Old Times There Are Best Forgotten: The Future of Confederate Symbolism in the South

On a Sunday afternoon, April 23, 1899, special excursion trains brought thousands of white citizens to Newnan, Georgia, to witness the public lynching of Sam Hose, a black man who had killed his white employer in what was clearly self-defense. According to Leon F. Litwack's introduction to Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, an extensive, well-documented, and utterly appalling collection of lynching photographs,

[a]fter stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self-appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying the torch, they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face. While some in the crowd plunged knives into the victim's flesh, others watched "with unfeigning satisfaction" (as one reporter noted) the contortions of Sam Hose's body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets, and rupturing his veins. . . . Before Hose's body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs. Shortly after the lynching, one of the participants reportedly left for the state capital, hoping to deliver a slice of Sam Hose's heart to the governor of Georgia, who would call Sam Hose's deeds "the most diabolical in the annals of crime." (Allen, et.al 9)

A primary component of the horror and revulsion one experiences in viewing these extraordinary images derives from how public the lynchings were. Several of these photographs depict very large crowds, mainly white men but also women and children, who certainly appear pleased with what they've done. The lynchers would also know that there was almost no chance that they would ever be charged with, much less convicted of, any wrongdoing.

The success of such obvious racial oppression required the almost complete support of white Southern society and its institutions of church and state, and that is exactly what happened. The "Progressives" who came into power around the turn of the century by opposing corporate interests and the privileging of wealth countered this obvious tilt to the left with an even more virulent racism that by now formed the core of Southern white unity. The resulting apartheid insured white supremacy and controlled Southern life to such an extent that even as late as the 1960s the white Southern community was capable of closing ranks to protect the killers of black children and black and white civil rights workers. The few Southern whites who dissented were at best shunned and at worst physically assaulted, and the sad history of anti-lynching legislation in Congress during the first half of the 20th century shows how successful the "Solid South" was in intimidating the rest of the nation politically and economically into not interfering with the "Southern Way of Life," a grand euphemism for extreme apartheid.

The images in Without Sanctuary also help deflate an argument sometimes employed by Southern apologists that lynchings were largely "poor white trash" affairs with their attendant ignorance and cruelty, behavior that was never countenanced by the educated, sophisticated gentry. Instead the photographs reveal many well-dressed citizens who have been identified as prominent members of the community, illustrating the simple but crucial truth that, as the venerable Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips said, the white South was unified by "a common resolve indomitably maintained" that the South "shall be and remain a white man's country." This unshakable resolve, according to Professor Phillips, could be "expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician's quietude" (Woodward 10).

Consequently, as much as many white Southerners would like to deny it, comparison of the ante-bellum and Jim Crow South with Nazi Germany is not unwarranted and in fact unavoidable. After all, both shared the same beliefs in...