Violence, Migration and Protest Politics in Jim Crow America

As lynching concentrated in the South in the early Jim Crow era, mob violence outside the region demonstrated a broader willingness to counter perceived threats to white power and privilege.

When black southerners migrated north, due in no small part to surging racial terrorism, they encountered whites who traded in rumour-mongering and sexual anxieties that frequently proved as volatile as those of their southern counterparts. In the first decade of the twentieth century, accusations of murder and rape sparked anti-black riots in industrial centres across Ohio and Indiana. Then, in 1908, as Springfield, Illinois - final resting place of Abraham Lincoln - prepared to celebrate the Great Emancipator's hundredth birthday, white mobs tore through the city's black neighbourhoods after demanding that police turn over two black prisoners. Flush with black migrants from the South, Illinois's capital city reeled from a ‘riot' that portended a national racial crisis. In response, white and black reformers convened in New York to organise the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Citing ‘the spread of lawless attacks upon the Negro, North, South, and West', the organisers drafted a call for a national conference to address anti-black persecution. ‘No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals', Ida B. Wells-Barnett declared in an address to attendees. ‘Only under the Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible.'^{^[143]} ^{^[144]}

The NAACP's moderate organisers shied away from Wells-Barnett's condemnation of the United States' ‘National Crime', but the organisation reflected reformers' conviction that black migration had nationalised mob violence. While northern mobs lynched black victims suspected of crimes or social transgressions, the spread of large-scale ‘race riots' evoked earlier patterns of racial violence.

From white supremacist political violence in the South to anti-Chinese purges in the West, the term riot belied the organised and intentional nature of northern racial violence. As contemporary observers dissected the anatomy of these disturbances, clear patterns emerged. In Springfield and elsewhere, whites initiated violence in response to perceived threats from blacks. Frequently, rumours of black criminality and sexual predation played a crucial role in aggravating tensions and intensifying violence. While the term riot suggests randomness and spontaneity, such disturbances occurred most often during periods of economic and social turmoil. A riot involves mutual culpability and belligerence, but urban racial violence almost always occurred within black neighbourhoods. Finally, while the ‘race riot' emerged as the northern counterpart to southern mob violence, outbreaks of racial violence in the urban North provided cover for targeted killings that fit the profile of a Jim Crow lynching.

As the Great Migration blurred patterns of anti-black violence, the lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the south-western borderlands challenged the notion that black mobility had nationalised racial strife. Indeed, the fluidity and volatility of life along the southern border spurred a renewed wave of mob violence in the second decade of the twentieth century. After the discovery of the ‘Plan de San Diego', a manifesto drafted by imprisoned revolutionaries in northern Mexico and circulated on both sides of the Rio Grande, Texas Rangers and vigilantes killed hundreds and displaced thousands more in their search for suspected insurgents. The massacre in South Texas marked the bloodiest episode in a decades-long reign of terror that historians William Carrigan and Clive Webb deem ‘comparable, at least on a per capita basis, to the mob violence suffered by African Americans'. The relative inattention to anti-Mexican violence reflects the binary approach of early antilynching activists, who classified documented victims simply as black or white.

Yet mob violence against Mexicans in the United States also underscores the international and diplomatic dimensions of American racial violence. Black activist groups appealed to state and federal government institutions for action, while foreign nationals could also seek recourse through diplomatic officials. In the case of Chinese victims of riots and purges in the West, diplomatic protest resulted in damage suits. By World War I, when questions of international reputation carried unprecedented weight in Washington, consular inquiries into anti-Mexican mob violence yielded results.^{^[145]}

Global conflict had broader consequences for racial violence. War mobilisation accelerated black migration to industrial centres, where whites responded with a wave of urban unrest that dwarfed earlier race riots. Two months after the United States entered the war, in July 1917, white mobs in East St. Louis massacred as many as 200 black citizens. Just weeks before, striking aluminium plant workers had blamed black migrants for threatening their jobs and declared their city ‘a white man's town'. The following year, as white southerners fretted about an exodus of black workers and the imminent return of emboldened black veterans, the annual lynching count nearly doubled from the previous year. By Armistice Day, November 1918, the Tuskegee Institute had tallied over one hundred wartime lynchings in less than twenty months. As the nation transitioned from war to peace, a potent mix of racism and anti-radicalism fuelled a wave of violence remembered as the ‘Red Summer' of 1919. Deadly outbreaks in Chicago, Washington, DC, and a dozen additional northern cities followed earlier patterns of urban unrest, but surging mob violence across the South blurred the lines between ‘race riots' and lynchings. In the Arkansas Delta, shots exchanged between snooping white officials and attendees at a black sharecroppers' union meeting sparked a massacre that left over 200 black Arkansans dead.

Dubbed a ‘race riot' and blamed on an imminent black insurrection by white newspapers, the mass lynching echoed the fears of subversion and indiscriminate carnage still raging in South Texas.^{^[146]}

The Great War also accelerated movements against racial violence, although these campaigns encountered considerable ambivalence. A few weeks after the East St. Louis riot, the NAACP organised a Silent Protest Parade of 10,000 men, women and children in New York City. The year before, the organisation had formed an anti-lynching committee after a brutal spectacle lynching in Waco, Texas. Confronted with a wartime surge in racial violence, the NAACP multiplied its membership and lobbied the first southern-born president since Reconstruction to speak out against lynching. By contrasting Woodrow Wilson's crusade to ‘make the world safe for democracy' with white supremacist violence at home, civil rights activists hoped to compel federal intervention on behalf of vulnerable minorities. Publicity, in the form of daring investigations and searing exposes, fuelled this anti-lynching campaign. Rooted in a tradition of bearing witness to the racial violence that attended emancipation and Reconstruction, as well as the muckraking ethos of Progressive reformers, the anti-lynching crusade gained considerable momentum during World War I. Walter F. White, the blondehaired and blue-eyed son of light-skinned black Atlantans, passed as a white man to investigate lynchings in Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi during his first year as an NAACP staffer in 1918. His reports on these atrocities, which included the torture and mutilation of at least three pregnant women, pierced the veil of deflection and apologia that clouded the ‘official' white accounts of Jim Crow lynchings. White completed his undercover investigations just in time to insert his findings into the NAACP's landmark report, Thirty Years of Lynching, 1889-1918, which documented 3,229 lynchings in just over one hundred pages of print.^{^[147]}

The wartime anti-lynching push also demonstrated the growing traction of the first nationally viable civil rights campaign of the twentieth century.

With southern black migrants pouring into industrial centres across the North, urban politicians felt at least some pressure to acknowledge their concerns. In 1918, Missouri congressman Leonidas Dyer, a Republican who represented St. Louis's largest black enclaves, introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill in American history. Over the next two decades, every congressional sponsor of federal anti-lynching legislation represented a northern or western state with a growing black constituency. The following year, the NAACP followed the publication of Thirty Years of Lynching with a National Conference on Lynching. The May 1919 gathering featured former Republican presidential candidate and United States Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, as well as a carefully recruited contingent of southern white lynching critics - including ex-governors from Georgia and Alabama. The conference, which packed New York City's Carnegie Hall, reflected the national resonance of an anti-lynching movement just weeks before a surge of postwar violence revealed the national reach of a white supremacist backlash.

Red Summer and the postwar ‘return to normalcy' underscored the mixed legacy of World War I for racial violence. While the rate of documented lynchings declined steadily during the 1920s, massacres in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) and Rosewood, Florida (1923) razed entire communities and claimed dozens of black lives. The rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, inspired by the glorification of Reconstruction era racial terrorism in D. W. Griffith's 1915 blockbuster Birth of a Nation, harnessed the reactionary politics of the 1920s and mainstreamed the Invisible Empire's violent agenda. With a national membership that peaked at 3-5 million, the Klan reflected the broader appeal and brutal logic of nativist politics. New immigration restrictions favoured northern Europeans over the predominantly Catholic and Jewish arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and severely restricted or banned outright immigration from Asia and Africa.

As in the late nineteenth century, violence presaged the nativist backlash and normalised persecution in its wake. In California, attacks on Filipino, Japanese and South Asian residents spiked in the years before and after the inaction of stricter immigration policies. Yet just as the wartime spike in lynchings proceeded apace with the surging NAACP membership, the postwar nativist backlash inspired organisation and advocacy. From the reorganisation and expansion of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in the 1910s and 1920s to the founding of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) - both in 1929 - persecuted communities invoked citizenship as an antidote to racial violence.

The interwar years demonstrated the fractious and complex nature of campaigns against racial violence. LULAC, for example, distanced itself from black activists in a calculated appeal to Mexican Americans' white racial identity. As Carrigan and Webb argue, this strategic move ‘exposes the limitations and lost opportunities of anti-lynching protest'.^{^[148]} The NAACP's efforts to cultivate interracial alliances below the Mason-Dixon line bore fruit with the founding in 1930 of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), a coalition of white reformers who rejected the myth that mob violence was necessary to protect them from black rapists. Yet while anti-lynching groups shared strategies of publicity and political persuasion, they failed to coalesce around a common agenda or even a uniform definition of lynching. While the ASWPL's white, middle-class leadership appealed to local and state officials, founder Jessie Daniel Ames shied away from the NAACP's push for federal anti-lynching legislation. The NAACP also clashed with more radical black activists who challenged the organisation's anti-lynching strategy and offered a broader, more systemic definition of mob violence. When Alabama authorities condemned nine black youths to death for allegedly raping two white women in 1931, the communist-backed International Labor Defense (ILD) mounted a national fundraising and publicity campaign on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. As the ILD pamphlet Lynching Negro Children in Southern Courts suggests, radical activists framed mob violence as a weapon of economic exploitation that blurred the lines of extra-legal and state-sanctioned punishment.^{^[149]}

The New Deal era dramatised the success and shortcomings of antilynching activism. After two decades of failed attempts, and just days after a brutal blowtorch lynching of two black Mississippians grabbed national headlines, the United States House of Representatives passed a federal antilynching bill in 1937 by a three-to-one margin. Yet when the Senate convened in January of the following year, southern Democrats launched a seven-week filibuster - the longest in five decades - to kill the legislation. Invoking white supremacy and ‘local control', southern senators warned that federal intervention in lynchings would provide, as Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo put it, ‘the entering wedge to the bill of civil rights and social equality by the Negroes'. Fearful of alienating his southern base, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt avoided any public discussion of lynching. Despite congressional inaction and executive ambivalence, some activists pointed to a dramatic decline in documented lynchings as proof that protests and publicity had forced southern officials to rein in racial violence. The apparent demise of lynching posed a strategic dilemma for activists who struggled to maintain political momentum and convince the public that racial violence posed an ongoing threat. As the NAACP warned in its 1940 pamphlet Lynching Goes Underground, white vigilantes continued to kill under cover of darkness, in smaller numbers, and frequently in concert with law enforcement officials. Despite her strategic differences with the NAACP, ASWPL founder Jessie Daniel Ames echoed the warning that the ‘changing character of lynching' posed a significant threat to a nation engaged in a global struggle against fascism. ‘The aftermath of the First World War,' she warned, ‘gives evidence of what the backwash from war can bring.’^{^[150]}

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Violence, Migration and Protest Politics in Jim Crow America

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