The Devil Is Watching You: Lynching and Southern Memory, 1940–1970
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THE DEVIL IS WATCHING YOU: LYNCHING AND SOUTHERN MEMORY, 1940–1970 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by MARI N. CRABTREE August 2014 ©2014 Mari N. Crabtree ii THE DEVIL IS WATCHING YOU: LYNCHING AND SOUTHERN MEMORY, 1940–1970 Mari N. Crabtree, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2014 This dissertation is a cultural history of lynching in African American and white southern memory. Mob violence had become relatively infrequent by 1940, yet it cast a long shadow over the region in the three decades that followed. By mining cultural sources, from folklore and photographs to my own interviews with the relatives of lynching victims, I uncover the ways in which memories of lynching seeped into contemporary conflicts over race and place during the long Civil Rights Era. The protest and counter-protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s garner most of the attention in discussions of racial violence during this period, but I argue that scholars must also be attentive to the memories of lynching that register on what Ralph Ellison called “the lower frequencies” to fully understand these legacies. For instance, African Americans often shielded their children from the most painful memories of local lynchings but would pass on stories about the vengeful ghosts of lynching victims to express their disgust with these unpunished crimes. By interpreting these memories through the lenses of silence, haunting, violence, and protest, I capture a broad range of legacies, from the subtle to the overt, that illustrate how and why lynching maintained its stranglehold on southern culture. “The Devil is Watching You” offers what I call the “blues sensibility” as an alternative to the Freudian sense of “working through” that dominates the literature on historical trauma. If the blues are, as Ellison defined them, “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism,” then many black southerners infused a blues element into their memories of lynching. Freud defined psychological recovery as taking control over traumatic memories through narration, but African Americans who spoke out too directly could face violent reprisals. In the enduring spirit of the blues, blacks often confronted these painful memories under the cloak of metaphor and irony to transcend the past, even if just for a spell. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Mari N. Crabtree is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston. She completed her A.B. in Black Studies at Amherst College in 2003, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History at Cornell University in 2010 and 2014 respectively. Her research and teaching interests include African American cultural history, African American literature, memory and racial violence, and the blues. iv To the survivors, and to the victims, may they rest in peace. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If the blues have taught me anything, it is that despite coming to the tragic realization that graduate school, like life itself, is a lowdown dirty shame, we survive and we endure and we slip the yoke and, even in Ithaca, we see the sun shine in our backdoors now and again. Living with a dissertation about lynching for four years, I sometimes teetered on the brink of despair. The material I used to craft a narrative about memory and racial violence was awful and all too real, and I would not have made it out of these blues alive had it not been for the many people who supported and challenged and encouraged me along the way. I am grateful to the brave and generous souls who patiently slogged through ragged drafts and endured gutwrenching stories about lynching and its aftermath, all for my benefit. The dissertation—its narrative voice, its arguments, and its analysis—changed for the better because of their careful and critical readings. For their guidance and vast knowledge of African American history and literature—and for their prodding and critiques— I am grateful to my adviser, Nick Salvatore, and my committee members, Robert L. Harris, Jr., Kenneth McClane, and Russell Rickford. I would also like to thank the members of the four (or was it five? six?) writing groups I shared my work with over the past few years: Catherine Biba, Brian Cuddy, Sarah Ensor, Abigail Fisher, Melissa Gniadek, Sinja Graf, Kate Horning, Maeve Kane, Amy Kohout, Peter Lavelle, Nicole Maskiell, Daegan Miller, Trais Pearson, Jackie Reynoso, and Josi Ward. I also must extend my gratitude to the graduate students and faculty who critiqued my work at Cornell’s Graduate History Colloquium, in particular the faculty conveners who facilitated these invaluable discussions and commented on my writing: Ed Baptist, Ernesto Bassi, Duane Corpis, Ray Craib, Mostafa Minawi, Jon Parmenter, and Aaron Sachs. Over the past seven years, several other faculty members in Cornell’s History Department have supported my work, including Judith Byfield, Derek Chang, Durba Ghosh, Fred Logevall, Mary Beth Norton, and, most especially, Margaret Washington who was a committee member all but in name. The extended research trips to archives and lynching sites across the American South would not have been possible without generous research funding and travel grants from the Society for the Humanities, the Graduate School, the Cornell University American Studies Department, the Cornell University History Department, the Texas Collection at Baylor University, and the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture at Duke University. I am also deeply indebted to the library staffs, from directors and archivists to reference librarians and students who retrieved boxes upon boxes of documents for me at the following institutions: the Auburn Avenue Research Library (in the Atlanta Public Library system), Baylor University, Cornell University, the Dallas Historical Society, Duke University, Emory University, the Library of Congress Folklife Center, the Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the National Archives, the University of Georgia, the University of Mississippi, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of Southern Mississippi. As important as it is for historians to brave the dust and paper cuts of the archives, the lifeblood of this project springs from the deeply personal and at times heartwrenching stories I recorded in oral histories. The people who trusted me—a stranger with a notebook and a digital recorder— with their stories deserve my deepest gratitude of all: Audrey Grant, Robert Hall, and Willie Head, Jr. of Brooks and Lowndes Counties in Georgia (as well as Mark George for inviting me vi to participate in the Mary Turner Project); Clarence Hunter, Jesse Pennington and James Reed of Jackson, Mississippi; Patricia Chisolm, Lester Gibson, and Joe Nesbitt of Waco, Texas; Johnny B. Thomas of Glendora, MS (as well as Tracy Rosebud for giving me a tour of the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center); and Monroe Saffold of Chicago. Our conversations and their kindness inspired me when my spirits flagged and will stay with me forever. I began my journey as an academic in the presence of two incredible professors in Amherst College’s Black Studies Department, Jeffrey Ferguson and David Blight. If I may borrow a phrase from a lynching survivor I interviewed, Jeff and David are by nature and by spiritual occupation teachers and writers. (Mr. Head told me that “by nature and by spiritual occupation I’m a farmer.”) Jeff introduced me to the likes of Nathan Huggins, James Baldwin, C.L.R. James, George Fredrickson, Franz Fanon, and Ralph Ellison—thinkers whose ideas compose the intellectual foundations of my work—and he was the first person who convinced me to think of myself as a writer. David, too, inspired my writing with his rich and seamless narratives, and it is to David that I owe my curiosity about the ways memory shapes American identity and the American historical narrative. More than just a glimpse of their mentoring is visible in this dissertation. I would be remiss if I neglected to thank my friends in the English and Romance Studies Departments who adopted me as one of their own: Kaelin Alexander, Teddy Bates (honorary grad student), Liz Blake, Matt Buscemi, Adhaar Desai, Nick Friedman, Mike Reyes, Ben Tam, Christine Yao, and Zac Zimmer. They made the bleakest of Ithaca winters feel warm and bright with their laughter and healthy appetites for my cooking. Lastly, I would like to thank my mother Eiko, my father Benjamin (the other Dr. Crabtree), my brother Martin, and my sister Christina for instilling in me the stubbornness necessary to finish the dissertation and for helping me weather the storm with good food and love. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Biographical Sketch iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 1. Anatomy of a Lynching 13 2. Silence 49 3. Haunting 100 4. Violence 139 5. The Blues Sensibility 173 Bibliography 193 1 Introduction The novelist has much to offer the historian. A dexterity with language, certainly, but also a gift for unlocking the mysteries of the human condition through characters and stories that uncover something more elemental than even the most thoughtful reconstructions of the past can. For both reasons I am indebted to the writer James Baldwin whose short story, “Going to Meet the Man,” inspired this project. Baldwin, with his characteristic eloquence and incisiveness, captured in a mere twenty-one pages many of the social, cultural, and psychological legacies of lynching that lingered in the American South for decades.