The Murder of Oscar Chitwood in Hot Springs, Arkansas by Guy Lancaster

Author:Guy Lancaster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

LYNCHING, RACE AND LAWMEN

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

How may likeness made in crimes,

Making practise on the times,

To draw with idle spiders’ strings

Most ponderous and substantial things!

—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Oscar Chitwood may not have actually been lynched, but he was exactly the type of white man who could have found himself at the end of a rope.

But before we get to him, we should unpack that term—lynching—just a bit, for it has meant different things to different people over the course of American history. Those studying the American West have typically regarded lynching as the “rough justice” of the frontier directed at obvious criminals and outlaws usually as white as the mobs who lynched them, in a time and place where the instruments of “proper” justice were rather lacking. For these scholars, the lynching of an African American man (or a Latino, Asian or Native) constituted an aberration of normal practices. Meanwhile, those studying the American South have emphasized how lynching primarily constituted a means of terrorizing and subjugating African Americans. In this schema, white lynching victims were the definite exception to the deadly rule.

Some scholars have attempted to combine these various perspectives to argue that lynching underwent a certain kind of “evolution” over the centuries, a view outlined eloquently by Ashraf H.A. Rushdy:

In the first stage, frontier societies lynch those accused of crimes against property in the early days of settlement, while the territory still lacks legal and judicial apparatus. In the second stages, primarily homicide or other especially heinous crimes are punished by lynching, sometimes in the absence of the legal apparatus, often despite its presence. In the third stage, vigilante violence becomes a tool for capitalists to dominate particular fields.… Finally, in the last stage, lynching becomes a weapon of terrorism used to control the mobility of particular groups (defined along ethnic, racial, or class lines).232

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