests with the collapse of slavery” (see Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995], 246). William Fitzhugh Brundage also identifies “the refusal ofmostwhitestoaccepttheemancipatedslaves’questforeconomicandpolitical power” as the underlying cause of lynching (see William Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993], 6). 3. Nancy Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of HouseholdintheDelta ,1861–1975(Gainesville:UniversityPressofFlorida,2003),85–91, 118. The journalist Wilbur J. Cash also connects the fear that whites had of African American equality with the rape complex that whites concocted to justify lynching. Whites lynched blacks, according to Cash, because “any assertion of anykindonthepartoftheNegroconstitutedinaperfectlyrealmanneranattack on the Southern woman” (see Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South [New York: Knopf, 1941], 117–19). 4. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 67–84. 5. See Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 2003), 426. 6. Joel Williamson argues that “whites began the practice of lynching as a reaction against the presumed threat of the black beast to white womanhood.” For Williamson, the primary cause of lynching was the psychological need of south- 192 Notes to Pages 3–4 ern white males to compensate for their inability “to play the role of protectoras -breadwinnerwiththesatisfactiontowhichtheyalwaysaspiredandhadsometimesachieved .”Thus,whitemenseizedtheroleof“protector-as-defenderofthe purity of their women” as a means of satisfying their craving for power. Because this new role was necessarily directed against African Americans, Williamson claims that lynching started and was most prevalent in the “black belt” counties of the South (see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 184). William Pinar takes the psychosexual interpretation of lynching to its logical conclusion and argues that lynching was “primarily, a gendered form of racial politics and violence” in which the “repressed, racialized homosexual desire [of white men] expressed itself in the mutilation and sexual torture of thousands of young black men.” “Lynching,” according to Pinar, “was in no small measure a mangled form of queer sex” (see William F. Pinar, The Gender of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and the Crisis of Masculinity [New York: Peter Lang, 2001], 11). 7. Walter White, Rope and Faggot (1929; repr.,New York: Arno Pressand New York Times, 1969), 10. 8. In his study of violence in late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury South Carolina, John Hammond Moore concludes that lynching was both random and sporadic and was ineffective as a mechanism of racial intimidation (see Moore, Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in South Carolina, 1880–1920 [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006], 1). 9. Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 174. 10. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 229–30. 11. Walter White claims that lynching resulted from the economic advances that African Americans had made since the Civil War and the resentment that poorer whites felt toward the same (see White, Rope and Faggot, 12). 12. Adam Fairclough argues that the fact that lynching varied “within the South is less significant than the fact that lynchings occurred throughout the South.”Onecanagreereadilywiththispointandstillfinditnecessarytodiscern why lynching varied across time and place (see Adam Fairclough, ed., The Star Creek Papers [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997], xxix). 13. The best biography of Vardaman remains William F. Holmes, The White Chief: James Kimble Vardaman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970).Bilbo’scareer was ably chronicledin ChesterM.Morgan, Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). On Tillman, see Stephen Kantrovitz, Ben Tillman and the Recon- [18.118.254.94] Project...