At the Heart of the American Experience

James H. Madison. A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America. New York: Palgrave, 2001. xiv + 204 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

A young white man was shot and his girlfriend raped by three African-American teenagers, or so the girlfriend charged. The young black men were arrested, and that night, after the wounded man died, a crowd of more than a thousand—men, women, and children—gathered outside the jail that housed the accused. A group of between thirty and seventy-five of them, most young males but a few females as well, stormed the jail, where the jailors put up little opposition and retreated. The white mob grabbed the young men, beat them, and dragged them outside. One was hanged there, another beaten repeatedly on the way to the courthouse, where he too was hanged. The third, the youngest, escaped death, in part because of the intervention of the sheriff. But the mob took the body of the first victim to the courthouse and hanged it along with the other. A crowd stayed to watch, while photographers snapped pictures of the victims and also of the smiling people milling about. Some in the crowd, which stayed up through the night, took pieces of clothing and other souvenirs from the bodies.

This incident could have taken place in any one of hundreds of southern towns over a forty-five-year period from 1890 to 1935. It did not. It occurred in August of 1930 in Marion, Indiana, the county seat of Grant County, northeast of Indianapolis. In A Lynching in the Heartland, James H. Madison tells the story of this tragic if all too common event. In doing so, Madison chooses a distinctive, and perhaps increasingly popular, narrative style, an open narrative as Edward L. Ayers has called it. ¹ In order to "encourage the general reader to keep turning" his pages and "to allow space for the reader to think about these events, to see possibilities of various meaning," Madison allows "the people in [the] book to tell their own stories . . . with less of" his "own analysis and interpretation than some readers might like" (p. 3). As a result, Madison makes little attempt to evaluate the competing claims of what happened in Marion and, in places, even suggests that such basic questions as why the lynching occurred cannot be answered.

He recounts the version of events told by Mary Ball and believed by most whites: Abe Smith, Thomas Shipp, and James Cameron attacked a young couple parked in a local lover's lane. When Mary's companion, Claude Deeter, tried to fight them off, he was shot and then his assailants raped Mary. The black community told a very different story. In it, Smith and Ball had been dating and may have been lovers, but in any case, they and the three others involved were part of a "black and tan" gang that had committed several robberies. The shooting, in the black community's version of events, occurred during a squabble among thieves, and the charge of rape was false. Madison presents both versions and, true to his word, leaves it for the reader to decide which is more accurate.

He does provide a more systematic explanation of why the lynching occurred, though perhaps as he expects, not as much as some readers might like. Madison makes a strong case that in the 1920s Grant County experienced a surge of growth and industrialization, changes that left some residents worried about "too much immorality, too much crime, too much corruption" (p. 34). They also feared that law enforcement had become too lax. Perhaps so, although similar conditions elsewhere did not lead to lynchings, and recent statistical studies of southern lynchings have undermined, though not eliminated, such social explanations for outbreaks of lynching. They find lynchings most common in agricultural areas undergoing little modernization, and one of them has...