Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South

Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ix, 330 pp. $17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-463S8.

The study of lynching has long occupied a significant place in southern history, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage opens this volume with a brilliant historiographical essay that highlights the dominant themes of past interpretations. Other essays then expand existing scholarship by adopting new approaches and methodologies for understanding racial conflict in the American South.

The first of the volume's four thematic sections offers two new theories for the study of lynching. Larry J. Griffin, Paula Clark, and Joanne C. Sandberg argue that each lynching episode was actually a "lynching-inthe-making" (p. 29), and that notions of white supremacy did not predetermine the outcome of a racial conflict. They use the 1930 lynching of David Harris in Bolivar County, Mississippi, as a case study to prove the potential of their theory. Roberta Senechal de la Roche proposes a model of interpretation based on the sociological theories of Donald Black. In Senechal de la Roche's Blackian paradigm, such variables as relational distance and cultural distance are key to understanding group behavior. In the former, familiarity or intimacy between the parties of a lynching moderated violent behavior, whereas unfamiliarity bred brutality. Lynchings varied inversely with functional interdependence-the extent of economic and political interdependence between the participants. Low levels of functional interdependence typically triggered outbreaks of racial hostility. Senechal de la Roche's essay lacks adequate empirical data and seems overly simplistic at points, but it intends to provide only "an initial step" (p. 64) in the formulation of new investigative techniques.

The second section emphasizes local and regional contexts of lynchings. Thomas G. Dyer, in a case study of an antebellum lynching in Saline County, Missouri, argues that in this instance the local propensity for vigilantism was a greater catalyst for mob violence than were concerns over a slave revolt or political divisiveness over the issue of slavery. Joan E. Cashin, in a case study of Civil War Unionville, South Carolina, discovers that the Saxe Joiner lynching occurred in a community perplexed by the transformation of gender and racial identities. White males were eager to reestablish the boundaries of a patriarchical social order, and therefore "white supremacy was socially constructed" (p. 127). These two essays complement each other and illustrate continuities between antebellum and postbellum lynchings. E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay study regional patterns in intraracial lynchings. Whereas most black-on-black incidents took place in the Mississippi and Arkansas deltas, white-on-white violence occurred in "predominately white, rural counties" (p. 144) throughout the South. Both varieties of extralegal activity involved attempts to establish and preserve community mores by means of popular justice. Beck and Tolnay cite a number of Alabama cases of white-on-white violence, but the other essays in the volume contain little or no Alabama material.

The third section focuses on the cultural context of lynchings. Nancy MacLean argues that ongoing changes in gender roles and family relationships produced the atypical conclusion to the Leo Frank case. Terence Finnegan discovers that the disfranchisement of blacks in South Carolina and Mississippi fortified southern notions of white supremacy, encouraged extralegal violence, and often caused disfranchised whites to lash out at blacks. In one of the collection's most original pieces Bruce E. Baker critiques North Carolina lynching ballads, which provided vivid expressions of "the original emotional climate of the community" (p. 232).

The final section considers black responses to white violence and lynching. Both W. Fitzhugh Brundage and Patricia A. Schechter demonstrate the extent and consequences of black resistance. For Brundage the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black newspaper editors, and local black groups provided a foundation for the eventual success of the Civil Rights movement by mobilizing the black middle class, focusing national attention on southern racial violence, and creating a discourse of resistance and protest. Schechter likewise stresses the development of the discourse of resistance and specifically the contribution of Ida B. Wells. Wells's pamphlet, Southern Horrors, refuted prevailing claims of white feminine purity-a standard justification for lynching-by contending that sex between white females and black males was often consensual. Also, Wells "linked black men's oppression through lynching to black women's oppression through rape" (p. 284) and thereby created a new ideological text that empowered black females. George C. Wright claims that the legacy of lynching has infiltrated the modern criminal justice system. By examining public executions or "legal lynchings" (p. 251) in Kentucky, Wright determines that the state executed blacks at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the population and that these sentences were much more severe than the punishments handed out to whites who committed similar crimes.

Determining a unifying theme in this or any other essay collection can be a difficult task. In a perfunctory afterword William S. McFeely remarks that "critics who refute the centrality of race in lynchings in our past deny that racism is a force today" (p. 319). Nevertheless, several of the essays suggest that social disorder, class tensions, gender conflicts, and distinctly southern conceptions of honor and violence may have served as central factors in many lynchings. Although this volume does not provide a neat overall explanation of lynching, the diverse viewpoints that it presents will doubtless make it a standard text in southern history.

GLENN ROBINS

University of Southern Mississippi

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jan 1999
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