American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching by Guy Lancaster

Author:Guy Lancaster [Lancaster, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Violence in Society, Political Science, Civil Rights, Discrimination, Social History, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781610757553
Google: wlQ_EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2021-10-18T22:11:39+00:00

4

VIRTUE

Since we cannot atone you, we shall see

Justice design the victor’s chivalry.

—William Shakespeare, Richard II

LYNCHING CAN BE VIRTUOUS. At least, that was the attitude of whoever wrote the opinion piece in the Arkansas Gazette justifying the lynching of Henry James on May 14, 1892. This piece is worth quoting in full for the total defense of lynching presented therein:

In the South it is the unwritten law that the man who commits the most atrocious of crimes of which a woman can be made the victim will die. It was in obedience to this inexorable law that the monster Henry James, the negro who so fiendishly assaulted little Maggie Doxey, was hanged to a telephone pole early Saturday morning by an infuriated mob, and riddled with bullets.

There was no mistake in identity. The brute had been employed in the family to which the child belong [sic]. When arrested he confessed the crime, and his executioners realized that he deserved ten thousand deaths.

It is useless to moralize, and to deplore the reign of the mob. Every good citizen would prefer that the law should take its course. The courts are open. The flow of justice is unrestricted. In his case legal trial would have been followed by conviction, and the gallows would have claimed and found its own. But there are times when human passion becomes a law unto itself. There are times when that higher law which discards legal forms, and marches in a straight line to the execution of its awful decrees, supersedes all other tribunals, and, swift and relentless, hurls the thunderbolts of vengeance against its victims. The brute who assaulted little Maggie Doxey yielded his worthless life to this higher law. His crime was the most atrocious of all crimes; and however we may deplore the methods of the mob, who will say that he did not deserve his fate?1

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