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CONCLUSION BY WORLD WAR II, THE NAACP and other antilynching activists and sympathizers had created a national perception that lynching was a brutal and degenerate practice at odds with modern civilized ideals. The spectacles surrounding lynching—the crowds of spectators, the tortures, and the photographs—were well suited to substantiate this perception. By lingering over images of unruly and sadistic mobs in news accounts and reimagining them in Hollywood films, lynching opponents reignited lynching spectacles , bestowing on them a new kind of cultural force and authority. They, in fact, came to epitomize the antilynching position. They signified more than the excess and sensationalism of lynching; they constituted its central injustice, at least in the popular imagination, so that most Americans came to associate lynching with its most extreme and grotesque manifestations. Lynching had been on a gradual decline since the early twentieth century , despite flare-ups just after World War I and after the start of the Depression , in 1930. By the mid-1930s, the annual number of lynchings had fallen to the single digits. Mobs could no longer kill African Americans without incurring sharp local and national disapproval and inviting state or federal investigation. African Americans were still victimized by violence and threats of violence, but lynching had fully become the province of small bands of white men who murdered blacks swiftlyand secretly, far from public view.1 This change in behavior corresponded to a perceptible shift in southern public opinion. Activists had succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate so that forward-looking white southerners were compelled to adopt the position that lynching was barbaric and disgraceful, even as they continued to defend white supremacy or rail against black criminality. Antilynching activists, to be sure, were not the sole cause of this shift. They succeeded in transforming public opinion because other factors lent 262 CONCLUSION  their arguments a certain amount of currency within the South. African Americans migrated out of the South in ever greater numbers after World War I, in part because of the decline of southern agriculture and the lure of northern industrial work, but also in response to lynching and the oppressiveness of Jim Crow conditions. In some places, local blacks had retaliated against lynchings, mobilized to protect lynching targets, or launched public protests. Both black migration and black resistance posed viable threats to social order and to elite and middle-class whites accustomed to cheap black labor. These elites, eager to attract northern capital and investment into their cities and towns, did not want to present their communities as out of step with national norms. At the same time, as southern cities and towns continued to modernize, older traditions of popular justice began to wane. Criminal punishment was increasingly centralized under state authority, making it more likely that the state would intervene to either prevent or punish lynchings. Finally, in the 1930s, the New Deal brought a new level of federal involvement in southern economic and social life, which opened up the prospect of federal intervention into local legal and criminal affairs.2 Although antilynching activists did not unilaterally cause the decline of lynching, they did provide the rhetorical and visual frameworks through which Americans, including white southerners, could turn against lynching. Lynching spectacles, which had once served to substantiate and normalize white claims to moral superiority, now served as documentary and incontrovertible evidence of just the opposite, even when encountered in Hollywood melodramas. To view a lynching spectacle was to witness—to bear witness to—a most deplorable act of moral barbarism; any other response to the sight soon became unimaginable. Once white elite and middle-class southerners began to perceive lynching in this way, the white solidarity that lynching was meant to enact showed signs of fissure. The representations of white mobs and crowds in southern newspapers began to change, for instance, from images of orderly and respectable citizens enacting punitive justice to ones of unruly, disreputable men and boys. And once lynch mobs were imagined as lawless, bloodthirsty renegades, then those whites who previously might have participated in or watched a lynching to experience a collective sense of white superiority now turned away. Indeed, to maintain their claims to racial supremacy, white southerners had to disavow lynching practices. White southerners shifted their attitudes not because there were concrete consequences of the act of lynching—lynch mobs still largely escaped prosecution, and neither federal legislation nor intervention ever came to [13.58.121.131] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 19:13...

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