Beyond the Mob, Beyond the South

In the early 1890s, the educator and journalist Ida B. Wells championed a number of activist causes but shied away from the issue of lynching. When her friend Thomas Moss was lynched she realized he was targeted for his business success. From that point on, she, and later others, investigated lynching and brought it to public attention as the most extreme manifestation of racism against African Americans. As lynchings declined in the 1920s and ‘30s, civil rights activists shifted their focus to suffrage, access to education, and other respectable issues. Lynchings faded in white national memory and historical scholarship.

Historians in the 1980s and ‘90s began to focus on lynchings, but they stayed mostly within the parameters drawn by early activists: a focus on the Jim Crow South, an interest in treating lynching as a unique phenomenon, and a curiosity about the bloodlust of mob members. Case studies proliferated. In the early twenty-first century, a new generation of historians answered calls for synthesis with an eye to national culture. In 2015, two books came out that broaden lynching studies: Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay shift their gaze from the mob to the victims with Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. Brent M. S. Campney continues a welcome trend of expanding beyond the South with This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927.

Lynched is a statistical study with two main goals: to gather information on victims and to seek a measure of justice for targets of the mob by fleshing out their lives as much as possible. The authors are sociologists who describe their methodology as testing questions with “quantitative data and enlightened by qualitative evidence” (p. 27). They admit this contrasts with the “more humanistic narrative investigative tradition” of historians (p. 27). There are multiple places in their review of scholarly literature where messy historical suggestions are eliminated for lack of quantitative validation. In a section titled “Why Do Lynching and Its Victims Matter in the Twenty-First Century?” the authors point to statistical studies demonstrating that a higher number of lynchings in a region is “significantly and positively related to” higher rates for murders, the death penalty, membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and incarceration rates decades later (p. 29). But the authors bemoan a lack of quantitatively proven “mechanisms” to explain this link (p. 30). “We are left, then, with the unsatisfying conclusion that the modern relevance of lynching is due to some kind of ‘historical legacy’ of mob violence” (p. 30). This gave me pause—historical monographs do not usually demand that the importance of the past must be exactly calibrated.

After gingerly treading onto this mushy ground, however, the authors give an impressive account of their methods. An earlier database of lynching incidents of ten Southeastern states (excluding Virginia and Texas), largely built from newspaper accounts, served as the bedrock from which to mine possibilities. In this database—E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, “Confirmed Inventory of Southern Lynch Victims, 1882–1930” (2010)—the authors used the U.S. Census, WWI draft cards, ancestry.com and other means to create possible matches between lynch victims and identifiable names. This “forensic social science” had many obstacles (p. 34). Research team members (many undergraduates) engaged in sifting (striking out bad matches), sorting (ranking matches by strength), and conducting forward searches—looking ahead in the Census to eliminate false positives. Out of 2,483 victims, the team matched, with confidence, 935 names (pp. 40, 60). The authors assert this percentage is quite normal with these kinds of projects. The team used the Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) from the Minnesota Population Center to get a control group of African American men who were...