African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era, and: This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947 (review)

In recent years, a relentless flow of new studies has almost flooded the once arid landscape of lynching scholarship. Scholars have now produced a wealth of research on every conceivable aspect of the subject. This includes analyses of lynching that range from case studies of individual acts of racial violence to broader assessments of mob behavior at the state, regional, and national levels. Scholars have scrutinized such topics as the antilynching movement; cultural memory of mob violence; literary and artistic representations of racial killings; and the victimization of minorities other than African Americans.

No historian has contributed more substantially to our understanding of lynching than Christopher Waldrep. The latest book from this prolific academic is an accessible introductory text aimed at undergraduate and general readers. In recounting a near century of black resistance to racial violence, it also provides clear explanations of the causes of lynching, changes to the activities of mobs over place and time, and the eventual demise of community support for extralegal killings. Waldrep gives due attention to the individuals and activists who led the antilynching crusade, delineating the sometimes subtle tactical differences between them. He subtly interlaces this narrative with references to significant historiographical debates.

Waldrep's discussion of the methodological difficulties of researching lynching is of particular help to students approaching the topic for the first time. He explains how the shifting meaning of the word "lynching" renders an exact count of the number of victims impossible. For example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attempted during the interwar era to impose a precise definition of lynching in order to secure federal legislation outlawing the phenomenon. As Waldrep observes, the problem with this approach was that it precluded other acts of racial violence. Southern politicians classified incidents such as the mass killing of African Americans by white mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida, during the early 1920s as "riots," excluding their use as evidence of the need for federal antilynching legislation. Waldrep argues compellingly that lynching assumed power over African Americans precisely because it eluded easy definition. Southern whites were consequently able to act with impunity in exacting numerous forms of racial violence on blacks.

Waldrep identifies other research problems such as scholars' reliance on newspapers that typically underreported mob violence. To help address the problem, he provides students with a broad range of primary source documents ideal for classroom discussion. The book also includes a superb bibliographic essay.

African Americans Confront Lynching is an ideal volume for students seeking a short introduction to the topic that not only synthesizes the extant literature, but also equips them with the tools to conduct their own research. There are nonetheless some aspects of the book where Waldrep could have developed his analysis. The focus of the text is on black leaders including clergymen, journalists, and political activists. Waldrep could have given greater attention to grassroots resistance including armed self-defense and black migration from the violence-ridden South to the relatively safe havens of the North and West. The persistence of black resistance to mob violence from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century also raises the question of whether antilynching protest formed part of what historians refer to as a "long civil rights movement." As Waldrep demonstrates, antilynching activists formulated different tactics over time. Their broader strategy nonetheless accords with scholars whose analyses of the black freedom struggle emphasize historical continuity.

Waldrep perceives a similar linearity in the actions of white racists, asserting that in their efforts to withstand civil rights reform after World War II, they "made bombing the new lynching." (p.102) This is a...