A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments I could not have completed this work without the expert advice and assistanceofmanyarchivistsandlibrarianswhoaretoonumeroustoname individually.Ibenefitedgreatlyfromtheassistanceofthearchivalstaffat the National Archives, College Park, Maryland; the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson; and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia. Librarians at the University of IllinoisLibrary,Urbana;theChengLibraryatWilliamPatersonUniversity , Wayne, New Jersey; and the Skillman Library at Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, were especially helpful in locating both primary and secondary source materials. Professor Orville Vernon Burton, who wasmymentorattheUniversityofIllinois,helpedmepersevereandwas a continual source of inspiration and assistance. Richard Holway, my editor at the University of Virginia Press, demonstrated remarkable patience and provided perceptive suggestions to improve the manuscript. Iwishtoexpressmy thanksandgratitudefor the innumerableinsightful criticisms that I received from historians and scholars who understand the past far better than I do. During the early stages of this research, I received a generous dissertation grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, without which I never would have begun the many years of work that it took to complete this book. My parents, John and Charmaine Finnegan, inspired in me a love for history and for truth that motivated me to write this book. It could not have been written, however, without the love and support of Clare, James,Mary,John,Lucille,Margaret,Joseph,Thomas,andHanora,and, most of all, Lori Jeanne, to whom it is dedicated. x Acknowledgments Portions of chapters 2 and 4 were published previously as “Lynching in the Outer Coastal Plain Region of South Carolina and the Origins of African American Collective Action, 1901–1910” in Toward the Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina During the Twentieth Century, ed. Winfred B. Moore and Orville Vernon Burton (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 41–49; “The Equal of Some White Men and the Superior of Others” in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 240–54; and “Who Were the Victims of Lynching?: Evidence from Mississippi and South Carolina” in Varieties of Southern History: New Essays on a Region and its People, ed. Bruce Clayton and John Salmond (Westport , Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 79–95. Chapter 3 was published in an earlier version as “Lynching and PoliticalPowerinMississippiandSouthCarolina ”in UnderSentenceofDeath: Essays on Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 189–218, and is republished with permission. A Deed So Accursed ...