Lynching Beyond Dixie by Michael J. Pfeifer

Author:Michael J. Pfeifer [Pfeifer, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780252094651
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 16673464
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2013-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

5

Making Utah History

Press Coverage of the Robert Marshall Lynching, June 1925

KIMBERLEY MANGUN AND LARRY R. GERLACH

Lynching claimed thousands of victims across the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these individuals, as graphically depicted in Without Sanctuary, were African American men who lived in southern states.1 Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells was the first to identify the underlying causes of lynching. In three long investigative pamphlets published between 1892 and 1900, she discussed how allegations of rape obscured the real reason behind the killings of black men: white rage over economic advances among a rising black middle class.2 Lynching has received considerable scholarly and popular attention since Wells’s groundbreaking work. Most scholarship on American mob violence has focused on the South. But the American West, especially Texas and Montana, also experienced an epidemic of summary collective murder in the latter half of the nineteenth century.3

Violence occurred in Utah Territory, as well. Conflict in the territory, created in 1850, was originally between leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and federal officials over political dominance, and between followers and non-Mormons who challenged the church’s social and cultural mores.4 Later, hostilities were directed at racial and ethnic minorities. At least eleven men were hanged between 1869 and 1886, including a Chinese man, a Japanese man, and two African Americans.5 The first black lynching victim, identified only as “a damned nigger,” was hanged, circumstances unknown, at a remote railroad camp in 1869. The second, an itinerant laborer named Sam Joe Harvey, was arrested in 1883 after shooting and killing a police officer. Jailers turned him over to a vengeful mob who hanged him and then dragged his corpse down a Salt Lake City street for several blocks.6 With the advent of statehood in 1896 and the institutional modernization of the early twentieth century, lynching came to be regarded as a peculiar historical relic of Utah’s rowdy frontier days. But on June 18, 1925, a lynch mob in Carbon County murdered Robert Marshall. He may have been the last black man lynched in the trans-Rockies West.

Instead of a traditional account of the Marshall lynching per se, this essay offers a summary of the crime and then examines how Utah’s daily and weekly press covered the lynching and its aftermath. It also considers local and national coverage of the Day of Reconciliation and Forgiveness, a controversial event held in 1998 to atone for the extralegal execution. More than one hundred articles and editorials have been examined using historical methods and critical discourse analysis, a method that considers the “situational, institutional and social structures” that affect how texts are produced and consumed.7 The essay also draws on archival research conducted at the Utah State Historical Society, including the records of the Salt Lake City Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), court documents, and the papers of Governor George H. Dern. This essay situates the public memory of the extralegal murder of Robert Marshall

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.