Veneer of civilization: Southern lynching, memory, and African-American identity, 1882--1940

This dissertation departs from the traditional approach to lynching that emphasizes how southern white society's personal concepts of honor and supremacy fostered a culture of lynching and a white collective identity. By focusing on the victims of lynching as opposed to the perpetrators, this work examines how blacks led a successful anti-lynching campaign, co-authored a black national reputation, influenced the national discourse of lynching, and connected a legacy of white entitlement to lynching. In the black collective memory of lynching, white southerners' interpretation of the intent of written laws nurtured a culture of unwritten laws, which generated so-called provocations that justified black lynching.; This dissertation uses the anti-lynching/rape dialogue articulated by early black activists to examine how lynching fostered a post-bellum shared black identity and collective memory of white-on-black violence. In the black discourse, each new lynching burned into a collective memory that made lynching victims martyrs because they were examples of the malleable nature of the law when it was subject to white interpretation and execution.; This dissertation chronicles the genealogy of the black anti-lynching/rape discourse. Chapter 1 argues that slavery was the progenitor of lynching. Black interpretations of slave laws, white-on-black violence, and slave patrols support this argument. Chapter 2 and 3 deconstruct the black argument that whites justified lynching in three stages: race riots, black domination, and black-on-white rape. In their discourse, blacks were more Christian-like, survivors, and strong critics of the anti-democratic behavior of whites. Also, blacks inverted the white rape/lynch narrative by discussing the sexual exploitation of black women, the biased intent of anti-miscegenation laws, and incidents involving consensual relationships between white women and black men. Chapter 4 examines the successful organization and effectiveness of early black anti-lynching activists and their organizations.; Overall, in examining the black collective memory of lynching, this dissertation provides an explanation as to why some contemporary blacks, such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who alleged during his 1991 confirmation hearing that he was a victim of a "high-tech lynching," evoke lynching as a metaphor for injustice when they desire to tap into the black collective memory of distrust and suspicion when whites interpret the established law and fear black competition.