In the photograph “Frustrated Lynch Mob,” a group of about 15 boys and men fill the frame, as they stand outside a courthouse in Shelbyville, Tennessee. The mob had attempted to break into the courthouse and take E.K. Harris, an African American man accused of assaulting a 14-year-old white girl. Tennessee Governor Hill McAllister ordered the National Guard to suppress the mob and the soldiers did so successfully, and bloodily, killing four men and wounding six by gunshot or bayonet. On the left side of the image, three faces nearly cheek-to-cheek suggest that the men on the outside are pushing their way in to try to be in the picture.
At the center is G.L. Gibson, father of the 14-year old victim; he holds a gun in his right hand, pointed in the air. The few boys on the right do not look directly into the camera but up and to the right, as does an older mustachioed man whose face looks shocked by what he sees, or perhaps by the hand reaching around from behind and touching his ribs, as a man looking at his ear seems to be speaking, or whispering, something into it. He is Gibson’s brother, and is also brandishing a revolver. The space between the ear and the mouth of these two men is actually the focal center of the photograph, as all of the other faces, including that of Gibson, are at least slightly out of focus.
I consider this a lynching image, though no one was lynched in Shelbyville that night, because it recalls the fact that lynchings were not only events of ritualized violence and threat, but places where intraracial struggles occurred within white communities over who has the power to dispense justice, over whether that power should reside in the hands of government officials or in the hands of citizens, or in some combination of the two.
The mob in Shelbyville was so dangerous that the government had to resort to a caper to transport its prisoner safely from the courthouse. In “Nation Cheers as Tennessee Prevents Lynching,” a December 29, 1934 article from Literary Digest, we learn that after the judge presiding over the case declared a mistrial, The National Guard soldiers dressed Harris in one of their uniforms, “his face covered with a gas-mask,” and had him “rushed out of the building and into an automobile driven by General Ballew” to Nashville. After the troops left the scene, the mob set fire to the Shelbyville Courthouse and to “four trucks belonging to the militia.” The mayhem prompted a group of prominent local businessmen to hold “a mass-meeting” and launch “a movement to establish a vigilante committee to preserve law and order and prevent further outbreaks of racial hatred after the troops left.”
Supposedly, the mob “came from the rural sections of the country and from near-by counties,” and the townspeople of Shelbyville “were helpless against the invasion.” This account, like many accounts of Klan floggings in the South, presents the violence of lynch mobs as the act of an outside presence, a foreign invasion of lawless whites threatening the stability of a white community aligned with the virtues of due process and the rule of law. As Leon Litwack points out in his essay “Hellhounds,” some whites saw lynching and lynching images as elements that threatened to disintegrate the imagined white community, as lynching rituals seemed to portend “the destabilization of the social order and the descent of their region into barbarism.” He cites a Southern minister, who remarked in 1907: “The greater peril at this hour where outbreak and lawlessness are at the surface is not that the negro will lose his skin, but that the Anglo-Saxon will lose his soul.”
How will we know whether we have become a democracy, or a mob?