Reconsidering the Lynching Archive

After several decades of research, Americanists understand lynching's centrality to U.S. history and culture. Scholars have traced the "roots" of Americans' support for and participation in extralegal violence and execution across the nation's social and legal cultures from the Anglo-European legal customary rights and the making and unmaking of a culture that tolerated lynching to the modern-day death penalty and hate crimes. They have profiled the perpetrators and their vocal and silent defenders and identified as victims women and men, confessed murderers and innocent people, enslaved and free people, as well as people from different racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds. They have tracked lynching across the nation's geographic and temporal landscapes and have unearthed and contextualized a multitude of creative and cultural by-products of lynching—photography, cinema, literature, art, and music—that resonate today. They have celebrated the individual and institutional crusades against this violence and lamented the challenges crusaders faced. They have even worked with cultural institutions and educators to weave lynching into the tapestry of American history by historicizing the violence for memorials, documentaries, websites, exhibits, and textbooks. In constructing the history of lynching and translating it for popular audiences, scholars disrupted the official record of Americans' amnesia regarding the nation's history of extralegal and racial violence.

Research on lynching and vigilantism by Michael J. Pfeifer—on "the roots of rough justice"—revealed that the history of Americans stepping outside the boundaries of the formal legal and judicial systems to exact justice for real or imagined crimes against their community and declaring an exemption from legal prosecution dates back to Anglo-European customs and to the Revolutionary era. In the early years of the republic, lynchers and vigilantes cloaked their resistance for the formalization of criminal justice procedures by claiming that they were acting in their capacity as republican citizens, in the name of the community and in conjunction with the legal and judicial systems. As Christopher Waldrep's research shows, these claims of "popular constitutionalism" were convincing enough to many white Americans that advocates of and participants in extralegal violence did not fear prosecution. Over the span of the nineteenth century, vigilantes and lynch mobs physically attacked or socially ostracized white men, but they modified their practices to adapt to such changes in American life as westward expansion, the threat of slave rebellion, the abolition of slavery, and immigration—ensnaring in their web of increasingly fatal mob violence Native peoples, African Americans, white women, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and immigrants from China, Japan, and Southern Italy. It was only after antilynching crusaders and due process advocates like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, John G. Cashman, and Jesse Daniel Ames tore apart lynchers' defense of their crimes; after organizations like the Constitutional League and the NAACP joined forces to push for federal antilynching legislation; and after diplomatic tensions in an increasingly global world were brought to bear that more white Americans started to consider the issue of moral and legal culpability and to lend their support for ending extralegal mob violence. Increasingly, the criminal justice system took over extralegal execution and administering justice to victims. Support for extralegal violence lived on, but there was more support for punishing people who tried to circumvent the legal and judicial process.

With many of the original questions about lynching and vigilantism answered, some scholars in the field have turned to ask new questions. To recover and construct lynching's history, more recent scholars have sought out archives of newspaper reports, court records, speeches, folk traditions, photographs, and creative projects such as music, literature, art, and cinema. In the fullness of time, some lynching scholars have come to take that archive for granted and have not done a good job of theorizing and articulating...