The Killing Fields

The truth probably lies close to historical sociologists Tolnay and Beck's admittedly equivocal conclusion that "the black and white communities alike endorsed mob violence as an acceptable method of social control" and that lynching's motivation within both communities "was the same . . . but only to a degree": Racist attitudes undeniably played a central role in Southern lynchings, but they weren't in themselves a sufficient cause. After all, whites throughout the South were "racist," yet lynchings were far more likely to occur in some areas of the region than in others and not necessarily in the most racist places. White South Carolinians under race-baiting Governors Blease and Ben Tillman were given every permission to hate, but their state fell far below the regional average in the number of blacks lynched. And, although racism surely existed in the South of the 1860s, '70s and '80s, lynching didn't sweep through the region then. If, as Litwak argues, lynching was merely a device to assert "white supremacy," why did white supremacists wait more than a decade after the end of Reconstruction to start their sanguinary campaign? What, in short, accounts for lynching's strange career?

Although terribly distorted by white males' economic frustration, racist stereotypes and psychological tensions about gender and sexuality, the racial ferocity of the 1890s and the concomitant rise of lynching were in fact triggered by concrete developments: the dramatic increase in the number of black male vagrants throughout the South in the late 1880s when, owing to the deepening agricultural depression and the penetration of the market economy into the countryside, young black men were forced to leave home in search of work. These "floaters" filled the South's countryside, especially those "frontier" areas newly opened to agriculture, such as the cotton uplands of Arkansas and Mississippi and the lumber camps in the piney woods of Alabama and the Florida panhandle. There, loosened from the traditional controls of the black family and community, many led a roaming, reckless and often violent existence. Others drifted to Atlanta, Memphis and Birmingham where, finding their labor economically expendable in the increasingly industrial and commercial New South, "the street-corner, counter-value, male-worshiping society that became so very evident in black life in the nation later actually emerged . . . in the turn-of-the-century decades," as historian Joel Williamson writes.