Silent Lynchings
The Tuskegee Institute began cataloguing and compiling lynchings of Black individuals in 1882. Tuskegee was followed by the Chicago Tribune and eventually the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also published annual lynching statistics. This was the beginning of the anti-lynching movement and the debate to define lynching. The NAACP often reported the largest number of lynchings as leadership in the organization viewed racial terrorism as a visual manifestation of all racial injustice in the nation. They feared without a broad definition, many lynchings would not be recognized as such and that the battle to end lynching would result in underground racial violence.[1]
At the same time that the NAACP, Chicago Tribune, and Tuskegee Institute were compiling statistics on lynchings in America, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) advocated for a narrow definition. Jessie Daniel Ames, a leader in the ASWPL, believed that lynching had become normalized in white Southern society and her goal was to show, through lynching reporting, that lynching was an abnormal practice. Therefore. the ASWPL set a “lynchless year” as their target and used a narrow definition to decrease the number of lynchings reported, thereby denormalizing the practice. The ASWPL believed that, while a narrow definition might exclude many lynchings, the perceived decrease in lynchings would forecast a real decrease in lynchings and eventually end the practice.[2]
This debate on the definition of lynching had a confusing impact on the populace who read, in some accounts, that the first lynch-free year occurred between May 1938 and May 1939; yet, during that same period, the NAACP identified six lynchings. Therefore, in December 1940, the three major anti-lynching groups met (along with representatives from International Labor Defense who argued for the inclusion of police brutality and labor strike retaliation in lynching statistics) to create a common definition of lynching. The Tuskegee Institute, led by sociologists and social scientists like Monroe N. Work, W. E. B. DuBois, and Walter White believed that the world could be changed through statistical data. Following in the tradition of Ida B. Wells, Tuskegee often produced statistics that were in between the goals of the NAACP and the ASWPL and therefore faced pressure from both sides. The Tuskegee Institute arrived in December 1940 with their definition of lynching, “an activity in which persons not officers of the law, in open defiance of the law, administer punishment by death to an individual for an alleged offense or to an individual with whom some offense has been associated.”[3]
Through the 1940 conference, major points of contention were identified. The NAACP and the International Labor Defense were displeased as Tuskegee’s definition excluded deaths caused by law enforcement and secret -- or hidden -- lynchings. The ASWPL was equally displeased with the definition because it did not clearly require a corpse and a legal record of the event. The ASWPL felt as though the Tuskegee definition was a form of propaganda and that the only way to end lynching was to convince white Southerners that lynching had ended, not to increase its presence in the press. After considerable debate, the conference agreed on four key components which must be present to label a murder as a lynching: (1) the presence of a dead body; (2) the murder had to take place outside of the law; (3) it must be done by a group; (4) the group must have acted “under pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.”[4]
This debate underscores an inherent problem within the study of lynching. The definition of the word itself was used, contemporaneously, to combat the act of lynching. All definitions of lynching based upon historical context are written from the perspective of anti-lynching activists who expanded and contracted its meaning in an effort to both raise awareness and end the practice. This made it quite easy to commit acts of racial terrorism which were not legible as lynching. Despite the lack of a comprehensive study and a consistent definition, it is possible to categorize lynching in Texas into five distinct periods:
The first period, pre-1860, was marked by vigilante action against perceived criminality outside the reach of law enforcement.
The second period, 1860-1880, was marked by secessional conflict and the immediate racial fears following emancipation. These first two periods bore witness to steadily increasing public attention and by 1880, a new lynching era arrived in Texas: spectacle lynching.
From 1880 through 1920, Texans performed frequent ritualistic public killings primarily against Black and Mexican men, and these murders were witnessed by, at times, thousands of spectators. Special trains sold destination tickets to the rural reaches of the state to carry thousands of witnesses to watch the gruesome spectacles. In 1916, one particularly brutal lynching was perpetrated against Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, as he was burned alive in front of thousands. Pictures of this grim act were spread across the nation and fueled anti-lynching activism as well as efforts toward a federal anti-lynching bill. The resultant negative national attention following the lynching of Jesse Washington slowly ended the era of spectacle lynching in Texas; however, in the fall of 1920 the second Ku Klux Klan arrived in Houston and rapidly spread across the state.
This fourth period of lynching between 1920 and 1924 was more controlled and calculating than its predecessor. With the fear of federal legislation to penalize lynchers and their home counties in mind, the lynchings of the second Ku Klux Klan in Texas were compartmentalized and the public, aware and supportive, remained silent as these acts of terror were committed in the dark of night.
The final phase of lynching in Texas, born out of the silence of the Ku Klux Klan era, was underground lynchings. From 1925 until at least 1942, lynchings were committed quietly against men of color and elected officials performed increasingly realistic attempts to stop the practice altogether. As the public perception of lynching shifted from a necessity to a crime, racial violence after 1924 was difficult to identify and infrequently reported by the press.
[1] Walter L. Buenger, The Path to a Modern South, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 26; Christopher Waldrep, “War of Words: The Controversy over the Definition of Lynching 1899-1940,” The Journal of Southern History 66, no.1 (February 2000): 75-100.
[2] Christopher Waldrep, “War of Words: The Controversy over the Definition of Lynching 1899-1940,” The Journal of Southern History 66, no.1 (February 2000): 75-100.
[3] Christopher Waldrep, “War of Words: The Controversy over the Definition of Lynching 1899-1940,” The Journal of Southern History 66, no.1 (February 2000): 75-100; ASWPL Papers, quoted in Waldrep, “War of Words,” 97.
[4] Waldrep, “War of Words,” 98.