Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America

The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these "public torture lynchings" took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events-characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments. In the early 1890s-nearly 30 years after Emancipation, 20 years after the end of Reconstruction, and at precisely the moment when Progressives elsewhere were establishing a new reformist penology-Southern crowds began to torture and burn alleged offenders with unprecedented ferocity and public ceremony. These new kinds of lynching continued in small towns and rural areas throughout the South until the end of the 1930s. The exact number of these "public torture lynchings" is uncertain, but of the nearly 4,000 lynchings that were recorded in newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts between 1882 and 1940, several hundred of them were spectacular events of this kind. Professional photographers set up shop at the scene of these lynchings and did a brisk business selling photo-souvenirs of the event. Images of mutilated black bodies, some of them horribly burned and disfigured, were purchased as picture postcards, and passed between friends and families like holiday mementoes, dutifully delivered by the U.S. mail. One postcard, with a photograph showing a large crowd in downtown Dallas, is addressed to "Dr. J. W. F. Williams, Lafayette, Christian County, Kentucky" and reads, "Well John-This is a token of a great day we had in Dallas, March 3rd [1910], a negro was hung for an assault on a three year old girl. I saw this on my noon hour. I was very much in the bunch. You can see the Negro hanging on a telephone pole." Another, carrying an image of the charred, barely recognizable, corpse of Jesse Washington, suspended from a utility pole in Robinson, Texas, was sent by Joe Meyers to his parents in May 1916. The message reads, "This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe." A third carries a photograph showing a group of onlookers (including several young boys), posing with Lige Daniels, who had been hung from an oak in the town square of Center, Texas, in August 1920. The message on the reverse says, "This was made in the court yard, In Center, Texas, he is a 16 year old Black boy, He killed Earl's Grandma, She was Florence's mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle."1 As so often when cruelty is viewed up close, it is the banality of these messages-their homely, small-town ordinariness-that most disconcerts. That torture killings could be so casually and nonchalantly represented stops us in our tracks, evoking a sensibility and a culture that seem puzzling as well as repellent. In his book The Great Cat Massacre, cultural historian Robert Darnton writes, "When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something. By picking at a document where it is most opaque, we may be able to unravel an alien system of meaning" (Darnton 1985:5). To anyone familiar with the history of race relations in the American South, there is of course nothing particularly surprising about evidence of racial violence. …