Popular Justice by Berg Manfred

Author:Berg, Manfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Jesse Washington’s charred corpse after the infamous 1916 lynching in Waco, Texas

Facing strong criticism from around the country, the white leaders of Waco mounted the usual defense. The lynch mob had been much smaller than the estimated ten thousand, they claimed, even though the pictures left little doubt about the enormous size of the gathering. The photographs also would have made possible the identification of the mob leaders, but no one was ever prosecuted for participation in the public murder. In as much as Waco leaders talked about the ghastly incident at all, they agreed that the lynching had been the deed of madmen coming from “the lowest order of society.” Of course this was a blatant distortion of the facts. Not only had the crowd included men and women from all walks of life, but, as Freeman found, the mob leaders were solid working-class and middle-class men who had every reason to believe they were acting with the full approval of Waco’s white citizenry. In this respect the “Waco Horror” of 1916 was not different from many other lynchings in the New South. As countless photographs document, neither active perpetrators nor onlookers made any effort to conceal their identity because they had no reason to fear criminal prosecution. Even when lynchers had their pictures taken with dangling and disfigured bodies, the coroners would later declare that the victims had suffered “death at the hands of parties unknown.”

Not all lynchings were the work of mass mobs carrying out sadistic rituals. There were also smaller mobs, ranging from a handful of participants to perhaps two or three dozen, that acted furtively, killing their victims in remote places at night without further ado. Like mass mobs that staged spectacle lynchings, small mobs claimed to avenge crimes for which the law allegedly offered no adequate punishment. Unlike mass mobs, however, small mobs often sought secrecy because they could not be sure of widespread support from the larger community. Typically this was the case when the lynchers sought personal revenge for offenses that had not triggered much public outrage. For instance, in 1912 members of a white family in Columbus, Georgia, lynched a young black man who had accidentally shot one of their own and was later convicted of manslaughter. Apparently the local white community had been satisfied with this outcome, but no one questioned the family’s desire for harsher retribution. Lynchings by private mobs may have accounted for roughly one-third of all lynchings. They were especially common in cases when whites or blacks executed members of their own race outside the law. As demonstrations of white supremacy and communal justice, however, they were of minor importance compared to the spectacle lynchings by mass mobs.

Most of the participants in lynching parties were members of the white rural and urban working classes—small farmers, sharecroppers, construction workers, or saloonkeepers. Nevertheless mass mobs usually included people of all social backgrounds and certainly were not confined to the proverbial “riffraff.” On the contrary, the legitimacy of popular justice depended on the involvement of “respectable citizens.

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