The Spectacle of Lynching: Rituals of White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12249
• Author: Amy Louise Wood
• Date: 01 May 2018

The Spectacle of Lynching: Rituals of White

Supremacy in the Jim Crow South

Amy Louise Wood*

AbstrAct. From 1890s to t he 1930s, whit e mobs t or t ured and kil led

thousands of African Americans across the South. These lynchings,

even those committed by the smallest of mobs, were ritualistic and

performative, enacting and reinforcing the core beliefs of white

supremacy. The narratives and photographs produced after lynchings

likewise created and circulated representations of white domination

and black subordination. Lynching was thus more than a social or

political form of violence; it was a cultural spectacle that conveyed

meaning to its white participants and spectators. This article, adapted

from the author’s 2009 book, examines the forces that gave rise to

lynching spectacles and the cultural work those spectacles performed.

It argues that, although the spectacle was reinforced through modern

technologies, such as photography, lynching ultimately arose as a

reaction against the transformations that modern life had brought to

the South. Industrialization and urbanization had destabilized the

racial hierarchy and fueled white fears of a black crime wave. Lynching

was a violent means to assert order in the face of potential disorder.

As such, it was rooted in traditional practices, such as notions of

popular justice and public executions, and white southerners

interpreted lynching spectacles through local customs and beliefs.

Over time, the dissemination of lynching spectacle nationally through

modern media by anti-lynching activists contributed to the decline of

mob violence.

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-Septe mber, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 49

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Professor of history at Illinois State University. Author of Lynching and Spectacle:

Witnessing Racial Violence in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

2009), from which this article has been updated and revised, with permission from the

University of North Carolina Press. Her current book project is a cultural and intellectual

history of crime and punishment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Email: alwood@

ilstu.edu

758 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Introduct ion

Racialized lynchings, or the extra-judicial killings of African Americans

committed during the Jim Crow era, continue to haunt us a nation.

Lynching often serves as a lens through which we conceptualize racial

injustice in the present; the term itself carries political weight, con-

veying the anger that racist practices endure despite the advances

of the civil rights movement (Markovitz 2004: xx, 69–109; Wood

and Donaldson 2008: 5–25). In recent years, the slayings of African

Americans by police in city streets have been likened to state-sanc-

tioned lynchings, and, with the disproportionate numbers of black

men on death row, capital punishment is commonly referred to as

“legal lynching” (Embrick 2015; Blain 2016; Jackson et al. 2003).

Indeed, one scholar has called lynching the “primal narrative” through

which African Americans understand their status in the United States:

criminalized and brutalized, with no promise of due process or equal

protection under the law (Raiford 2009: 117).

Lynching carried a similar kind of psychological force in the Jim

Crow South. African Americans at this time were subjected to many

forms of terror and intimidation, of which lynching was but one ex-

traordinary form. Physical assaults, rapes, and murders were more

frequent than lynchings. Mobs, masked or otherwise, not infrequently

harassed black farmers or proprietors who had gained a measure

of success. African Americans were more likely than whites to be

arrested and incarcerated, or legally executed, with little cause and

with few due process rights. But, lynching stood out for many African

Americans in a way other kinds of oppression did not. As it still does

today, it served as the “primal narrative” that told the story of all the ev-

eryday humiliations and hostilities that they endured under Jim Crow.

Lynching had this cultural power not only because it was a rel-

atively infrequent occurrence, but also because it was, by its very

nature, public and visually sensational. Mass lynchings, in which hun-

dreds, sometimes thousands, of spectators gathered to witness mobs

beat, mutilate, and kill their black captives, sometimes by burning

them alive, obviously attracted the most attention. These events com-

prised only a minority of lynchings, however. Much more common

were extralegal executions in which small mobs of white men shot or

759The Spectacle of Lynching

hanged their victims outside of public view (Brundage 1993: 21). Yet,

even the most perfunctory lynchings were performative and spectacu-

lar. Lynchings, of all kinds, were ritualistic, drawing from longstanding

cultural traditions, and they were performed to convey powerful mes-

sages about white domination and black inferiority. These messages

were circulated through stories that spread from house to house, town

to town, through accounts reported in local newspapers, through

photographs that were sold in local stores, rendered into postcards

and sent to friends and relatives, and through film that fictionalized

mob executions in sensationalistic form.

For many African Americans, these messages reverberated without

having to witness the violence themselves. In his memoir, Black Boy,

Richard Wright ([1937] 1945: 65, 150–151) expressed the terror evoked

by lynching:

I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become

conditioned to their existence as though I h ad been the victim of a thou-

sand lynchings …. The things that in fluenced my conduct as a Negro did

not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel

their full effect s in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the

white brutality t hat I had not seen was a more effective control of my

behavior than that which I knew. The actual ex perience would have let

me see the realistic outlines of what was really happening, but as long it

remained something terrible an d yet remote, something whose horror and

blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was comp elled to give my

entire imagination over to it. (emphasis added)

Lynching terrified Wright even though it existed purely, for him, in

the realm of representation. It was the spectacle of lynching, in other

words, rather than the violence itself, that wrought psychological

damage and that compelled black acquiescence to white authority.

Yet, lynchings were not performed only to terrorize African

Americans. After all, the primary witnesses to lynchings were not

blacks, but whites. Rituals of violence and their representation in

news reports, photographs, and film imparted to whites powerful im-

ages of white dominance and black subordination, of white unity and

black criminality, that reinforced the ideological infrastructure of Jim

Crow—white supremacy. The cultural power of lynching to sustain