Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South by Claude A. Clegg III (review)

Knowledge of a 1906 triple lynching in Salisbury, North Carolina, Claude A. Clegg writes, has “almost entirely lapsed into misty legend, with the finer details available only in long-forgotten court records, period newspaper accounts, gubernatorial correspondence, and other aging documents tucked away in various repositories” (169). Until recently, historians could make a similar argument about Americans’ collective memory of lynching. The 2000 debut of what became “Without Sanctuary,” the exhibition of lynching photography, escalated historians’ ongoing efforts to recover the history of lynching and erase Americans’ amnesia about this violence and its critical role in shaping American culture and life. Indeed, Clegg’s discovery of a photograph of the 1906 lynching, which occurred in his hometown, inspired him to investigate. He discovered that the killings generated enormous press coverage, as well as the rare prosecution of a lyncher, before triggering the decline of lynching in the state. Over time, this and other lynchings slipped from the public memory of many North Carolinians. Using newspaper reports as well as municipal, court, and gubernatorial records, Clegg restores the history of lynching in North Carolina.

The book begins with the 1895 state-sponsored, public execution of two African American men. The spectacular nature of the event and officials’ feelings of regret marked the end of the state’s formal participation in public executions. Although the state deemed itself out of the business of spectacle killings, its white citizens were not. Clegg argues that conservative white politicians, like Governors Charles Aycock and Robert Glenn, sowed the seeds of a lynching culture by touting disfranchisement by law and mob rule as the best ways of routing African Americans’ insistence on participating in the state’s political culture and resisting resubjugation. It was only when these politicians began to reap the whirlwind of what they had sown—marked by the rise of lynching and by questions about their capacity to govern—that they pivoted from being fire-breathing rough justice advocates candidates to becoming due process-supporting governors.

Lynching occurred in North Carolina until 1906, when outrage over the lynching of three African American men delivered a sociopolitical reckoning to the state’s white officials and citizens. The quadruple murder of a white family, the arrest of several possible perpetrators, and incendiary press coverage instigated the formation of a mob. Hundreds of men, women, and children participated in the lynching. The mob’s subversion of the rule of law, the seeming incompetence of local officials, and the crowd’s engagement in the macabre rituals that followed spectacle killings created a scandal that, combined with questions about the legitimacy of Glenn’s authority, forced the governor to take action. With the support of the governor and the need for the state to erase the sociopolitical uproar of the lynchings, authorities quickly convicted one white man. Understanding the impact of such killings on the reputation of the state and the governor’s determination to prosecute perpetrators, North Carolinians seemed to show a greater support for allowing the legal and judicial system to work to bring perpetrators to justice. Lynching declined in North Carolina, as it did throughout the nation, as “legal lynchings” supplanted extralegal ones. According to Clegg, even if North Carolinians did not remember lynching, evidence of the residual imprint of this violence can be found stamped on race relations and on the political leanings of some residents.

Troubled Ground makes an important contribution to recent case studies of lynching and memory. Readers could use the book to understand not only local, but also regional history and culture. Given the richness of the source base that comes with case studies, the one thing that could have strengthened the book would have been more examination of ordinary North Carolinians’ statements on, or reactions to lynching. This issue, however, does not diminish the book’s enrichment of the field.

In both...