The Killing Fields

Most lynchings took place precisely in those areas in the South where many of these wandering black males ended up. The Gulf plain and cotton uplands had by far the highest rate of lynchings, and these areas combined extremely low rural population densities with by far the highest rates of black transiency in the South. Whereas in the Piedmont and low country, blacks were likely to know whites as neighbors and shared ties with them going back several generations, in these other areas most blacks and whites were strangers to one another, and "floaters," both black and white, kindled fear and hostility. The question of the relationship between lynching and transiency has been studied only using a limited sample, but that study found that all of the black lynching victims whose length of residence could be determined were newcomers. In regions with scattered farms, few towns and weak law enforcement, murders had always been frequent and murderers rarely punished. This setting fueled the insecurity and suspicion that fed lynching and also lacked the few checks that served to dissuade would-be lynchers elsewhere.

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The relationship between black criminality and lynching in the South has been both exaggerated and avoided. Until well into the 20th century, far too many Southern whites excused the barbaric and criminal lynching of black men with the specious argument that public execution was the best deterrent against black crime--especially rape. Largely in reaction to this indefensible position, many modern historians have chosen to ignore the rise of black crime in the South altogether, even though it can help us understand how the very racism they justifiably excoriate played itself out. Denying black criminality betrays a curiously rosy view of the effects of oppression (and it is therefore ironic that often historians who conspicuously champion social justice do so). A more clear-eyed assessment of the consequences of oppression comes from a runaway slave who wrote that it "makes its victims lying and mean; for which vices it reproaches them, and uses them to argue that they deserve no better fate." Historians' disregard of black criminality also neglects the awful truth that, as Williamson makes clear, for all the Southern blacks killed by whites in lynchings and riots and broken in the convict camps in the swamps and forests, "most blacks died by black hands." (That many frustrated and dispirited black men were violent is hardly surprising; they were, after all, conforming to prominent features of Southern culture as a whole: The South was a notoriously violent place where murder rates among whites, as well as blacks, were by far the highest in the country and among the highest in the world.)