The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For southern cases studies, see, for example, James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Dominic Capeci, Jr., The Lynching of Cleo Wright (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); Bruce E. Baker, “Under the Rope: Lynching and Memory in Laurens County, South Carolina,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 319–346; Christine Arnold-Lourie, “‘A Madman’s Deed—A Maniac’s Hand’: Gender and Justice in Three Maryland Lynchings,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 1031–1045. 2. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990) was a pioneering state study of lynching. Subsequent state studies include Stephen J. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado 1859–1919 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002); William Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), analyzes lynching in California. 3. Two pathbreaking regional studies were W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Additional important treatments of racial lynching in the postbellum South include Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 156–157; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1999), 280–325; Margaret Vandiver, Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 4. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 109 2/7/11 10:17:35 AM 5. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979; rev. ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Power of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 6. Examples include Jonathan Markovitz,Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004); JacquelineGoldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 7. In their important work on the lynching of Hispanics, William Carrigan and Clive Webb have argued that the majority of mob killings of Mexican Americans occurred in the mid-nineteenth-century West, several decades before the widespread lynchings of African Americans in the South. Carrigan and Webb have documented at least 571 Mexican American victims of lynching between 1848 and 1928. Carrigan and Webb, “Muerto Por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons Unknown): Mob Violence against African Americans and Mexican Americans,” in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the US South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison Parker (College Park: Texas A&M University Press, 2004). For an analysis of the lynching of Hispanics in California, see Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West. 8. For a valuable early scholarly analysis of the origins of American lynching, see James Elbert Cutler, Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 1–136. Phillip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), 18–32, is a popular treatment that includes a brief but suggestive discussion of lynching violence before the Civil War. 9. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 19–60. 10. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture, 112–131; Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 90–109; Bruce E. Baker, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynching in the Carolinas, 1871–1947 (London: Hambledon and London, 2008); Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2007), 84–87; Julius E. Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865...