Lynchings in the Depressed South

In the previous essay, I said that, since the fall of the Confederacy, white southerners have had little to live for, which explains their many dysfunctional symptoms of depression. That since they lost the Civil War, they have had nothing to live for or which could inspire them. But I realized that there was, in fact, something that could life the spirits of white southerners after the Civil War.

Lynching.

We usually think of lynching as white people taking out their anger on innocent black people by torturing and hanging them. And certainly, this is one of the functions of lynching. There was almost no form of torture that was not practiced somewhere or sometime during lynchings. That is, it went way beyond mere anger, but a lust for inflicting a maximum amount of pain and degradation on the black victim. Nor were all lynchings the result of a mob mentality that went out of control. Sometimes they were planned with cold ruthlessness.

Sometimes the lynchers particularly hated their black victims for having the very virtues that they claimed blacks did not have. In Okemah, Oklahoma, near where I live, a black mother tried to defend her son who had shot a white police officer. It is true that the son needed to face justice for his deed, but justice is not what he faced: it was lynching, without a trial. The mother, Laura Nelson, did in fact help him to resist arrest, but her crime was not a capital one. The lynchers, once they had subdued their victims, then raped Laura before killing both her and her son. If a white mother had defended her son, the southern whites would have esteemed her motherly virtues.

The point I wish to make in this essay is that lynching was not mere anger; it was a celebration of bloodlust on the part of an entire white community. That is, while the Confederacy had inspired them before 1865, it was lynchings that inspired them for the hundred years after that. It was a source of community pride and inspiration. And as I said previously, some of them were planned as community events. Here are some examples:

• The organizers sold tickets, and for an extra fee you could shoot the victim’s body. Sometimes the bodies were so full of shot that they were difficult to move.
• The organizers printed and sold postcards celebrating the lynchings.
• Lynchings drew huge crowds. One in Waco, Texas drew a crowd of fifteen thousand.
• Lynchings could not be prosecuted because the entire community would maintain a conspiracy of silence. Note: the entire community.

You can read more at this NPR interview.

I am a mostly-white man (although a member of the Cherokee tribe) of Southern origin. As such I bear some of the blame and responsibility for what my fellow whites did. When a black male looks at me, he may see simply another person, or he may see me as partly guilty for lynchings. I am not a racist, but how could a black man know this just by looking at me? I bear part of this blame unless I publicly proclaim my hatred of racism, as I have done often before, as I am doing now, and as I will continue to do, online and in published books.

Lynchings continue to occur, though they are now rare. A white racist dragged a black man, James Byrd, by a rope behind his pickup truck and killed him in 1998 in Jasper, Texas. But lynchings are no longer a readily-accessible form of white southern pride. They appear to have no outlet for their hatred any more, except driving their trucks around with Confederate flags or stickers. But the anger is still there and will find some outlet. And they have guns. I suspect that, soon, their victims will not just be black people, but all of us who love black people. As a non-racist surrounded by racists with automatic weapons, I no longer feel safe in America.