The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching, Jessie Daniels
1. The Death Penalty, Racism and the
American Practice of Lynching
A RACISM REVIEW REPRINT
Part of the RBG Troy Anthony Davis End the Racist-Classist Death Penalty Studies Collection
Historical Lynching &
Contemporary Death Penalty
Patterns
What’s lynching? As the leading
organization fighting against
lynching, the NAACP developed a
very specific definition of lynching
that includes:
there must be evidence that
someone was killed;
the killing must have
occurred illegally;
three or more persons must
have taken part in the
killing; and
the killers must have
claimed to be serving
justice or tradition.
This definition remains useful to
researchers today, including the
scholars working on Project HAL:
Historical American Lynching
Data Collection Project.
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The Death Penalty, Racism and the American
Practice of Lynching
September 26, 2011
By Jessie Daniels
Source: http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2011/09/23/death-penalty-racism-american-practice-
lynching/#more-7762
“A man was lynched yesterday” read the banner that flew outside the NAACP headquarters at 69
Fifth Avenue in 1938. Some 73 years later, such a banner is still relevant as the American
practice of lynching continues in ways new and old in the 21st century.
(Image source: Library of Congress, NAACP)
On Wednesday, in what the typically reserved New York Times called “a grievous wrong,” the
State of Georgia executed Troy Anthony Davis at 11:08 pm. Albert Camus observed that
“capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders,” and that was never more true than this
week when Georgia proceeded with the killing of Mr. Davis in spite of serious doubts about his
guilt and in spite of national and international media attention about the case, and an outcry from
various celebrities and luminaries including President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI.
Much of the outrage is that there was simply too much doubt (as the Twitter hashtag
#toomuchdoubt suggested) about Davis’ guilt. There was no physical evidence linking Davis to
the crime for which he was convicted, and 7 of the 9 witnesses recanted their testimony. If
Georgia ends up exonerating Davis, it wouldn’t be the first time that state later recanted it’s
prosecution of an African American accused of killing a white person, but it may take
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awhile. Sixty years after Lena Baker, an African American woman, was convicted – and
executed – for killing a white man, the State of Georgia exonerated her.
The other part of the outrage about this case has to do with the systemic racism of the death
penalty: Davis was African American and the victim in this case, Mark MacPhail, was white
(and an off-duty cop). Some have even referred to the execution of Davis as a “legal lynching,”
an especially ironic phrase given that the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which
refused to stay the execution with no dissents from the bench, not even from Justice Thomas,
who once claimed to be a victim of “high-tech lynching” because of Anita Hill’s charges of
sexual harassment. But, perhaps this is just hyperbole. What is lynching? Is there any evidence
that links the American practice of lynching to the death penalty?
Historical Lynching & Contemporary Death Penalty Patterns
What’s lynching? As the leading organization fighting against lynching, the NAACP developed
a very specific definition of lynching that includes: 1) there must be evidence that someone was
killed; 2) the killing must have occurred illegally; 3) three or more persons must have taken part
in the killing; and 4) the killers must have claimed to be serving justice or tradition. This
definition remains useful to researchers today, including the scholars working on Project HAL:
Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project.
Race & Lynching. The peak period of lynching in the U.S. was from 1882-1930, and estimates
are that some 4,742 people have been lynched in the U.S. (through 1968). What not everyone
realizes is that lynching has taken place in almost every state in the U.S., and victims have been
of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, from 1882-1886, whites made up a
majority of those lynched, almost exclusively at the hands of other whites. This began to change
in 1886 which was something of a tipping point. In 1886, 64 whites and 74 African Americans
were lynched, but by 1898, 101 lynching victims were black compared to just 19 whites; and by
1919 and the notorious “Red Summer” there were only 7 whites lynched compared to 76
blacks. The context for this historical period is, of course, the response to the Reconstruction Era
following the Civil War. After some progress by African Americans following the war, whites
launched an insurgent movement to reassert white supremacy. From 1890 to 1908, white-elite-
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dominated state legislatures passed disfranchising constitutions that effectively barred most
African Americans (and many poor whites) from voting. This legal disfranchisement was
reinforced by the extra-legal pattern of lynching.
Geography of Lynching. During its peak, historical lynching followed certain geographic, racial
patterns. Lynching was more common in the South, not necessarily because white Southerners
were more racist than their Northern counterparts, but rather that is where most African
Americans lived. However, a county-by-county analysis of the HAL data looking at percentage
of population that was African American and the rate of reported lynchings suggests that
percentage of population alone was not enough to predict where lynchings might occur. Yet,
when African Americans began to leave the South in significant numbers with the Great
Migration, the number of lynchings began to decline. Historical lynching patterns also suggest a
systemic racism that intersects with class and gender.
Class, Gender & Lynching. In terms of class, fluctuations in the market economy affected the
rate of lynching. Beck and Tolnay found that lynching was “an integral element of an
agricultural economy that required a large, cheap, and docile labor force” which was a
continuation of a plantation economy (“The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for
Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks,” American Sociological Review, 55 (4, August, 1990):526-
539. Further, Beck and Tolnay found that there was an inverse correlation between the price of
cotton and lynching, such that as cotton prices fell, the number of lynchings rose.
African American women were lynched while the predominant pattern was that African
American men were the primary targets of the practice of lynching. Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
journalist and activist, wrote The Red Record in 1895 about lynching and noted the class and
gender dynamics that were evident at the time. Wells-Barnett first got involved in the anti-
lynching crusade after she witnessed the lynching of an African American grocer, seen as too
economically successful by white citizens. Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Revolt Against
Chivalry also patriarchal racial and gendered orders that were shored up by the practice of
lynching. Wells-Barnett, and 100 years later Hall, both note the way that the “defense of white
womanhood” was used as a justifying ideology for lynching black men, often falsely accused of
rape.
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Over this span of this reign of terror, the most conservative estimate is that 3,445 African
Americans were lynched by whites; other estimates, like that of Wells-Barnett are much higher,
near 10,000. According to one researcher, lynching was an “historically significant, but
statistically rare event.” In many ways, this statistical assessment diminishes the reality of
lynching’s effectiveness as a weapon of terrorism used by whites against blacks.
Terrorism is always a “statistically rare event” but that doesn’t make it any less effective as a
tool of domination, in fact it may work in quite the opposite way. So, while historical lynching
wasn’t exclusively a racist act, it was used as a weapon of racial domination especially after
1886.
Legal Execution, Legal Lynching?
The execution of Troy Davis has a lot of people using the term “legal lynching” to describe that
heinous act. Typically, when people use this term, it’s meant to convey the injustice done when
a person who may not be guilty is executed by the state, as in the book Legal Lynching by Senior
and Junior Jesse Jackson. The folks at The Innocence Project work on getting wrongful
convictions overturned and this is important. Beyond wrongful convictions, there are other
similarities between historical lynching and the contemporary death penalty.
Race & the Death Penalty. A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale
University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death
penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white. In
addition, killers of white victims are treated more severely than people who kill people of
color when it comes to deciding what charges to bring.
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(Source: Amnesty International, Death Penalty & Race)
Geography & the Death Penalty. States that sentence the most people to death also tend to be
the states that had the most historical lynchings. Researchers found that the number of death
sentences were higher in states with a history of lynchings. The findings showed a clear link
between the number of lynchings, the proportions of African Americans in the states, and the
number of death sentences. This research also found that the number of death sentences increases
in states after a growth in the population of Blacks. But the number of death sentences begins to
go down once the population of African Americans reaches a threshold of about 20 to 22 percent
(David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, Stephanie L. Kent, “Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and
Death Sentences,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Aug., 2005):656-677).
Poverty & the Death Penalty. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed that the
death penalty was unfair to the poor (among several other groups). And indeed, the death penalty
is disproportionately applied to those who are poor. Of course, the death penalty is an extension
of the broader carceral system that snares the poor in this society, as Jeffrey Reiman of American
University has pointed out in multiple editions of his book, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor
Get Prison.
Gender & the Death Penalty. In a study by Professor Steven Shatz of the University of San
Francisco Law School and Naomi Shatz of the New York Civil Liberties Union suggests gender
influences the death penalty, and that this bias has roots in the historic notion of chivalry. In a
review of 1,300 murder cases in California between 2003 and 2005, the authors found gender
disparities with respect to both defendants and victims in the underlying crime. The authors
concluded “the death penalty is imposed on women relatively infrequently and that it is
disproportionately imposed for the killing of women. Thus, the death penalty in California
appears to be applied in accordance with stereotypes about women’s innate abilities, their roles
in society, and their capacity for violence. Far from being gender neutral, the California death
penalty seems to allow prejudices and stereotypes about violence and gender, chivalric values, to
determine who lives and who dies.” The researchers go on to note that “[b]ecause women are
stereotyped as weak, passive, and in need of male protection, prosecutors and juries seem
reluctant to impose the death penalty upon them.” On the other hand, in cases where the victim
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was a woman, the death sentence rate was 10.9%, seven times the rate when men were victims
(1.5%).
Taken together, there are a lot of similarities between historical lynching and the “legal
lynching” of state-sponsored executions.
But what about those “extra-legal” killings? Surely those have ended are no longer part of the
contemporary patterns. Yes and no.
Contemporary Lynchings & Capital Punishment
There were actually two executions on Wednesday of this week. The other took place in Texas
where Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for his part in the dragging death of James Byrd
in 1998. In case you don’t remember or aren’t familiar with the case, Brewer and two other
white men kidnapped the 49-year-old James Byrd one night just outside Jasper, Texas. Then,
they chained Byrd by the ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for 3 ½ miles
down a country road until he was dead. Prosecutors said the crime, which they described it as
one of the most vicious hate crimes in U.S. history, was intended to promote Brewer’s fledgling
white supremacist organization. During his 1999 trial, they called Brewer a racist psychopath.
Today, we use the term “hate crime” but we really should be connecting these kinds of acts to
the historical pattern of lynching. The killing of Mr. Byrd certainly fits the definition of
“lynching” and is similar to those in the historical pattern of lynching.
The real anomaly here is that Brewer, who is white, was sentenced to death for killing a black
man.
More recently, in August of this year, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old auto plant worker,
was standing in a parking lot, near his car two carloads of white teenagers drove up and attacked
him. The white teens allegedly beat Anderson repeatedly, yelled racial epithets, including “White
Power!” according to witnesses. The attackers then climbed into their large Ford F250 green
pickup truck, floored the gas, and drove the truck right over Anderson, killing him instantly. The
brutal attack was caught on videotape. All the evidence suggests that those who attacked Mr.
Anderson will not face capital punishment because they are white and Mr. Anderson was black.
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(Subsequent reports have also identified Mr. Anderson as gay and living with a long-term partner
of 20 years, societal homophobia combined with racism makes even a conviction in this case
questionable.)
It’s these “grotesque levels of racial bias” that affect the capital punishment system and part of
what prompted an earlier Supreme Court to rule that the death penalty could not be applied fairly
so should be stopped. The current Supreme Court has not revealed any similar heroes for our
time.
The End of the Death Penalty
Some have suggested that the intense level of attention surrounding the execution of Mr. Davis
will mean the end of the death penalty. I hope those predictions come true, I really do.
Yet, when I see the cheering from a crowd over people dying – dying by state-sponsored lethal
injection or the slower death by neoliberalism from a lack of health care – it frankly makes me
question how strong our collective political will might be for ending the death penalty.
To me, there’s no doubt that there are people who’ve committed heinous crimes that may not
deserve to live – Brewer comes to mind for his lynching of James Byrd – but I don’t think that
state-sponsored killing, as Camus observed – the most premeditated of murders – solves
anything. In fact, it makes us all worse for its existence.
It’s really about what kind of a society we want to be. From what I sit, I think we need to do
better, much better, than state-sponsored death.
The Death Penalty, Racism and the American Practice of Lynching Jessie Daniels