Guy Lancaster - Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840-1950

GUY LANCASTER

The cedar stump to which Ed Coy was burned has been manufactured into cuff buttons.

Arkansas Gazette, March 11, 1892

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

While researching my previous book on racial cleansing in Arkansas, I spent many hours in front of various microfilm readers, scanning years and years of newspaper headlines hoping to catch sight of some reported event that would explain the dramatic loss of black population in the county in question between two census surveys. As weeks of state and local history flitted by my blurry eyes, I hit a number of stretches in the newspaper record wherein it seemed some new racial atrocity, or rumored race riot, was occurring on a near-daily basis. Headlines shouted the impromptu execution of yet another unfortunate individual, and the pursuit of another anticipated sacrifice by a frenzied posse, and more, and yet more. It proved difficult to pass over these many events and stay focused upon the subject at handspecifically the expulsion of African Americans, a phenomenon that only occasionally overlapped with that of lynching and other mob activitiesamid this wider ecosystem of violence. And I am not the only person who has been taken aback by sheer ubiquity of atrocity reported; as the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas once recalled, Some years ago, my friend Bob Lancaster and I started to work on a book that would be a collection of articles from the 172 years of the old Arkansas Gazette that would catch the flavor of the Gray Lady and the Lynching could be both the dramatic atrocity gleefully explicated under lurid headlines and the everyday occurrence that needed no further elaboration.

Much of the public interest when it comes to lynching centers upon the number of victims. While scholars are also concerned with gender and patriarchy, law and order, memory and forgetting, and much more, quantifiable numbers do help us understand the dynamics that underlie lynching both through time and across geographic regions. If more lynchings occurred in one place than another, or more in one year than another, questions arise that help people to understand the shifting nature of mob violence. In his 1999 doctoral dissertation, Racial Violence in Arkansas: Lynchings and Mob Rule, 18601930, Richard Buckelew documented 318 victims of lynching in Arkansas, 231 of whom were black.), which began with data collected over a period of thirty years by Tolnay and E. M. Beck and has since been expanded. The definition of lynching employed by these researchers is that developed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1940, which many scholars use and which requires the following: there is evidence that a person was killed; the killing was illegal; at least three people were involved in killing the victim; and the killing was justified with reference to tradition, justice, or honor. This inventory currently records 317 lynching victims in Arkansas between the years 1877 and 1950but, as noted, it is being maintained and supplemented as additional information arrives.

Of course, as partially demonstrated by the various figures given for the body count, what constitutes a lynching remains quite open to debate, and the definition of lynching has shifted over time, as Christopher Waldrep ably documented in his 2002 book, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. The word reportedly had its origin in the impromptu trials and punishment of individuals suspected of treason during the Revolutionary War but soon came to apply, by the early nineteenth century, to the whipping of miscreants on the ever-advancing American frontier, typically by people representing the broader community, outside the legal process. The 1835 execution of In fact, Republican leaders worked hard not to describe Klan violence as lynching lest they grant it the authority of the community; as Waldrep goes on to explain,

Understanding why racial violence in the Reconstruction era was not called lynching helps explain the difference between Reconstruction and the lynching era. Reconstruction was a revolutionary time, a time when power as expressed in language was genuinely up for grabs. Once the white population seized power and rallied itself into a racial bloc, then, and only then, could they kill confident that they had the support of what they defined as the community. And they understood a community-sanctioned killing to be a lynching.