1993, the year W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s Lynching in the New South was published, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which some historians believe represents “the closest Congress ever came in the post-Reconstruction Era to enacting anti-lynching legislation.”Footnote ¹ In June, 2018, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Brundage’s magnificent and still unrivaled book, and on the hundredth anniversary of the introduction of the first anti-lynching bill to pass in the House (and be filibustered in the Senate), the three sole Black members of the United States Senate, introduced a bill entitled “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018.”Footnote ²

In its second section, under “Findings,” the Bill offers a brief account of how the practice of lynching succeeded slavery as the primary form of white supremacist terrorism from the end of Reconstruction until the middle of the twentieth century, and provides details about how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had “worked tirelessly” to end lynching, while the national government had signally failed to pass meaningful legislation toward that end. At the end of the “Findings” section, the Bill lists four contemporary or near-contemporary events that give resonance to its imperative. The Bill alludes to the Senate’s June 2005 Resolution apologizing to the victims of lynching, the Senate’s April 2017 Resolution condemning hate crimes and racism, the Senate Joint Resolution of September 2017 that condemned the “racist violence and domestic terrorist attack” in Charlottesville in August of that year, and, finally, to the opening in April 2018 of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. On the one hand, the Bill recognizes acts of public, institutional contrition and memorialization—lynching has been the subject of an apology and a museum; while on the other hand, the Bill recognizes the persistence of precisely the intellectual and institutional forces that historically motivated and emboldened many lynchers. The Bill mentions that President Trump signed the Joint Resolution in September, but surely that reference also serves to remind all of us who had lived through that episode of his presidency that he was also the president who refused to condemn the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, the president who routinely employs white supremacist rhetoric and draws on racist, xenophobic political strategies to inspire and embolden what he considers his political base. This was a bill—marking the centenary of another—making us aware, as Faulkner inimitably put it, that the past is not dead, and maybe not even past.

The specific action the Bill would legislate is to amend Title 18 of the United States Code “to specify lynching as a deprivation of civil rights.” A new paragraph, Section 250 of Chapter 13 of Title 18, entitled “Offenses involving lynching,” would be added immediately after Section 249—“Hate crime acts.” If it passes, the Bill would incorporate the word “lynching” into the United States Code for the first time, where it would occupy an interesting place right after another term—“hate crime”—that took Congress almost a quarter century to recognize and make part of the legal language of the nation.Footnote ³

Those two terms—“lynching” and “hate crime”—give structure to Christopher Waldrep’s deeply important 2002 book The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America.Footnote ⁴ They give it structure, literally, in that the prologue is entitled “The Origins of the Word,” and the epilogue “Hate Crimes.” But they also act as the beginning and endpoint of his overall argument about how we can understand the trajectory of extralegal violence in American history. The first and only historical study of the evolution of and contestation over the term “lynching” in American history, politics, and culture, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch is in many ways a perfect complement to Brundage’s Lynching in the New South. Waldrep’s book attends to the evolution of a term, while Brundage’s traces that of a practice. When Waldrep posits that different deployments of the term “lynching” permit us to appreciate what is at stake in the intellectual debates over the practice, he reveals how discourses can allow us to understand the differences in what might appear to be similar acts or acts motivated by similar motives. When Brundage proposes an analysis based on what he calls “four general categories of mobs,” he focuses on how material congregations of human agents in particular formations enact what can be understood to be a range of activities belonging to the same species of acts.Footnote ⁵ It would not be wholly accurate to claim that one focuses on words and the other on deeds, since the distinction between those two categories is disputable, and also because each of these authors looks behind the word and deed to expose the changing social and intellectual practices that made possible the rise and decline of lynchings. Each of them, to use Brundage’s eloquent words, explores “a complex pattern of simultaneously fixed and evolving behavior and attitudes” (15).

*****

Waldrep declares at the outset that his interest is in seeing how the word “lynching” operated and changed over time “as a variable in determining Americans’ acceptance of extralegal violence” (4). Anyone who has studied lynching knows that one of the most vexing issues is precisely that the word that names the practice is frustratingly imprecise because it has so significantly changed in meaning over the two and a half centuries since it entered American parlance. It has sometimes denoted corporal punishment, sometimes capital; it has sometimes connoted the pursuit of justice in the absence of state apparatus, sometimes against the failings of such apparatus; it has sometimes indicated xenophobic or racist terrorism, sometimes not. Even what would seem to be a fundamental fact of the practice—that it is vigilante violence—is disputable when people speak of “legal lynching” and “police lynchings.” It is a gross understatement to say that it is a contested term.

As with any history of a contested term, let alone one as politically contested as “lynching,” the historian confronts a knotty and perhaps insoluble problem. Given that his purpose is to show how “the people who championed their cause, or fought against it, manipulated the meaning of lynching,” Waldrep has to posit that there is a relatively stable term that can be manipulated (4). In other words, for an advocate of lynching or a staunch critic of it to manipulate the term to serve a particular political agenda, there has to be enough of a shared understanding of the term in question among those who parry that term and wish to persuade the audience for which they are contending that the manipulation can be effective.

The history of debates over lynching can sometimes show that there is such a shared understanding of the term. In 1892, for instance, both the greatest anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells and the unreconstructed Southern governor Ben Tillman would call an event in which an African American man was hanged by a mob for the allegation of having raped a white woman a “lynching.” They do not dispute that the event in question can be called a “lynching,” but rather ascribe different motives for the lynching, Wells seeing an act of white supremacist terror and Tillman seeing a chivalric upholding of justice. But that same history of such debates can also frequently show that there is no shared understanding. As Waldrep himself reveals with admirable detail and clarity in his seventh chapter (127–50), the three anti-lynching institutions that met in 1940 to establish a workable definition of the term–the NAACP, Tuskegee, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL)–did not sufficiently share an understanding of what constituted a lynching to be called one. The ASWPL insisted on calling some events “murder” and denied that they were lynchings, while the NAACP and Tuskegee disagreed. In part, their disagreement was over logistics–the motive for the act, the numbers required to constitute a mob, and what the size of the mob represented–but their fundamental disagreement was grounded in what the term implied about the event in question and the nation in which it took place. The same sort of debate took place after James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death by a truck driven by three white supremacists in 1998. Many mainstream media commentators hastened to insist that this event was not a lynching, while many African American writers asserted that it was. The issue seemed to be about much more than the naming of an event; it seemed to be about the moral standing of a nation that believed it had or had not overcome a certain history.Footnote ⁶

In the first case, we can say that there is sufficient agreement that the antagonists can contest what the event means, while in the second case they cannot agree what the event is. It is worth noticing that the debate over the term deepens and becomes more contentious as lynchings decline in frequency and become anomalous rather than routine acts. In 1892, there were over 200 recorded lynchings, in 1940 the number of lynching victims was down to single digits, and Byrd’s was likely the only lynching in 1998.

I mention the difficulty of the project Waldrep has undertaken not to suggest it is inadvisable or impossible, but rather to acknowledge and applaud his courage and to recognize just how well he succeeded in this daunting task. His solution to the problem of trying to trace the history of a term whose definition continued to evolve as well as being contested is to use what he calls “the nineteenth-century definition as a reference point” (12). That definition—“an act of violence sanctioned, endorsed, or carried out by the neighborhood or community outside the law” (12)—is most forcefully stated by Jonathan Cutler in 1905 who wrote that “popular justification,” that is, “public approval, or supposed favorable public sentiment,” is the “sine qua non of lynching.”Footnote ⁷ While some of us might disagree with that definition, and believe that even as a reference point it mis-serves the analysis of lynchings before and after the Progressive Era, we do have to accept that Waldrep has done what was necessary to make possible what is in the end an invaluable study. We might also honestly acknowledge that many of us who have written on the subject have done the same. Waldrep has also consistently noted the limitations of that nineteenth-century definition. While acknowledging that it is “clear that community support has long been a touchstone,” there is in the end, as he recognizes, “no single behavior that can be called ‘lynching’” (183, 182).

Given that the “history of lynching in profoundly rhetorical” (182), then, what Waldrep does with exceptional skill is reveal what is at stake in those moments of contestation in the course of that history. He does this not only in the central chapter of his book on the 1940 summit involving the NAACP, Tuskegee, and the ASWPL, but also in his analyses of several explicit and implicit dialogues over a range of issues and through a sequence of political institutions in American history. With acumen and sensitivity, he reveals just what sorts of disagreements, and what implied agreements, existed between antagonists of various sorts. Just to select one such moment—the mid-1850s–we can see how he teases out how pro-vigilante and anti-vigilante sentiment was expressed across the nation in the discussion over the San Francisco Vigilance Committees, and how pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates in Kansas fought over, and with, a shared discourse of vigilante justice after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (49–63).

Nowhere, to my mind, is Waldrep sharper, and nowhere has he placed those of us who follow him more in his debt, than in his particularly fine discussion of the 1835 Vicksburg lynching. Not only does he disentangle the variety of conflicting accounts to produce a succinct narrative of precisely what happened to inspire the people of Vicksburg to lynch the gamblers who had shot one of the citizens, and not only does he discuss how the Vicksburg press covered the story, but he also reveals precisely how the word “lynching” spread from Vicksburg to the nation at large by identifying what steamboats docked at Vicksburg, which ones carried Vicksburg newspapers to nearby cities, and which ones carried oral accounts from the passengers to other cities (27–35, esp. 30). As I stated earlier, there is no easy distinction between word and deed, and what makes Waldrep’s history compelling is that he reveals the precise material conditions (the deeds, as it were) by which the word originated, spread, and assumed meaning across the nation.

*****

It is unlikely that we will have any future studies of the evolution of the word “lynching,” and it is equally unlikely that, if one does appear, it would significantly challenge the historical contours Waldrep establishes in The Many Face of Judge Lynch, and that he deepens and elucidates in his excellent anthology of primary sources, Lynching in America: A History in Documents.Footnote ⁸ Even future scholars who disagree with Waldrep about the validity of using the nineteenth-century definition of lynching as a reference point will be indebted to him as they endeavor to reveal the extent and meanings of lynching in slavery, Reconstruction, and after the end of the Progressive Era. To that extent, Waldrep’s book will help and inform the work of future scholars who undertake a case study of an individual lynching, and those who explore the patterns and meanings of lynchings in a county, state, region, or nation.

Even more indebted to him, though, will be those future scholars who will write what we might call studies of the discourse of lynching. These are studies not of a lynching or a set of lynchings, per se, but rather of lynching represented. These are studies that explore the rhetoric, the iconography, and the other discursive features of vigilante violence. A brace of books that appeared around the same time as, and shortly after, Waldrep’s have opened up exciting new avenues of exploration in the ways lynchings are represented in American culture, not just in literary or dramatic works, but in a wide variety of visual and textual cultures.

In his 2004 book Legacies of Lynching, for instance, Jonathan Markowitz examines what he calls the “metaphorization of lynching,” the way lynching even when it was a common material practice, and now when it is less of one, comes to represent a prism onto race relations, an idea, an image, a trope that can be employed rhetorically in a given political situation.Footnote ⁹ Other studies have focused on what we can broadly call political discourses, that is, the ways discourses of lynching as a practice drew on, revised, and sometimes undermined the formative political ideals of communities and nations.Footnote ¹⁰

We can also include those illuminating studies of the politics of lynching photography by Leigh Raiford, Dora Apel, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Amy Louise Wood in which they reveal what we can make of the photographs that recorded the moment of the lynching, trafficked through the mails as tokens of white supremacy, and were framed and recast by anti-lynching advocates as a statement of white barbarity.Footnote ¹¹ We can also include those studies that look at particular communities’ responses to lynching. Kidada Williams has done that with sensitivity and intelligence in her exploration of how African American intellectuals and communities responded to lynchings and other forms of violent social control in the half century after the Civil War.Footnote ¹² One hopes that there will likewise be similar studies of the responses of Mexican American and Native American intellectuals and communities to the lynchings that historians like William Carrigan, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Clive Webb are uncovering.Footnote ¹³

One cannot overemphasize how important such recent studies of the testimony and response of these communities have been, or future ones will prove to be. In the same way that writing “history from the bottom up” challenged the historical profession and paved the way to a fuller history that took seriously the experiences of people of color, laboring classes, and women of all colors and classes, these studies will give voice to communities that resisted as they were terrorized, and help reveal in more precise and detailed ways what we can make of the fissures and deep flaws in the pro-lynching discourse produced by those who had access to the means of production and publication. As has been the case in the historiography of slavery and Reconstruction, the testimony of those who suffered rather than benefited from the violent expression of white supremacy in America will change how we see what the beneficiaries attempted to posit as reality. Waldrep’s book stands as an early pioneer in this exciting frontier of lynching studies that take seriously the ways in which lynching is a rhetorical practice as well as an act of vigilante terrorism.

*****

There will inevitably be many other dimensions of the discourses of lynching that will emerge to support and supplement the work of those who have so far studied the terminology, metaphors, photographs, and communal memory of lynching. I will conclude with what might seem too precise and likely too idiosyncratic a recommendation for one such practice of the discourse of lynching that calls for deeper exploration: the signs and placards that mobs sometimes affixed to the corpse of the victim.

Both Waldrep and Brundage describe lynchings in which we can find such signs, and both offer compelling interpretations for what these signs do. For Brundage, these signs were part of the ritual of lynching, and he identifies at least three different purposes they seem to serve. First, they expressed morbid humor, as in the case of the sign placed on the body of John Bailey (“Please do not wake him”). Second, they also issued a warning to others, sometimes addressed to a general populace and other times directly to named individuals. The sign attached to the bodies of two Black men lynched in Glynn County, Georgia, did both, as it addressed the person perceived as a leader in the local African American community: “Evil-doers take warning from what they see. Mase Sawyer take warning.” In other cases, the warnings were implied as the signs named politicians who attempted to prevent lynchings. The mob attached a sign reading “Mayor Trout’s friend” to the body of Thomas Smith in Lynchburg, Virginia, to indicate their disapproval of the politician who had ordered the entire city police force and the local militia to protect the prison where Smith was being held. Finally, the signs were meant as acts of justification. “Our women and children will be protected,” read the sign attached to the body of Brown Washington in Madison, Georgia. Sometimes, signs were meant to do all three things, and, disturbingly, also do them in the ventriloquized voice of the victim. The mob in Sylvania, Georgia, wrote a sign that read: “To all my race that passeth by, look on and take heed that I am justified for the cause of this crime, and have received the punishment that is due all violators of this act. Tom Israel. P.S. Blessed be those who leaves [sic] me alone, and damned be [he] who moves my bones” (42, 168, 79, 42–43).

Waldrep also suggests that the signs did the work of justification and warning, and sometimes addressed newspaper editors critical of the vigilante violence the mobs performed (“N.Y. Journal: We Must Protect our Ladies,” read one such sign).Footnote ¹⁴ In addition, though, Waldrep uses the presence of these signs as evidence for his argument for the primacy of the nineteenth-century definition of lynching. He points out that those signs that declared “‘we will protect the female sex,’ or some similar message” began to appear at least as early as 1882, that is, when lynchings began to fit the definition he uses. And he also suggests that those signs operate in a different way in those lynchings that don’t fit his time line. He argues that the Klan of Reconstruction, for instance, “designed their killings to resemble lynchings.” By “putting their own placards on the bodies of their victims,” he writes, “Klansmen similarly claimed—falsely—to represent the entire white community” (120, 90, 72–73).

These signs call for more intensive study. Many of them are warnings that seem to be particularly aimed at African Americans in the local community.Footnote ¹⁵ Many are also warnings to viewers not to move the hanging body.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet others are also primarily intended to identify how the lynchers wish to perceive themselves. A mob in Marion County, Florida, left a placard on the body of Robert Larkin, whom they lynched in 1893: “Done by 300 of the best citizens of this county.”Footnote ¹⁷ A few commemorate the place when it is significant (that is, the scene of the crime), as did the mob who lynched a man who had been paroled four years into his thirteen-year sentence: “On this spot Allen Green got his Parole and here he got his lynch.”Footnote ¹⁸

There are some so straightforward a description of the events that they seem transparent, as in the note pinned to an unnamed victim in California in 1853: “I caught this fellow stealing my mules, and I shot him.”Footnote ¹⁹ There are others so cryptic that they seem wholly opaque. When Jack Walker and Charles McIntyre were hanged in the county jail in Belmont, Nevada, in 1874, those who hanged them pinned a note that mysteriously bore the inscription “301.” When Samuel Burt was hanged from the gate frame of a cemetery in Carson, Nevada, in 1875, the note pinned to his body read “601.” The same kind of note, with the same “601” inscribed on it, was pinned to the body of an unnamed victim in Winnemucca, Nevada, in 1877.Footnote ²⁰ The numbers might be the signature of a vigilante group, or perhaps something else.

There is at least one case, identified by Hubert Howe Bancroft, where the signs occur in a sequence. A group of vigilantes in Idaho who appear to have hanged a flurry of men in a few weeks in 1866 signed a series of signs “XXX.” The sign that was attached to the body of David Updyke simply named him and his alleged crime: “DAVE UPDYKE, The aider of murderers and horse-thieves. XXX.” Two days later, a note written in the same handwriting as the note on Updyke, was posted on Main Street in Boisé City:

Jake Dixon, whose body had presumably not had a sign pinned to it, had been hanged the day after Updyke and the day before the main notice was posted in Boisé City.

Some notes were addressed specifically to agents of the government, meant presumably to show that the “people” had sovereign power. The mob that hanged an African American soldier in Knoxville, Tennessee, in front of the Freedman’s Bureau office declared: “Hung to show the niggers and Freedmen’s Bureau Nigger Officers what it takes to make a true Tennessean and whether they’d be run over or not.”Footnote ²² A mob in 1887 in Tarboro, North Carolina, stated: “We hang this man, not in passion, but calmly and deliberately, with a due sense of the responsibility we assume. We take executive power in this case and hang this man in accordance with the unwritten law of the land, because the written law provides no penalty adequate to the crime. And be it understood, we who have done this act will repeat it under similar circumstances.”Footnote ²³

What this brief and wholly unscientific sample of such signs suggests is that they differ in meaningful and revealing ways that help us better understand how those who lynched wished to represent themselves, their victims, and their relationship to the state. The differences in address are significant; some seem to talk to the victim (David Updyke is addressed directly as “you”), while yet others are aimed at known presumed accomplices or, more generally, those who are deemed to have criminal intent. The most intriguing and disturbing ones are those that presume to speak in the voice of the victim. We need to ask what such an act of attempted ventriloquism means, and how it might be related to other American cultural forms in which white actors adopt a Black voice. Minstrelsy was meant to mock, while these mock confessions seem to suggest something else. What might this desire to inhabit the voice of the victim tell us about a mob that already evidenced a bloodthirsty need to desecrate the body? And what might it tell us that some mobs could not rest until they wrote something to mark what was an already overdetermined body and tableau? What desperation is evidenced in these efforts to control the voice, the confession, the adornment of a victim whose life and life options they had already controlled?

These are words written by lynchers, of course, and the study of them might seem to suggest one more way we are valuing the discourses of the empowered over those of the victimized. But these signs can help us understand another discourse of lynching that reveals what those who produced the sign felt and feared. These signs are perhaps the place where word and deed most emphatically meet, where those who performed the sordid deed make the first attempt to control the words that will describe it. As such, they can tell us a great deal about and the many faces and signs of Judge Lynch.