Philip Dray - At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the archivists and staff at the Alabama State Archives, Montgomery; the Georgia State Archives, Atlanta; the University of Georgia Library, Athens (Georgia Newspaper Project; the Rebecca Felton Papers); Howard University Library, Washington, D.C.; the National Archives in Washington, D.C. (Freedmens Bureau Records, Records Group 105), and Beltsville, Maryland (Department of Justice Records, Record Group 60); the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson; and the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

I made extensive use of the resources at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, where I had access to the NAACP Papers, the Tuskegee Clippings Files, the International Labor Defense and Civil Rights Congress Papers, the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching Papers, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation Papers, and the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois. The Schomburg also houses a complete collection of The Crisis as well as the papers of A. Phillip Randolph, Paul Robeson, and Jessie Daniel Ames. The stacks and microfilm collection of the main research library of the New York Public Library were also invaluable.

Research was also conducted at the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; Clemson University Library; the Memphis Public Library; the Florida State Archives, Tallahassee; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York; the Newnan Public Library, Georgia; the Peekskill Public Library, New York; the Beinecke Rare Book Collection at Yale University (the James Weldon Johnson Papers); the Chester County Historical Society, Pennsylvania; the New Hanover County Public Library, Wilmington, North Carolina; and the Phillips County Library, Helena, Arkansas.

A handful of books by other historians were particularly helpful. Richard Browns Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of Violence and Vigilantism is a compendium of valuable data; John Egertons Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South was indispensable for gaining a sense of the South between the world wars; David Levering Lewiss W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 18681919 is a masterful introduction to Du Bois and the world of the early NAACP; Herbert Shapiros White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery provides a thoughtful chronology of the lynching era, as does Donald L. Grant in The Development of the Anti-Lynching Reform Movement in the United States, 18831932. Thomas F. Gossetts Race: The History of an Idea in America enabled my understanding of Social Darwinism and its relation to late-nineteenth-century views on race. Also useful were the articles collected in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage.

I wish to express my thanks and appreciation to Stephanie Steiker of New York City and Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger, for their friendship and assistance, and law professor Carol Steiker for valuable comments on the manuscript. Finally, this book would never have been undertaken if not for the encouragement of Elizabeth Sheinkman of the Elaine Markson Literary Agency, nor could it have been completed without the dedicated efforts of my editor at Random House, Scott Moyers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PHILIP DRAY is the co-author of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, a 1988 New York Times Notable Book. He lives in New York City.

Bibliography

Selected Books and Pamphlets

Akers, Monte. Flames After Midnight: Murder, Vengeance, and Desolation in a Texas Community. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Allen, James. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000.

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1963.

Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Baker, Lee. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 18961954. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. Reprint. New York: Dell, 1961.

Bancroft, Hubert H. Popular Tribunals, vols. 36 and 37 of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft. 39 vols. San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1888.

Bannister, Robert C. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo American Social Thought. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.

Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard. The Rise of American Civilization. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

Beck, E. M., and Stewart E. Tolnay. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 18821930. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Belford, Barbara. Brilliant Bylines: A Biographical Anthology of Notable Newspaperwomen in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Belknap, Michael R. Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Bernardi, Daniel, ed. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Berry, Mary Frances. Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America. New York: Penguin ed., 1994.

Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Macmillan, 1944.

Bowers, Claude G. The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1929.

Brisbane, Robert H. The Black Vanguard: Origins of the Negro Social Revolution 19001960. Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1970.

Brown, Richard. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of Violence and Vigilantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Brown, Sterling, ed. The Negro Caravan. New York: The Dryden Press, 1941.

Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.

Bruce, Philip A. The Plantation Negro as Freeman. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1889.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 18801930. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

, ed. Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Buck, Paul H. The Road to Reunion, 18651900. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1937.

Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Macmillan, 1988.

Capeci, Dominic J., Jr. The Lynching of Cleo Wright. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Carroll, Charles. The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of God (1900) Reprint. Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Company, 1969.

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Knopf, 1941.

Cecelski, David S., and Timothy B. Tyson. Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Civil Rights Congress. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People.