Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [123]
Bad as the Klan was, the worst was yet to come. The “golden age” of the lynch mob was in the years after 1880. Any threat to the ideology of white supremacy made a black man a candidate for lynching. The NAACP published a report on lynching in 1919, covering the thirty-year period in which lynching was rampant. The toll was awesome. More than a hundred blacks a year, on average, fell victim to the lynch mobs between 1889 and 1918. The count was 219 victims in the North, 2,834 in the South, 156 in the West; 78.2 percent of the victims were black.65
Lynch mobs were often savage and brutal beyond belief. In 1899, outside Newman, Georgia, a black man named Sam Holt was tortured, mutilated, and burned at the stake while two thousand people watched. He was accused of murdering a white man, Alfred Cranford, and raping Cranford’s wife. None of the people involved wore masks or made any attempt at secrecy.66 Some of the victims of mob violence were surely innocent—either falsely accused, or misidentified, or perhaps merely an outlet for the rage of a lynch mob. Some victims were castrated. Photographers sometimes sold picture postcards of the event; and there are reports of supposedly civilized southerners who collected souvenirs from the mutilated bodies of black victims. Local police almost never intervened; and it was practically unheard of to punish anybody for taking part in a lynching. A coroner’s jury usually ended the matter with the solemn, hypocritical finding to the effect that parties unknown were responsible.
Lynching was a “ritual” that served to “give dramatic warning to all black inhabitants that the iron-clad system of white supremacy was not to be challenged by deed, word, or even thought.”67 More specifically, lynching warned blacks not to step over the social line; rape was a capital offense in the South, but whites in lynch mobs did not wish to take a chance on trial by jury; black-on-white rape (or suspicion of rape) was punished swiftly, brutally, unequivocally. A recent study of Georgia and North Carolina in the years 1882 to 1930 compared blacks who were lynched with those executed for crime. In Georgia, murder accounted for 88 percent of the executions of blacks, and rape only 12 percent; in North Carolina, the figures were 71 percent for murder, 22 percent for rape. The picture was quite different for “execution” by a lynch mob. Rape accounted for 41 percent of the lynch victims in Georgia—more than murder, which accounted for only 34 percent. In North Carolina, equal numbers were lynched for murder and rape (39 percent). The lynch mob, in short, showed an inordinate interest in stiffening the penalty for rape or suspected rape.68
Lynching, as the NAACP study showed, lasted well into the twentieth century. Most of the victims continued to be black, with some notable exceptions: for example, the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish victim of a Georgia mob, falsely accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for him in Atlanta.69 The North, on the whole, was scandalized by lynching—not so much because people in the North believed in racial equality, but because they found lynching brutal, uncivilized, and bestial, as indeed it was. But despite long-term agitation against lynching, by blacks and some white allies, it was only the triumph of the civil rights movement and the passage of comprehensive civil rights laws in the 1960s that put an end, once and for all (one hopes), to this reign of racial terror.
In the previous chapter, we dealt briefly with the issue of police brutality ; that, too, can be seen as a kind of lawless law. It would be a bit schematic to treat lynch law, the vigilantes, and police brutality as pieces of the same puzzle, neatly divided into regions: the vigilantes in the West, police brutality in the urban East, lynching in the South. For one thing, though all three phenomena had their “hubs,” they all spilled over, at least