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Book Review
| Chistopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. x + 264. $39.95 (ISBN 0-312-29399-2).
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| In the past several years lynching has drawn considerable attention from historians and the general public. A number of excellent books, an academic conference, public memorials, and a major exhibition of lynching photographs suggest that Americans are once again wrestling with questions of the legitimation of the collective use of force and the sometimes conflicting demands of the rule of law and a community's demand for justice. Into this growing debate comes Christopher Waldrep's new book, the purpose of which is "to trace the history of the word lynching, as a variable in determining Americans' acceptance of extralegal violence" (4). In the process, he presents both a sweeping account of the behaviors described as "lynching" and a careful analysis of the relationship between those behaviors, the language used to describe them, and shifts in American mores. It is an ambitious project, but Waldrep carries it off convincingly, producing an account that explains the evolution of extralegal violence in America and provokes scholars of lynching to think more carefully about just what it is they study. |
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Waldrep's first chapter traces the disputed origins of the term "lynching" in Revolutionary Virginia and its gradual diffusion on the frontier in the early nineteenth century. The author's earlier work on nineteenth-century violence and his familiarity with the sources serve him well in this scavenger hunt for a word, and he proves his point that people on the frontier used "lynching" to legitimate vigilantism by comparing it with patriotic actions during the American Revolution. By a thorough examination of newspapers, Waldrep argues that the term entered the national lexicon after the 1835 killing of five gamblers in Vicksburg. Abolitionists quickly picked up the word to describe attacks by pro-slavery southerners, regionalizing the term for the first time. |
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The moral valence of lynching shifted by the early 1850s as a result of western migration. Settlers created convincing arguments that lynching was necessary in locations where the legal system was not yet in place or weak and corrupt. With extralegal violence enjoying a renewed cultural legitimacy, white southerners found it easy to justify Ku Klux Klan violence by arguing that Reconstruction had hopelessly corrupted southern courts. Opponents of the Ku Klux Klan could not use the term "lynching" to describe this racialized extralegal violence since it automatically cast the Klansmen as the forces of right, so they turned to the concept of the "outrage," an offense not against a local community, but against the nation itself. |
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In the 1870s and 1880s, Waldrep argues, communities across the nation came to accept the legitimacy of lynching within certain situations, and journalists developed formulaic ways of describing situations that met the criteria of a lynching. It was not until the 1890s that African American anti-lynching activists, especially Ida B. Wells, began to force Americans to see that lynching had become a racialized practice. From here, Waldrep's last two chapters follow the anti-lynching campaign of the first half of the twentieth century and the fall-out of lynching in the second half. For nearly forty years, two important African American institutions—the Tuskegee Institute and the NAACP—quarreled over the definition of lynching, making the definition itself a part of the effort to eradicate the practice and a reflection of larger social philosophies. Once lynching had been effectively stopped, the rhetoric became available once again for all sorts of uses, most memorably by Justice Clarence Thomas. |
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Waldrep puts various forms of extralegal violence in American history into a broad framework and shows how one led to another. Too often histories of lynching have given but cursory attention to the relationship between extralegal violence in the West and in the South. Waldrep's distinction between Reconstruction-era violence and the classic formulas of lynching developed in the 1870s and 1880s reveals an important point. While some earlier studies have shown that there were remarkable continuities in these periods in terms of the victims of violence (mostly African American), Waldrep provides a convincing explanation of why most people at the time did not see these forms of violence as similar. It is just this sort of fine distinction that Waldrep excels at, refining the way we think about the practice of lynching based on the way contemporary observers tactically deployed the language available to them to support or attack the extralegal violence itself. |
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The strength of this book lies in the nineteenth century, and I have reservations about the two twentieth-century chapters. In his account of the struggle between the conservative Tuskegee Institute and the militant NAACP to define lynching as part of a program of racial advancement, Waldrep gives very little attention to the role of the Communist Party and the International Labor Defense. Including the Communists' attempts to radically expand the way "lynching" was used and to recast it as a class-based rather than racial phenomenon would have significantly strengthened Waldrep's analysis. An epilogue suggests that "hate crimes" have replaced "lynchings," meaning that racially motivated attacks that once would have assumed some degree of community support are now distanced from the mainstream of community sentiment. This argument seems to narrow the field too much. Rather than just being transfomed from "lynchings" to "hate crimes," I suspect that the sort of racially motivated attacks formerly known as lynchings were fragmented into many different forms enjoying varying levels of community sanction (police killings, for instance). |
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| Bruce E. Baker
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| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
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