“In the years after World War I, Florida was still a loosely policed frontier state. White Protestant mobs staged regular lynchings and beatings to intimidate black voters, drinkers and anyone else they felt threatened the social order. [. . .] [T]he Florida Klan essentially took over Putnam County in 1925. Virtually every weekend, vigilantes kidnapped men and women, black and white, and flogged them with straps or chains as punishment for some transgression. Most of the time, the raids and abductions revolved around drinking. The Klan considered enforcement of Prohibition part of its larger mission to police social, sexual and religious mores. Klansmen castrated a prominent Catholic priest at the University of Florida and then dumped him bleeding on the steps of his church. They flogged women they thought might be having affairs. Between 1924 and 1928, Klan mobs carried out as many as 80 of these nonfatal punishments in Putnam County.”
—Billy Townsend, “Ku Klux Klan Met Its Match in Putnam County in the 1920s,” Tampa Bay Times
In her essay “The Evidence of Lynching Photographs,” Shawn Michelle Smith offers a mainstream definition of lynching that informs much of the visual cultural analysis of lynching images: “murder committed by a mob of three or more.” In her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, Leigh Raiford follows Smith’s lead by focusing on white-on-black extralegal violence, remarking that “the history of lynching in the United States is a long and brutal one,” only to circumscribe her definition tightly around the years between 1882 to 1930, which she calls the “apex” of lynching in America, and highlight the fact that 88 percent of the three thousand lynching victims were African Americans. This strict definition limits the archive of “lynching” images to those depicting or referring to interracial, white-on-black, extralegal, fatal violence.
Historians have long debated the origins of the term “lynching,” and the definition of lynching has been highly contentious at various moments. The research and writings of Ida B. Wells deeply influenced the narrowing of the definition of lynching. Wells’s narrow and specific definition was important for mobilizing support for an anti-lynching movement aimed at saving black lives, and freeing black men and women from the terrorism and threat of lynching. Wells’ work clarified the way in which vigilante violence disproportionately victimized often innocent black men, an important point to make at a time when other women advocated an increase in the lynching of black men, or, in the cases of many prominent white progressives and suffragists, only hesitantly condemned lynching, or condemned it only because they thought that the barbaric and gruesome nature of lynching degraded the whites who comprised the mob.
In Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America, Manfred Berg notes that the term “lynching” probably goes back to Virginia in the late 18th century, when it mostly referred to nonlethal forms of corporal punishment. He describes floggings and hangings of white abolitionists and other whites accused of inciting slave insurrections in the antebellum South. Lerone Bennett discusses the long history of white intraracial violence in his analysis of the establishment of racial hierarchies in the colonial period. Such practices form the prehistory of white intraracial violence in the Jim Crow era. In A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature, Jacqueline Goldsby focuses on the fact that Klan violence between 1867 and 1871 functioned to intimidate African Americans but recognizes that it also functioned to “oust northern Republicans from leadership positions across the [South].”
When we assume that interracial violence was the only kind that preserved white supremacy, we only scrape the surface of Jim Crow’s overall archive of violence, one that includes images of Oren Van Loon’s shoulder branded with “KKK,” not as a mark of allegiance, but as a threat and warning to other whites (see my previous post). Nonlethal lynchings like Oren Van Loon’s are highly similar to those suffered by blacks at the hands of the KKK. In 1960, four white youths abducted a sit-in participant named Felton Turner in Houston, Texas, forced him into a car, tied him to a tree, flogged him about fifty times with a chain, and then left him hanging upside down. While Turner pretended to be unconscious in an effort to avoid being killed, his assailants carved KKK into the skin on his belly, in two different places. I recently found a digitized newspaper fragment (I am, so far, unable to locate the original publication), in which a white man bears the letters KKK on his chest after a similar assault. Such parallels in interracial and intraracial lynchings suggest that a desegregated methodology is now needed to illuminate how white supremacist violence is, and has always been, more democratic in its thuggery, its threats, its terror, than we’ve often liked to believe.