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5. Strange Fruit Hanging from the Palmetto Tree Lynching in South Carolina The 1876 “redemption” of South Carolina brought the white, native-born men of the state back to the fore of political power. Having won the governor’s seat, the state legislature, and assurances from the federal government that noninterference was their new official policy, the victors set about restoring the control they had once had over most areas of life. The federal government’s removal of the last of its soldiers in 1877 facilitated their efforts. Interestingly, and perhaps expectedly, however, the essential goal of restoring traditional gender roles was unfulfilled. Political power did not translate as easily into sexual power. The women of both races had been too much altered for easy reversals, and black men held on tightly to the gains they had won in the preceding decade. In the election of 1876, white South Carolinians had discovered the efficacy of political organization supported by acts of intimidation and violence. Now that they were firmly in control with little risk of interference from outside the state’s borders, whites embraced a campaign of unbridled brutality to assert themselves over those issues that still vexed them. In the twenty-five years following Hampton’s election, whites reclaimed total control over much of what they had lost in the Reconstruction era. Although black men continued to vote and accumulate property into the early twentieth century, they lacked the leverage necessary to hold onto their fair share of either the elective franchise or the state’s economic growth. What remained to them were some of the social changes that had taken place over the preceding ten years. A sense of strength and pride borne of emancipation and the reconstruction of 106 [ Strange Fruit Hanging from the Palmetto Tree community and family lingered long past Chamberlain’s defeat. These intangible luxuries were more difficult for the white community to strip from them; they were the things onto which the black men and women of the state clung most tightly. Among them were the newly redefined gender roles that combined qualities unique to the black community with traditionally white southern rituals and evolved throughout the Reconstruction years. Masculine pride and feminine virtues did not necessarily require political or economic power to thrive among the freedmen, but what they would sadly discover is that they had great difficulty surviving the unchecked rage of a South Carolina lynching bee. Lynching—extralegal execution via shooting, burning, hanging, or torture , that was often mob driven—in nineteenth-century South Carolina never achieved the levels that it did in other southern states. The state ranked only eighth of the eleven former Confederate states in numbers of lynchings between 1881 and 1940, an interesting and perhaps contradictory fact when compared to the violence practiced in South Carolina in the decade following the Civil War. South Carolina was also relatively unoriginal when it came to the targets of its lynch mobs. The freedmen and freedwomen were not the exclusive victims; occasionally a white man was on the receiving end of mob “justice,” but black men and women were a disproportionate majority in the Palmetto State as they were throughout the South. South Carolina, however, did not lag behind in terms of the brutal nature of the lynchings it witnessed. Victims suffered a range of cruelties , justified by a series of accusations and crimes, but a single consistent thread ran through each incident. Lynching was, above all, a sexually charged ritual, and the last attempt of white men to assume exclusive control over southern manhood.1 In general, lynchings in South Carolina rose dramatically from the 1880s through the 1890s, which was the worst decade by far, and declined slowly thereafter into the 1930s. The worst region of the state overall was the Western Piedmont , home of Edgefield County, and the five predominantly black regions of the state witnessed more than 60 percent of the state’s lynchings. The stated reasons for lynchings in South Carolina ranged from arson to murder to the most electric of accusations, rape. In many cases the lynchers claimed that they acted because they felt the law could not. Governor “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, a notorious racist who had publicly advocated violence to prevent blacks from voting, made this argument in a speech in 1894: “It appears to me that South Carolina has the best system of laws and rules of court to enable men to shirk the gallows that can possibly exist anywhere. The...

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