lynching and a political synthesis

by Cliopatria

Noted and worth reading: Michael Bérubé of Penn State on James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and lynching. In passing, Bérubé notes

far too many white Americans believed that lynching was a positively good thing that they should commemorate with celebratory photographs and postcards

I sometimes use a postcard of a lynching in lecture. It provokes precisely the response Bérubé describes. It is a horror.

But the challenge that lynching poses the historian is not to convey the horror. That's too easy. In getting only that across you've failed. What's essential to understand as a student of history is the routineness, and ordinariness, of that horror in the America of not so many years ago; of the complicity in that routine horror of the Democratic Party even into the years of the Great Society; of the way that complicity shaped what the Democratic Party could (and can) accomplish politically.

Specifically, we know all about this story:

but we don't associate it closely with the felt need of Southerners to defend themselves from outside interference with this:

But maybe we should. For as much as Strom Thurmond loudly deplored lynching, he also loudly deplored anti-lynching bills, arguing that lynching was murder, and had nothing to do with federally enforceable civil rights. Would we really ask too much perspective of past politicians if we suggested that they exhibit more than an insensitivity to nuance when they insist that a crime performed, packaged and sold as public spectacle, defined by the race of its victim, counts as no more than another murder?

In any case, Thurmond and the Southern rebels of 1948 considered it of paramount importance to oppose the civil rights program of the Democratic Party and devoted themselves to stopping it, however they could.

As in 1948, many factors made the presidential election close in 1960. One was again a splitter faction (an effort that again drew on Thurmond's strength) of Democrats offended by even the most tentative of steps toward supporting Civil Rights.

And some less-tentative steps, coupled with the further splitter efforts of George Wallace, produced this effect:

A new synthesis of American political history should really emphasize this function of the federal system -- it's the only way we can meaningfully put social and political history together -- that the federal system, when it operates as intended, exacerbates local peculiarities and grievances until they become national wounds and obsessions.

As Bérubé notes, in replying to a student query, there were lots of"good" white people around,

But here’s the thing. Sometimes there just weren’t enough ‘good’ white people within a ten-mile radius.

And those isolated localities with insufficient numbers of"good" white inhabitants put people in Congress and swung electoral votes, shaping elections and policies that superficially, at the national level, weren't about race, or lynching, at all.

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Eric Rauchway - 12/14/2005

Thanks for those points, Ralph. I didn't mean to claim that this was a story about stopping lynching; I tried to be careful about that. I mean to say that, (1) this is a story about conflicting views of the federal government,
(2) the views on one side were so strongly held that they extended even to asserting there was no legitimate federal civil rights interest in the matter of lynching -- a point Thurmond made explicitly -- even though, I suppose, as you say, it was basically by this point a specifically white-on-black crime in the South.

Tom Sweetnam - 12/12/2005

In your lecture on lynching, do you show a postcard of the raped, battered, and murdered white grandmother who was the victim of this hanged black man?

Ralph E. Luker - 12/6/2005

Classically, of course, lynching was the hanging (and sometimes burning) of an accused person without legal proceedings. Of course, people could be murdered in other ways and Emmett Till was. Still, the murders of the civil rights era are a very substantial decline from the numbers of public, extra-legal murders of the period from 1875 to 1925.

Oscar Chamberlain - 12/5/2005

Ralph
Did lynching actually end so abruptly, or was the public display to some extent supplanted by more private doings.

Put differently, is Emmett Till include in lynching statistics?

Oscar Chamberlain - 12/5/2005

You are not worth responding to, but

the fact that there was a market for white on black lynching memorabilia is in many ways a clearer proof of the barbarism the southern white majority tolerated than the statistics on lynching itself.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/3/2005

Eric, This strikes me as interesting, but wrong on a number of levels. First, Berube's commentary assumes an innocense on our parts that is misplaced. Not that we've participated in a lynching lately -- but we're all subject to the temptations of mob action and someone with Michael's rhetorical skills might even lead one.
Secondly, there's a chronological disjuncture in this analysis that might even be called ahistorical. Lynching of white and black people in the United States peaked in the United States, as you know. Thereafter, it was increasingly a Southern white act committed on black victims, but also in fits and starts it declined fairly steadily. There is a correlation between its decline and the passage of fairly severe state legislation against it. The opposition to national legislation against it was led by Southern and Western Democrats who, like Thurmond, believed it was a legitimate issue of state -- not federal -- action.
But the decline in lynching was so dramatic that it had nearly disappeared by the time of your political analysis. For all of his faults -- and they were many -- one could make a pretty persuasive case that lynching declined because Southern politicians like Strom Thurmond were willing to take strong public stands and action against it. You have to thoroughly discount the whole states rights position (a position that had earlier passed state legislation against child labor, but opposed such legislation on the national level) and ignore the very real decline in lynching as a regional and racial phenomenon to make the kind of argument that you do here.