"The Necessity of an Example": Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition & the Ohio Anti-Lynching Campaign

The chief constitutional objection to [anti-lynching] legislation is that the federal Government has no more warrant to step in to punish lynching in the States than it has to prevent or punish any other form of murder or any other crime—arson, for example. I think it is safe to say that lynching is not simply murder; that it is murder plus something else.

James Weldon Johnson

Testifying in 1926 before a senate judiciary committee, James Weldon Johnson spoke out for the dire necessity of a federal anti-lynching bill. In his testimony, Johnson objected to the central argument among opponents of anti-lynching legislation, which held that the federal government had neither the power nor the jurisdiction to prosecute those who participate in mob violence. Cloaked in the legal authority of U.S. v Cruikshank (1875), that argument had accrued force for the past fifty years. For Johnson and others, however, lynching presented a special case. Lynching was more than a crime rarely, if ever, prosecuted under state law when victims were minorities; it was "not simply murder" but "murder plus something else." It was, Johnson continued, "murder plus revolution and anarchy . . . murder plus a flaunting and overthrowing and tramping under foot of the prerogatives of the courts" ("To Prevent" 29).

A quarter century earlier, Charles W. Chesnutt made a similar argument and plea for anti-lynching legislation in The Marrow of Tradition (1901). However, whereas Johnson presented a straightforward attack, Chesnutt approached the subject through irony and indirection. The literary assault he levied in The Marrow of Tradition culminated in a chapter sardonically titled, "How Not to Prevent a Lynching." Aimed at a legal and political system that tolerated mob violence, Chesnutt's ironic "How Not to" account anticipated the legal snafus and frustration that would confront the movement for federal anti-lynching legislation for the next thirty years.¹

This essay analyzes The Marrow of Tradition in terms of its ironic representation of "lynch law"—summary punishment (usually public execution) by a mob—and its cultural rhetoric of legitimation: that is, the narratives, tropes, and arguments through which participants in and apologists for lynching justified the mob murder of African Americans and other minorities. A key component of this legitimizing discourse is figured in the essay's title, "The Necessity of an Example," which I have taken from another of Chesnutt's ironic chapter headings.² Both an argument and a trope integral to lynching's legitimation rhetoric, the phrase draws on the logic of deterrence and the belief that the force of law (licit or otherwise) necessarily depends upon its dramatic enactment. In appropriating Chesnutt's title for my own, I give it a further ironic twist by emphasizing the absurd position into which Chesnutt—like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, T. Thomas Fortune, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other anti-lynching activists—was placed: the necessity of presenting painfully obvious examples of how African Americans were brutally murdered through mob law.

Anti-lynching legislation draws attention to how Chesnutt's novel, traditionally read as an indictment of Southern racism, is national in scope. Much of the historical criticism on The Marrow of Tradition has, for obvious reasons, focused on the book in relation to the 1898 Wilmington race riot, the novel's ostensible historical referent.³ While this scholarship is crucial for understanding the work's moment of representation, it neglects the fact that Chesnutt wrote the novel while living in Ohio, where from 1892-1900 the most significant state movement for anti-lynching legislation took place. The Ohio anti-lynching campaign centered around the drafting and passage of a bill that would make communities in which lynchings occurred financially liable and socially responsible for acts of mob violence. The campaign's headquarters were located in Cleveland, Chesnutt's birthplace and the city in which he lived and worked for most of his career as a legal stenographer and writer. In fact, Chesnutt not only wrote much of his fiction in Cleveland while the Ohio movement was...