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

3“No Rights for the Negro Which a White Man Is Bound to Respect”: Lynching and Political Power in Mississippi and South Carolina

58 3 “No Rights for the Negro Which a White Man Is Bound to Respect” Lynching and Political Power in Mississippi and South Carolina The desire among some southern whites to invalidate the effects of emancipation and the enfranchisement of black males contributed to an onslaught of terroristic violence that manifested itself in lynching and other forms of repression and coercion. Whites attempted to dehumanize African Americans so that they could rationalize the apparent need to lynch allegedly depraved black criminals and exclude blacks from the body politic. The emergence of black fiends, who preyed purportedly on the innocent and defenseless, confirmed in the minds of many whites that blacks should never again be allowed unfettered access to political power. Prior to disfranchisement, whites in Mississippi used terroristic violence most frequently in Republican regions of the state, in part because these same regions formed the core of the New South cotton kingdom. Republican regions in South Carolina, on the other hand, were in economic decline before disfranchisement. In the years before disfranchisement, economic marginalization and a gerrymandered lowcountry “black district” insulated African Americans in these South Carolina regions from racial violence. The desire of whites to demonize African Americans that culminated in legal disfranchisement and segregation , however, made lynching worse in both states. In Mississippi, disfranchisement unleashed class tensions among whites, especially Lynching and Political Power 59 in majority white regions, and the denial of the franchise did little to ease the interpersonal tensions that fueled lynching. In South Carolina , the decimation of the Republican Party made African Americans, especially in heavily black regions, more susceptible to violence from whites, and lynching for alleged crimes, such as murder or assault, became commonplace. Just a few months before South Carolina enacted a new constitution that would impose a literacy test and a poll tax, ban interracial marriage, and segregate public schools, Frederick Douglass excoriated the whitesupremacist South for using lynching as a means of disfranchising African Americans of their political rights. The claims of white southerners that black males had suddenly become menacing rapists, from Douglass ’s perspective, lacked credibility. Whites had made no such charge during the Civil War, Douglass noted, when white women had lived unprotected among black men while white men served in the Confederate army. Given the political climate of the United States in the 1890s, Douglass charged that the old shibboleths concerning black supremacy were no longer tenable; hence, whites created a myth of black criminality to inflict terror on African Americans and to deliberately deny them their constitutional rights.1 Otherblackleadersagreedthatlynchingwasinseparablyintertwined with whites’ concerns about African American political power. David Augustus Straker, a former candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina, the first dean of law at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, and an accomplished criminal defense lawyer, claimed that southern disfranchisers fabricated the rape complex to “destroy Northern sentiment in the favor of the Negro by charging him with committing , as a class, the most heinous offense, next to murder.” Straker argued that the “true purpose” of lynching was not punishment but to “cast odium upon . . . [blacks] . . . and thus show unfitness for political suffrage.”2 Robert C. O. Benjamin, an accomplished African American attorneyandjournalist,insistedthatthechargeofraperesultedfromthe “pretended and baseless fear of Negro supremacy” and was nothing less than “an effort to divest the Negro of his friends by giving him a revolting and hateful reputation.”3 60 a deed so accursed For many whites, lynching and violence became “a sort of final solution ” to the problem of black political participation in the South.4 Of course, whites lynched for a variety of transgressions, both real and imagined, but the unprecedented wave of lynching that beset the South in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was a direct result of emancipation. Emancipation enabled African Americans to strive for social and political equality in the South, and many white southerners regarded such prospects as inherently threatening.5 Although whites frequently claimed that they tolerated lynching only for the unspeakable crime of rape, in calmer moments they often admitted that racial violence was an outgrowth of social and political competition between blacks and whites. The former Alabama Supreme Court justice Henderson Somerville, for instance, claimed that lynchings (and alleged rapes) were few in sections where “the negro vote has been eliminated as a controlling political factor,” but numerous where blacks held “the balance of political power.”6 To many white southerners, the “negro problem...