At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

Abstract

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America Philip Dray Random House, 2002 There is no subject that lends itself more to anti-American (and, most recently, anti-white) alienation than lynching. The scenes, after all, were often of the utmost cruelty. No decent individual, sensitive to human suffering, undertakes to defend that cruelty. It is unfortunate, however, if that means that no one is willing to speak in defense of the mainstream of American society during the century following 1865, placing this very cruel subject in context and perspective. Such a failure leaves the field to those who like to paint the picture of white Americans of that period as one of viciousness, rapacity, unbridled racism, and hypocrisy; and who like to picture blacks as victims who received the brunt of that cruelty. This latter view has long-since become the conventional wisdom among the opinion-makers in the United States. And elsewhere, as well: this reviewer wrote a legal studies monograph in 19951 analyzing the history of lynching and placing it in perspective from a scholarly point of view - and it has been barred from Canada as "hate literature" (an act that is arguably as intellectually disgraceful to Canada as Stalin's insistence on Lysenkoism was to the Soviet Union). Herbert Marcuse's prescription, in his discussion of "repressive tolerance," that all views from the left should be permitted and all from the right prohibited has become reality. Philip Dray's new book on lynching fits into that conventional wisdom. Unless one is predisposed to question the Left's image of white Americans, a reader will be inclined to accept its narrative at face value. Dray has written a readable chronology of lynching, with emphasis especially on the South, and his study is the product of considerable research into the subjects he considers important. This said, it remains important to note the ways his book lacks perspective. (What follows is a discussion of just some of those ways, since a complete examination of them would go far beyond the scope of a book review): 1. His entire theme ("the lynching of black America") repeats the now-customary premise that lynching was primarily an expression of racism. "Lynching," he says, "was a form of caste oppression... the white world's cruelty"; and, elsewhere, "victims were chosen for their race." What is odd is that he cites quite a lot of counter-evidence, but never reflects about it. He tells about the San Francisco Vigilante Committees of 1851 and 1856; about the hanging of the white gamblers in Vicksburg; about the lynching of eleven whites in New Orleans in 1891 after the Police Superintendent was shot from ambush; that half the thirty lynch victims in Illinois after 1882 were white; that thirty-five whites were lynched in North Dakota in the mid-1880s for cattle rustling; and much more. Lynching was not limited by race or by region of the country. Robert Zangrando's The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 19091950, cites the figures compiled by the Tuskegee Institute: that during the 87 year span between 1882 and 1968 a total of 1,297 whites and 3,445 blacks were lynched. If racism were the prime mover, the almost 1,300 whites require some explanation. The major explanation as an alternative to the racial one is the amount of crime to which local communities were reacting. We know, of course, of the cattle-rustling and other crimes committed in the "wild west." What most people today don't know about is the extent of black crime in the South. In his book on lynching, James Elbert Cutler quotes with favor a statement that during those years "the worst instincts of the negro came to the front; the percentage of criminals among negroes increased to an alarming extent; many were guilty of crimes of violence of the most heinous and repulsive kind." Another author tells that "in 1921-22, the homicide rates in Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans per 100,000 Negro population were 103. …