The Killing Fields

Lynching should be unequivocally condemned, but at the same time the assumption that, as some have argued, nearly all white women who made accusations of rape were hysterical, sexually frustrated or lying doesn't, and shouldn't, sit well with modern readers. Moreover, psychological interpretations fail to account for regional variations in lynching or its ebb and flow over time. Whites called the rape of white women by black men--the crime that fueled the white South's lynching frenzy--the "new crime." Whereas Southern whites had long feared that blacks would rise in a massive insurrection, they did not fear that they would rise individually and sporadically to rape white women. It was only in the late 1880s that this crime and its punishment commanded a new and tremendously magnified attention. White sexual psychology unquestionably played a large role in the lynching frenzy, but there is every reason to assume that, with the dramatic rise in violent black crime (including the number of black men legally convicted of raping black and white women) and the sudden emergence of what Du Bois called "the new Negro criminal," the "new crime" was--at least in part--a reality.

It's clear from their diaries that many white Southern men did not think it farfetched that furious black men would attack the most vulnerable among the most privileged race, and there is reason to assume that this motive partly fueled the "new crime." After all, writing of assaults on white women in 1892, Frederick Douglass warned: "When men sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind" (and, of course, in a later period such black writers as Eldridge Cleaver, LeRoi Jones and Frantz Fanon asserted, notoriously, that the rape of a white woman was an act of racial retribution). Given late 19th and early 20th century Southern men's self-definition as the protectors of women, dispensers of justice and guardians of communal values, the "new crime" instigated a virulent response that transformed every black man into potential quarry. As a perceptive white Southerner wrote of rape: "It is with this crime that lynching begins; here and here only could the furious mob spirit break through the resisting wall of law and order. Once through, it does not stop. But it is only because lynching for rape is excused that lynching for any other crime is ever attempted." That savage spirit which "broke through" in the late 1880s wasn't subdued until the 1940s.