On the 12 April 1899, 24-year-old black American Sam Hose asked his employer – Alfred Cranford – in Georgia if he could have some time off work and an advance in payment to visit his sick mother. The two men ended up arguing, and Cranford drew his pistol and threatened to kill Hose, who retaliated by flinging his axe, hitting Cranford in the head, and killing him instantly. Hose fled.
The following day, newspapers ran the story. Some reported that Hose had also sexually assaulted Cranford’s wife and even tried to murder their baby.
The Atlanta Constitution informed its readers that “When Hose is caught he will either be lynched and his body riddled with bullets or he will be burned at the stake”.
It continued that ‘”There have been whisperings of burning at the stake and of torturing the fellow, and so great is the excitement, and so high the indignation, that this is among the possibilities”.
The search for Hose continued for the next few days. Four days later the Atlanta Constitution reported, “The residents have shown no disposition to abandon the search in the immediate neighborhood of Palmetto; their ardor has in no degree cooled, and if Sam Hose is brought here by his captors he will be publicly burned at the stake as an example to members of his race who are said to have been causing the residents of this vicinity trouble for some time”.
The editor even offered a $500 reward for Hose’s capture.
One local said that “If Hose is on earth I’ll never rest easy until he’s caught and burned alive. And that’s the way all of us feel”.
A few days later, on the 23rd, officers found and arrested Hose. Instead of taking him into custody, they took him to the nearby town of Newman where a crowd was already gathering.
A special train was organised to transport visitors from all over the state to join the growing mob.
It was a Sunday, so most of the visitors went from church in the morning to the lynching of Hose in the afternoon. The crowd grew to around 200 men, women, and children.
A witness reported afterwards that: “After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying the torch, they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face. While some in the crowd plunged knives into the victim’s flesh, others watched ‘‘with unfeigning satisfaction’’ (as one reported noted) the contortions of Sam Hose’s body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets, and rupturing his veins. Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over the souvenirs”.
What caused such pride in violence? Between 1889 and 1930 there were around 3,700 known lynchings in the US. The perpetrators ranged from single people to small mobs to huge crowds of 15,000. The reasons given were broad. While most were accused of murder or rape, many were lynched for simply being rude, for arguing, for taking the wrong job or having the wrong beliefs.
In 1935, for example, a mob lynched Rubin Stacy for frightening a white woman. In the days following his death, people from across the state travelled to see Stacy’s body.
One photo – this one – shows a young girl not looking traumatised, afraid, but excited.
When an anti-lynching advocate was travelling to visit the site of a lynching he came across three children walking to school near the site. They asked him if they were going to the place where “the n****s had been killed?”. They then described the scene, in Whites words, “animatedly, almost as joyously as though the memory were of Christmas morning or the circus”, talking about the “fun they had burning the n****s”.
Like during Holocaust, as I explored in a previous video, these were ‘ordinary men’ and women, and often even children.
And as in my exploration of the psychology of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, I want to try and understand the factors that led both to the violence of lynchings, but also ask how ordinary Americans justified their racism more broadly.
In doing so, the purpose is to search for a kind of moral and cultural vaccine, an inoculation, that learns from some of the worst events of the past, to try to understand how we can recognise the warning signs in the present, and guide us to a better future.
First, a quick history.
After the southern states lost the Civil War in 1865, congress passed the 13th amendment to the constitution, abolishing slavery and freeing around 4 million slaves.
The atmosphere, for many, quickly turned from a celebratory one to a difficult one. The economics of the cotton fields, the culture of racism, and the complexity of politics all, of course, persisted.
The southern states quickly passed a series of ‘black codes’ aimed at controlling and oppressing the newly-freed slaves.
Groups like the KKK, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces, the Invisible Empire, the Knights of White Camellia, and the Constitutional Union Guard quickly formed to agitate for a return to the past, to frighten newly-freed slaves into submission, and to unify and perpetuate white supremacy.
In his 1867 state of the union address, president Andrew Jackson said that: “it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism”.
The lynching era – which peaked in the five decades between 1880 and 1930 – saw thousands of African Americans lynched in the southern states.
Many of the participants in lynch mobs were ordinary men and women who, if asked, would likely, and often did, say that it was the only way to protect against black aggression and to defend the natural god-given racial order of the world.
John T. Brown, keeper of Georgia penitentiary, said in 1876 that “the only difference existing between colored convicts and the colored people at large consists in the fact that the former have been caught in the commission of a crime, tried, and convicted, while the latter have not. The entire race is destitute of character”.
In 1906, the Atlanta Journal warned that the black man is growing “more bumptious on the street. More impudent in his dealings with white men; and then, when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, with the instinct of the barbarian to destroy what he cannot attain to, he lies in wait, as that dastardly brute did yesterday near this city, and assaults the fair young girlhood of the south”.
James Cutler wrote the first academic study of lynching in 1905: “Lynching has been resorted to by whites not merely to wreak vengeance, but to terrorize and restrain this lawless element in the Negro population. Among Southern people, the conviction is general that terror is the only restraining influence that can be brought to bear upon vicious Negroes”.
One member of a lynch mob said that: “I reckon folks from the north think we’re hard on n****s, but they just don’t know what would happen to the white people if the n****s ran wild like they would if we didn’t show them who’s boss…. If that n***r out there in the woods gets jumped before the sheriff finds him, it will all be over and done with by sundown, and everybody will be satisfied”.
I want to use lynchings to try and examine racism more broadly, taking an action, an event, and slowly zooming outwards, looking at the psychological, sociological, and historical conditions that led to it.
We’ll look at a number of what I’ll describe in as justifications, rationalisations, or causes – to try to understand what led to violence, and how the beliefs, attitudes, and psychologies of perpetrators were produced more broadly.
We’ll look at propaganda, sexuality, scientific racism, nostalgia, economics, stereotypes, and first, the power of a feeling of defeat and victimhood, on the part of whites.
Perpetrators of violence often see themselves as victims, the subject of some kind of injustice, either in the past, or on-going, which heightens a feeling of being threatened.
In her 1947 autobiography, Making of a Southerner, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin remembers that during her childhood, she inherented afeeling of a ‘lost cause’ from her father who had fought in the civil war. She heard “words and phrases at all times intimately familiar to Southern ears and in those years of harsh excitement carrying a special urgency: white supremacy, Negro domination, intermarriage, social equality, impudence, inferiority, uppitiness, good darkey, bad darkey, keep them in their place”.
Defeat after the war lent itself to a sense of fear, of being under siege, of almost being ruled by a foreign power, and a fear of black retaliation, of newly freed slaves with “animalistic” instincts, no reason, incapable of governing themselves.
The post-bellum period saw the emergence of a new stereotype – the black brute. Monstrous, lustful, and in white supremacist senator Ben Tillman’s words “a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails, lurking around to see if some helpless white woman can be murdered or brutalized”.
Emancipation had supposedly created a new brutish African American and destroyed the old image of the loyal slave.
The children’s novel Diddie, Dumps, and Tot declared in the preface that “I KNOW whereof I do speak; and it is to tell of the pleasant and happy relations that existed between master and slave”.
In 1901 George T. Winston wrote that “when a knock is heard at the door, [the Southern woman] shudders with nameless horror”.
In 1903 William Lee Howard wrote in a medical journal of the sexual madness and an increase in the rape of white woman through which “we see … evidence of racial instincts that are about as amenable to ethical culture as is the inherent odor of the race”. The problem, he wrote in the journal, was the large size of the black mans penis and the lack of “the sensitiveness of the terminal fibers which exists in the Caucasian”.
The well-known lawyer Thomas Nelson Page wrote that, “The crime of lynching is not likely to cease until the crime of ravishing and murdering women and children is less frequent than it has been of late…. The Negro had the same animal instincts in slavery that he exhibits now; [T]he Negro does not generally believe in the virtue of women. It is beyond his comprehension…”.
Popular novels like Thomas Dixon’s 1905 The Clansman described African Americans as “half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit…a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger”.
Mississippi governor James Vardaman said, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy”.
So the defeat after the war and the sight of so many freed slaves led to the development of this brute caricature, a feeling of victimhood and fear. But this stereotype existed alongside others creating a culture of expectations around how black Americans should act and how whites should construct their own views.
Propaganda, philosopher Jason Stanley writes, “uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends”.
For the most part in the South, propagandistic stereotypes of African Americans were spread through education, children’s books, novels, films, and advertising. The stereotypes informed most white southerners’ views of Black Americans.
Justifying both racism and lynching was based on a genuine belief in these caricatures. If you believe a stereotype to be true, of course, it is easier to justify unpleasant necessities.
A number of themes intersected in the literature, film, advertising, and common attitudes that depicted black Americans: frightfulness, laziness, backwardness, unintelligent, and inarticulate, violent, sexually mad, unable to control themselves, and in need of care.
The coon stereotype depicted African Americans as lazy. The pickaninny as dirty and animalistic. Both suggested that African Americans were incapable of self-government. The mammu, aunty, sambo, or uncle were depicted as grateful and servile. They were often represented with childish features or as easily frightened, unable to understand simple things or to care for themselves.
This 1914 Cream of Wheat advert, for example, depicts the ‘uncle tom’ stereotype – the faithful aged servant – with a phrase – giddup uncle – that reduces him to an animal at the boys’ command.
Stereotypes were exaggerations that drew on a variety of ideas in support of white supremacy.
In her autobiography, Anne McCarty Braden remembers from her childhood that “one of the things a child learns by osmosis without anyone ever putting it into words—that I was one of the ‘better’ human beings, more privileged because my people came of a ‘superior stock’”.
Lumpkin remembers the combined feeling of fear and supremacy. She thought that “To be ruled by Negroes! The slave ruling over the master!”. Only white supremacy could counter this “disaster, injustice, and outrage”.
Africans, it was taught in Church, were descendants of Ham, the biblical son of Noah, the first black man, and Africans were “cursed by God for all time to atone by servitude for Ham’s sin of dishonouring his father”.
Thomas Jefferson, who had owned slaves, wrote that, “In general, their existence seems to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labor. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications”.
Surrounded by impoverished, uneducated, and oppressed black americans, whites didn’t find it difficult to believe that they were naturally superior. That was just the way the world seemed to be.
And this ‘color line’ had to be protected for another reason: racial purity.
Disgust, squeamishness, and revulsion, are all, as we know, powerful feelings. And scientific racism created a fear that even the touch of African Americans might transmit germs and genes that could threaten the purity of the white race.
The power of beliefs like this is illustrated by a recollection from the diary of Melton Mclaurin. He recalls an incident from his childhood when he and a black friend he was playing with found their basketball flat. His friends took the inflation needle to blow the ball up and applied quite a “lavish amount of saliva”. When it came to McLaurin’s turn he was horrified imagining the black germs entering his body and jeopardizing his own racial purity. He responded angrily, throwing the ball at his friend and rushing to rinse out his mouth.
Another author remembers the “horrifying moment” when his mother found his brother “in the act of taking alternate bites off an apple with a Negro boy”.
In her autobiography, Lumpkin returned home from university and told her family that she’d shared a meal with a Black man. Her brother replied “What? You ate with a Negro?”, “Daddy, I don’t want to eat with Alice if she has been eating with Negroes. May I be excused?”.
Boyle recalls how “You never, never, never sat at a table with a Negro in your own dining room”.
There were even concerns about laundrettes washing the clothes of whites and blacks together.
These feelings went hand-in-hand with attitudes about masculinity, as White southern men needed to feel that they remained in control of women’s bodies to protect them from impurity and prevent racial mixing.
After Caleb Campbell was lynched in 1882, a note pinned to his body read “Our mothers, wives, and sisters shall be protected, even with our lives”.
This type of language was common. Another note on Nathan Bonnet’s body read “our wives, mothers, sisters and daughters shall be respected”.
The colour line had to be respected, but was also made easier to believe in by the common idea that the white race were actually protecting and looking after African Americans, even if they didn’t know it.
What the scientific racism of the day often led to was the powerful belief that African American actually needed caring for, like any other lower animal. Negative attitudes could be rationalised as being for the greater good of society, and for the greater good of African Americans. A white man’s burden.
In one pamphlet, the KKK declared that “The Klans have always considered the problem of the negro race, one worthy most careful consideration [sic]”, after the Emancipation Proclamation freed “a great band of negroes who did not know the first thing about caring for themselves, and many of whom did not want to be free”.
Boyle wrote in her autobiography that her mother “loved Negroes, but with the same deep tenderness she lavished on her riding horses, her dogs, and other pets”.
Her thoughts were “saturated with the assumption that Negros belonged to a lower order of man than we”.
Lawton Evan’s widely-read The Essential Facts in American History told readers that freed slaves had “had no money, no food, and nobody to care for them. Some of them became vicious and even thought they could take by force what they needed”.
The children’s book the Voyages of Doctor Dolittle depicted a group of childlike black people on Spider monkey Island that “look[ed] just as much like a monkey”.
Dolittle says that “They are, as it were, my children”.
A cultural attitude would not be able to sustain itself for long without people adopting to believing it was for the greater good. Whites viewed African Americans as figures of entertainment and comedy, too.
Lumpkin remembers a story her father, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, told of tricking an African American into thinking he was being visited by the ghost of a confederate soldier. “we thought it funny to an extreme; our shrill young laughter would ring out whenever it was told. ‘And did it scare them?’ we would ask”.
One children’s book, Little Jeemse Henry, tells of a young black boy’s attempts to make some extra money by helping whites. His clumsiness and simple-mindedness undermines his attempts. His father, working at the circus, is also reduced to entertaining whites and acting stereotypically.
The 1921 Sears Catalog – a central pillar of mainstream American culture – had a “Famous Alabama Coon Jigger” toy.
The description said that it was “a realistic dancing negro who goes through the movements of a lively jig. Very amusing and fascinating”. “wind up the spring and start him off”, with its description noting that “this happy darky just can’t keep from dancing! He seems to like it too”.
Carnivals had games like “dump the Ni****r” and “Coon Dip” and games that involved throwing things at or hitting black Americans.
Lynchings often had the feel of carnivals, as children took time off school and victims were paraded on carts behind horses. In 1911 The Intelligencer reported that one of its staff had gone to see the “fun” of the lynching of Willis Jackson.
De Lumpkin recounts her disappointment when she encountered African Americans working in the field. She presumed, from what she’d read, that they would be singing and happy, joking and smiling. “I had thought they would treat me … deferentially, of course, as would be right to the white landowner’s daughter, but also outgoingly, responding with hearty pleasure to my little attempts to be friendly. … They were polite when I spoke to them, but so reticent, it seemed, so very remote. A ‘Yes, ma’am’ or ‘No, ma’am’ and nothing much besides”.
It’s these cultural stereotypes that created a cultural matrix of positive and negative feelings for whites. The varied caricatures meant that the fear, tough-love, punishment, and violence towards African-Americans were ‘justified’ in the eyes of white southerners because of the ‘positive’ feelings they had of paternalism, humour, entertainment, nostalgia, and the ‘good old days’, ultimately sustaining a powerful rationalisation for oppression and violence.
Of course, all of these had to be transferred through generations and codified in a strict system of social rules and cultural norms. Children were socialised through clubs like the Junior KKK and the Children of the Confederacy.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy – founded in 1894 – wanted to keep “alive the sacred principles for which Southern men and boys fought so bravely”. By 1905 it had over 100,000 members. By 1929 it had 22,500 children members. It still exists today. Children salute the confederate flag and sing confederate songs.
Southern publishing houses started producing new text books that taught children to keep the lost cause of the Confederacy alive.
Historian Mildred Lewis Rutherford wrote in her textbook that “Don’t say you believe that the South was right; say you know she was right!”.
Another described African Americans as “docile, being able to work in the field better than the white man … faithful, black, humble, heathen, and practising wild African customs”.
American History for Grammar Schools described African Americans as “ignorant and unfit to govern themselves”.
Most relied on, perpetuated, and even created the stereotypes and caricatures we’ve seen, describing slavery as good for African Americans.
Charles and Mary Beard’s 1921 History of the United States said that “Slavery was no crime; it was an actual benefit to the slaves. The beneficial effects of slavery were proved, they [the slave owners] said, by the fact that the slaves were happier, more comfortable, and more intelligent than their ancestors in Africa, and it was believed that they were better off in bondage than they would be if they were free”.
Another said that “The condition of the slaves generally was not a hard one. They were well cared for with good cabins to live in and plenty to eat. All day long they worked in the fields and at night sang their songs around the fires of the negro quarters”.
They described African Americans as having love and affection for their masters and as being grateful that they were being cared for.
And the socialisation of white children was also a part of the most violent educational event – the lynching.
During one in 1893, in Paris, Texas, the mayor gave the children the day off school so their families could watch and celebrate as a lynch victim was drawn through town on a carnival float pulled by four white horses.
Another school in 1915 also reported that it was delaying teaching “until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man”.
Children sometimes assisted women getting wood for the fire using for a lynching. One NAACP report from Waco in 1916 at the lynching of Jesse Washington said that “they got a little boy to light the fire (Legally you could not arrest a little boy)”.
One newspaper reported that they forced “a 10-year-old white lad who carried water around the camp to take a large butcher knife and unsex him”.
We can see in lynchings the whole constellation of cultural attitudes – from entertainment to protecting against impurity to popular justice – but can they help us dig deeper? To uncover any other causes that could lead to such gleeful violence?
Of course, during slavery, the underlying cause at the heart of the system had one central star, around which everything else revolved: economics.
Slaves, ultimately, were profitable.
In their now classic study, Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck studied the relationship between lynchings and the economics of the south.
21 counties where lynchings occurred in 1931, for example, had economies that were far below the national average.
A Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching found that, “In approximately nine-tenths of these counties the per capita tax valuation was below the general state average; in almost nineteen-twentieths the bank deposits per capita were less than the state average; in three-fourths the per capita income from farm and factory was below the state average, in many cases less than one-half; in nine-tenths fewer and smaller income tax returns were made per thousand population than throughout the state; in over two-thirds, the proportion of farms operated by tenants was in excess of the state rate; and in nearly three fourths of the counties, automobiles were less common than in the state”.
In the years after the civil war, the phenomenon of white-capping meant scaring black families into leaving their homes and jobs as white workers responded to the competition for work from newly-freed black men.
One newspaper reported, “Eli Hilson, a negro, living eight miles from Brookhaven, was assassinated Sunday while on the way from town alone in his buggy. Last winter Hilson was warned by whitecaps to leave, which warning he disregarded. About three or four weeks ago his home was visited in the night by whitecaps and several volleys fired into it. He still disregarded the warning, and remained on his place”.
It continued that, “Hilson is the second negro murdered by white caps in that portion of Lincoln county within the last month, and the other negroes are greatly alarmed over the situation”.
But how do economics have anything to do with lynchings when African Americans were accused of murder or rape, which made up around 82% of the killings?
There was a belief – a justification – widespread throughout the era, that the legal system would fail to prosecute, or would be too lenient. And it was this reason that was often given for extrajudicial murders.
It was also widely believed that it was inherently unfair and ethically wrong that a lesser race was treated in the same way as a higher one. Different types of punishment, different legal systems, a different process would be more appropriate. Animals, after all, were not afforded due process.
After Reeves Smith’s killing in 1886, for example, the De Soto Democrat reported that, “while we deplore the necessity for mob law, we must commend it in this instance, for if the accused had been convicted of an ‘attempt at rape,’ the penalty would only have been two years, which is worse than farce. All such monsters should be disposed of in a summary manner”.
However, Tolnay and Beck find no relationship between the rate of convictions across counties and the rate of lynchings. They conclude that the idea of ‘popular mob justice’ motivated simply by the accusation of a serious crime does not adequately explain the frequency of violence. Instead, looking at the data, Tolnay and Beck find lynchings to have four main functions:
1 – To remove specific people accused of crimes
2 – As state-sanction terrorism to intimidate and control the black population
3 – To eliminate economic, social, political competitors
4 – As community-building in support of white supremacy
Overall, they describe what they call a threat model of lynchings.
As we’ve seen, Southern whites felt themselves under siege. They’d lost the civil war, were socialised through stereotypes, caricatures, and scientific racism, and 4 million black men and women had suddenly gone from being subservient to being their economic, social, and political competitors.
They found that African Americans were more likely to be attacked when whites’ access to privileged and scarce resources – economic, social, political or otherwise – were challenged. That could be jobs, political offices, or land or women.
Whenever they felt their position under threat, the rate of lynching increased. Furthermore, they also increased in frequency in counties with higher percentages of African Americans, where the perception of threat was more pronounced.
Lynchings were twice as likely in cotton dominant areas. For poor whites lynchings were a response to the economic threat of black competitors, whereas for landowning whites, violence prevented the threat of any coalition between poor whites and blacks.
The peak of the lynching era coincided with the decline in demand for King cotton in the 1890s. As cotton prices rose and the situation improved, lynchings fell, until the post WWI period when cotton prices again decreased and many African Americans returning from serving in the army were murdered.
Tolnay and Beck summarise their findings like this: “Within the cotton economy, poorer whites looked for a small piece of land to buy or a tenant farm with good soil. Well-to-do whites looked for reliable tenants to occupy their fragmented landholdings and tried to replace the slave labor lost through emancipation. Blacks struggled to find a niche that would represent at least some improvement over slavery. The issue of race aggregated an already volatile situation. Wealthier whites resented the need to treat formed slavers as free labor and the resultant loss of control over workers. Poorer whites resented having to compete with the “inferior” caste for economic survival”.
Their material analysis of lynchings show that racism in the south was tied to the production of cotton long after slaves were freed, and only abated with the transition to a modern technological, industrial economy as many labourers were replaced with mechanisation like tractors, as farms were replaced with factories, and as African Americans embarked on the great migration away from the south to northern cities.
This is a difficult topic to summarise. Tolnay and Beck say that these were ordinary folks who did unspeakable things; “they were not monsters who temporarily assumed the persona of southern whites. They were the town barber, the local blacksmith, and even the county sheriff. Clearly, the must have been swept along by very strong social forces to fell justified in committing more than two thousand atrocities against their black neighbors”.
How can we, from this distance, even begin to understand those “strong social forces”?
They were a sense of victimhood and defeat, a sense of fear, and a culture of caricatures and stereotypes. Psychologist Ervin Staub argues that genocide becomes more likely when “difficult life conditions frustrate basic human needs”. These needs can be the need for security, a feeling of control, the need for a positive identity and social connections, and of course, the need for food, water, and shelter.
All of these things created what Tolnay and Beck describe as the threat model. As the sense of threat increases, the likelihood of violence increases too.
But these feelings of threat were accompanied with a pervasive culture of scientific racism, of nostalgia, of paternalism, that seemed to lead most to believe that this was something they were doing for the greater good.
Sources
Donald G. Dutton, The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence : Why ‘‘normal’’ People Come to Commit Atrocities
Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South
Hanson, Jon, and Kathleen Hanson. “The Blame Frame: Justifying (Racial) Injustice in America.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer 2006, p. 413-480.
Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930
https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/brute/
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
Steven Hoelscher, Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South
https://www.historyonthenet.com/authentichistory/diversity/african/4-brute/
