The end of American lynching

229 Pages·2012·0.925 MB·English

by  Rushdy, Ashraf H. A

The End of American
Lynching
(cid:2)

The End of American
Lynching
(cid:2)
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
rutgers university press
new brunswick, new jersey, and london
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., 1961–
The end of American lynching / Ashraf H. A. Rushdy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8135–5291–0(hbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5292–7
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5293–4(e-book)
1. Lynching—United States—History. 2. Hate crimes—United States—History.
I. Title.
HV6457.R87 2012
364.1(cid:2)34—dc23
2011035600
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British
Library.
Frontispiece photos, top, ca. 1920s, published in Minnesota History 59, no. 1 (Spring
2004), courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society; bottom, lynching in Marion, Indiana,
August 7–8, 1930, photo by Lawrence Beitler, courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.
Copyright © 2012by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
All rights reserved
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tronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without writ-
ten permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100Joyce
Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is
“fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
To my beloved wife, Kidan, and our beloved sons,
Zidane and Aziz

C O N T E N T S
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: When Is an American Lynching? 1
1 The Accountant and the Opera House 20
2 Date Night in the Courthouse Square 60
3 The End of American Lynching 95
4 The Last American Lynching 128
Conclusion: The Subject of Lynching 160
Notes 177
Index 203
vii

P R E F A C E
When Clarence Thomas accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of conduct-
ing what he called a “high-tech lynching” during the hearings for his Supreme
Court nomination on October 11, 1991, his comments resonated powerfully
with one part of the American population.1 Indeed, pundits and pollsters
immediately noted the subsequent spike in support for Thomas among
African Americans (while they ignored the insistent protest against his nom-
ination by African American women). At the same time, his comments fell
on deaf or unhearing ears in the larger part of the American population.
Thomas’s comment—and the pollsters’ response of tracing the ways it influ-
enced black popular opinion—explicitly made clear that “lynching” referred
preeminently to the practice of terrorism against African Americans. At the
time of the hearings, it was not clear that a majority of white Americans made
that association with the word “lynching.” In the introduction of a superb
and prizewinning book on lynching that was likely in press at the time of the
hearings, Fitzhugh Brundage speculated that “for many modern-day white
Americans, lynch mobs conjure up images of cowboys, cattle rustlers, and
a generally wholesome tradition of frontier justice.”2 For these many white
Americans, presumably, the word did not conjure up another unwholesome
tradition of frenzied white Americans ritually dismembering and murdering
African Americans at the rate of one person every five days for five decades
(1880–1930).
It is certainly true that the historiography of lynching lagged far behind the
study of other periods and institutions in American and African American
life. In 1991, there were innumerably more books on slavery, Reconstruction,
the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights and Black Power movements
than there were on lynching. Lynching seemed simply to be an ignored or
forgotten part of the American past. Indeed, Brundage concluded his book by
noting that “nothing about the history of mob violence in the United States is
ix