Concerning lynchings, the following is from an article of mine on "Music Making History" published in Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed.,
Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies. Carolina Academic Press, 1997.
Winthrop D. Jordan (1974) has shown that Europeans were disposed to see blacks in the image of the emotionality and
sensuality they were rejecting in themselves. In the late Renaissance blacks were likened to beasts; in Bacon's New Atlantis
(1624) the "Spirit of Fornication" was depicted as "a little foul ugly Ęthiop" (p. 19). Jordan notes that Englishmen "were
especially inclined to discover attributes in savages which they found first, but could not speak of, in themselves" (22-23; see
also Gilman, 1985). Thus before the European settlers of North American had any substantial contact with Africans, they had
a lascivious place prepared in their minds through which to understand and interact with them. Shakespeare's Caliban was to
be a lens through which the people of a whole continent would be viewed and interpreted.
Joel Williamson has taken this psychological line in examining the lynchings which once plagued this country, especially in the
two decades straddling the turn of the century (Williamson, 1984, 117 ff.; see also Brundage, 1993; Du Bois, 1940, pp. 730,
747, 772; Fredrickson, 1988, pp. 172-182; Harrington, 1992, pp. 157-162). Many of the victims were black men often
accused of some sexual offense against a white woman; in some cases the offense was real, in many it was not. Further,
many of these lynchings were extravagant public exhibitions with wide-spread participation. That is, it wasn't a matter of a
few drunken thugs breaking into the jail at night to get the offender--perhaps with the tacit approval of the sheriff--and then
hanging him from a tree for all to see in the morning. Sometimes lynching preparations would go on for days, with newspaper
articles about the alleged crime and the impending punishment, and with railroads offering special excursion fares to take
people to the scene. The actual lynching would then take place in broad daylight, with thousands of people in attendance,
vendors attending to the needs of these thousands, with photographers and reporters recording it all for posterity. People
might take fingers of the victim as souvenirs. It was not unusual for tens or hundreds of men each to fire a bullet into the
hanging body or bodies. Such public exhibitions seem much like the public tortures and executions of medieval Europe and
obviously had the full approval of the local and regional community, with at least the tacit approval of national authorities.
Williamson concludes that African-American males were being used as scapegoats for European-American discontent and
that, while some of that discontent was certainly generated by current social displacement, some also stemmed from sexual
and emotional repression [13].
The thrust of these various studies is the same: racists are punishing others for their own sins. Western civilization has not
created adequate means for directly incorporating a satisfying range of human emotion and behavior into its cultural practices.
Consequently, it has been forced into racism as a one means of dealing with the resulting repression and self-hatred.
For a good study of lynchings see Brundage, W. F. (1993) Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press. This book covers every lynching in Georgia and Virginia for which we have any record during that period,
including the lynching of whites. In many cases it is not clear that the victims committed any crimes whatsoever. Interestingly enough,
even if you take newspaper accounts and other records at face value, the number of blacks lynched for rape is not as large as people
thought it to be.