The Killing Fields

Out of an understandable, if misguided, concern that to grapple with the issue of black crime could be construed as condoning lynching, historians have ignored for too long the indisputable fact that, as Monroe Work, the black sociologist and associate of Du Bois, concluded in 1913: "the number of lynchings reached its highest point about the same period that Negro crime reached its highest point." Of course, correlation isn't the same as causation. Also, it must be said that an indeterminate sizeable number of lynching victims did not commit the crimes of which they were accused and, by definition, none was found guilty by properly constituted authorities (whose ability to carry out justice was suspect at best). Still, Litwak, for instance, is evasive on the relationship between black crime and lynching. He asserts that "many of the offenses [allegedly] committed by blacks would have been regarded as relatively trivial if committed by whites." This is true as far as it goes--and indisputably Southern black men could be lynched for any offense, or no offense. Nevertheless, more than two-thirds of black lynching victims were accused of the capital crimes of murder and rape (in the 1880s and '90s when the lynching fever took hold, 73% of black victims were accused of those crimes). Significantly, in cases in which blacks lynched blacks and whites lynched whites, lynching victims were also accused of rape and murder about twice as often as of lesser offenses.

Moreover, Litwak asserts that Southern whites' fear of black men raping white women "was only a rationalization" for lynching. But as Ayers observes, late 19th and early 20th century white Southern newspapers and diaries are "filled with sincere fear and anger, not with fabricated excuses to buttress the status quo." White supremacy may explain how the widespread lynching of black men could take place, but it doesn't explain why it did. Given the ferocity of the lynching epidemic, many have looked to psycho-sexual explanations, in which black men represented for white men a sexual liberation that they wanted for themselves but couldn't achieve without violating their professed morality. Tortured by their frustration, white men projected their own forbidden fantasies on black men and symbolically eradicated those desires by lynching those men. There's much truth in such an interpretation, but ascribing the relationship between rape and lynching simply and exclusively to warped white psychology overlooks the specific crimes which precipitated lynchings. Again, many rapes were undoubtedly fabricated, were perceived assaults where none existed or were no more sinister than a sexual advance, but in many cases there was ample evidence of assault, and women made direct and explicit accusations.