But this was not their only political function. Lynchings were, to be sure, acts of terror instrumental to securing white social dominance in the aftermath of emancipation.
In this article, I examine public spectacle lynchings as rituals of people-making. Popular sovereignty did not serve an exclusively justificatory role, however. Du Bois, “lynching” signified popular legitimation beyond the law. In other words, prior to the sustained campaigns of antilynching activists such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. It is this fact that distinguishes lynching, on the one hand, from assassination and murder, and, on the other hand, from insurrection and open warfare” (Cutler Reference Cutler1905, 276). James Elbert Cutler, who produced the first scholarly monograph on lynching while it was still ravaging the American South in 1905, placed the issue of popular authorization center-stage: “it is not too much to say,” he wrote, “that popular justification is the sine qua non of lynching. As the historian Christopher Waldrep has observed, for much of American history, “plausibly calling something a lynching compellingly argue that the violence had popular support” (Waldrep Reference Waldrep2002, 8). Indeed, the term lynching was historically and semantically bound to the idea of popular authorization. In their attempts to authorize these acts of extra-judicial execution, lynch mobs called on the language of popular sovereignty, arguing that, as representatives of the people, they retained the right to wield public violence against individuals they deemed to be beyond the protections of due process. Between 18, white mobs across the American South lynched 4,075 African Americans-more than one person per week for seventy-three years (Equal Justice Initiative 2017).
0 kommentar(er)
