Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Arkansas lynchings part of history
Think of lynching, and images of mobs and nooses, Old West-style vigilantes and displays of white supremacy may come to mind.
In his new book, “American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching” (University of Arkansas Press, Sept. 22), Guy Lancaster sets out to define the act more broadly and explore the multiple forms of brutality it encompasses.
Lancaster, the editor of the Central Arkansas Library System’s online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, uses old newspaper accounts to detail lynchings of Black people by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. He draws on other works from the fields of literary theory, social sciences, history, cognitive science and sociology and proposes that lynching involves five “distinct but overlapping types of violence.”
In his introduction, he writes that the motivation for the book is “to illustrate concisely the types of violence within the category of lynching, and to demonstrate how we might apply these models, especially for those who may not be aware of the wealth of theory regarding the origin and nature of violence.”
Lancaster, who edited the 2018 anthology “Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950,” grew up in Jonesboro and attended Arkansas State University, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and a doctorate in heritage studies.
In this interview from November, which has been edited for clarity and length, he talks about the definition of lynching, the language of reporting on lynching, a 1909 “anti-lynching bill” and how he hopes lynching and its aftermath will be incorporated in the story of American history.
How many lynchings have there been in Arkansas?
It’s challenging to assemble [exact numbers], but from 18361896: 286 Black males, eight Black
females and 92 white males; of this total, there are 46 about which there remain questions.
How did you become interested in the study of lynching?
I was doing research on racial cleansing in Arkansas, the expulsion of African Americans in some communities. Sometimes all I had to go on was Census figures. Armed with that, all I could do was go through a local newspaper and scroll through 10 years of issues to try to find some reporting on what happened.
While I was doing that, I would constantly see reports about lynching throughout the state. It made me aware of just how prevalent racial violence was. Richard Buckelew wrote a 1999 dissertation on lynching and racial violence in the state that was a good starting catalog of these events.
Working for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, people out in the community will find ones that hadn’t been documented and let us know. It just continues to drive home how prevalent a practice this was.
Since I published the anthology, which assembled the work of several scholars, it occurred to me that there needed to be some sort of theoretical perspective that would frame this in a way that would make a little more sense, that would try to define what a lynching is, what purpose it serves.
You define lynching as “a scapegoating form of lethal violence; performed by one group of human beings against another group of human beings (or an individual representing said group) assigned lower moral status; for purposes regarded as virtuous by its perpetrators, such as punishment and regulation; with the effect of maintaining the very structural inequalities that delineate group boundaries and their respective moral statuses.” Why did you come up with this definition?
There are a lot of misconceptions about what a lynching is. I’ve given talks where I’ve mentioned an event in which someone was shot to death by a crowd or set on fire, and people will say ‘Isn’t lynching just hanging?’ The murder could be carried out in many ways and not just a hanging.
Another misconception is that it is explicitly the punishment of a crime, and it’s not always that.
You recount the 1905 lynching of a Black man at Dumas for eloping with a white woman.
As I make clear in Chapter 5 [“Scapegoat”], sometimes people were lynched for consensual relationships. Rape was often cited, but many times it was cited to disguise what was a consensual relationship.
You also dig into Act 258 of 1909, the so-called anti-lynching bill written by the Rev. John Michael Lucey, a Catholic Priest from Pine Bluff, that wasn’t really that at all.
This law was passed so that in order to prevent a lynch mob, the court would step in and very quickly convict someone, likely to death. It shows the expectation that if we let the court act as the lynchers, surely that will be all better. And Lucey’s language is that of the mob. He uses the logic and the language of the mob to defend his law.
It’s astonishing just how ineffective Act 258 was. Lynchings were still occurring on a regular basis. It didn’t minimize anything.
There is a lot of vicious language from editorialists and reporters at the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat and other papers concerning lynchings. Victims are referred to as brutes and fiends, and there was a Gazette editorial defending the 1892 lynching of 22-year-old Henry James, who was accused of raping a 5-year-old girl. What was it like to read these reports and statements?
On one hand, it is a dip into a different world. On the other hand, we see this language employed today. You only have to look at some of Fox News’ rhetoric around the murder of George Floyd where the same kind of brutish language is employed. Or look at American rhetoric around alleged terrorists in the early 2000s. These tropes do crop up again and again.
In the process of researching and writing for this book, were you thinking of the victims, the lynchers, the communities? Where was your mind going?
I’m largely focused on trying to understand the perpetrators. Their identities are often very much obscured in the reporting. Several hundred people can march down Main Street in broad daylight and none of them are named. What we do know is that they are often very representative of the community. It’s often people of at least middle-class means who are doing this. You realize just how much of mainstream society is in these mobs.
We think of violence as something antithetical to civilization, but I think that studying and contemplating this we see how much violence, for societies that permitted lynching, is simply part of civilization. You could say that violence is the means by which they see civilization surviving.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., was opened in 2018 to memorialize victims of lynching, and efforts are being made in Arkansas to commemorate victims. How should we remember lynching?
More than anything, we need to restructure the way we teach history so that things like lynching aren’t seen as exceptions to history. We tell the American story as this story of enlightenment and progress, and slavery is sort of over here as that bit we didn’t get right at the beginning. Well, slavery is a very important part of the American story.
I think we do something similar with lynching. We talk about Reconstruction and the Gilded Age and, oh, some lynchings happened due to these out-of-control mobs. But the mob is the same group of people driving the progress of the era. So we need to do a better job of incorporating this reality into our broader story.