Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century by Jason Ward (review)

Jason Ward's Hanging Bridge is a case study of two lynchings that occurred in Clarke County, Mississippi, located on the eastern border of the state. In 1918, a white mob raided the county jail and abducted four African-American prisoners, two young men and two young women accused of murdering their boss, a local white farmer. The mob then lynched them from a bridge that spanned over the Chickasawhay River. Twenty-four years later, in 1942, another mob hanged two young black men from the same bridge, this time for allegedly "chasing" a white girl (91). The "hanging bridge" of the book's title serves as a trope to link these two events together; it bears the weight of the bodies and of history.

Case studies are a common genre in the field of lynching studies and if one reads enough of them, they can become repetitive. Lynchings tended to follow certain patterns, both in terms of motivation and execution, and so do most case studies of them. They often add little to our historiographical understanding of the practice. At their best, they can provide a degree of human detail that broader, interpretative studies cannot, and, if read in the places under study, they can compel those communities to reckon with their violent pasts.

Hanging Bridge stands out among case studies, however. That is because Ward is less interested in the events that precipitated the lynchings or the violence itself than their aftermath. In fact, the stories of the lynchings take only a few pages. Instead, he presents a complex narrative about black defiance in the face of racial violence. The lynchings, in his telling, are notable for how they served as a catalyst for activism. For this reason, he includes a final section that extends the story to the 1960s through the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of Black Power politics in Clarke County. I applaud Ward for his decision to craft this story this way. The result is a compelling, deeply-textured local study of black resistance under a Jim Crow regime.

What makes this local study especially interesting is how linked Clarke County was to wider events, both statewide and nationwide. The 1918 lynching happened in the wake of World War I, just as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was shifting its antilynching activism into high gear and connecting its cause to Woodrow Wilson's postwar idealism. Walter White, then a NAACP staffer, traveled to Clarke County to investigate the lynching. Similarly, Ward places the 1942 lynching in the context of increasing racial tensions in WWII. By 1942, the federal government was involving itself in lynching cases, which represented a significant shift in national politics. In the face of black activists' Double Victory campaign and in the glare of international attention, the Roosevelt administration was compelled to take acts of racial violence seriously. The lynching in Clarke County thus prompted a Department of Justice investigation. In turn, the NAACP, which had organized its own investigation, used publicity about the lynching as a propaganda tool for its wartime activism.

Ward relates these events through the perspectives of various historical actors like Walter White, James Yates, a county resident and memoirist, and NAACP activist, Roy Wilkins. This is an effective strategy not only to propel the narrative, but also to emphasize that black citizens in Clark County, as well as national activists, were not simply subject to impersonal forces of history; rather, they were reacting to and, in turn, shaping conditions on the ground.

Ward's last section, a snapshot of the county in 1966, is particularly fascinating. Although the Justice Department had investigated and sued the county's registrar for voter discrimination in 1961, the black freedom struggle that unfolded across Mississippi in the late 1950s and early 1960s had largely bypassed Clarke County. This was not so by 1966, when black power politics had...