Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South - Softcover

Clegg, Claude Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252077822 ISBN 13: 9780252077821

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In Troubled Ground, Claude A. Clegg III revisits a violent episode in his hometown's history that made national headlines in the early twentieth century but disappeared from public consciousness over the decades. Moving swiftly between memory and history, between the personal and the political, Clegg offers insights into southern history, mob violence, and the formation of American race ideology while coming to terms on a personal level with the violence of the past. Three black men were killed in front of a crowd of thousands in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1906, following the ax murder of a local white family for whom the men had worked. One of the lynchers was prosecuted for his role in the execution, the first conviction of its kind in North Carolina and one of the earliest in the country. Yet Clegg, an academic historian who grew up in Salisbury, had never heard of the case until 2002 and could not find anyone else familiar with the case. In this book, Clegg mines newspaper accounts and government records and links the victims of the 1906 case to a double-lynching in 1902, suggesting a complex history of lynching in the area while revealing the determination of the city to rid its history of a shameful and shocking chapter. The result is a multi-layered, deeply personal exploration of lynching and lynching prosecutions in the United States.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

<div><div><b>Claude A. Clegg III</b> is a professor of history at Indiana University and the author of <i>The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia</i> and <i>An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad.</i></div></div>

Claude A. Clegg III is a professor of history at Indiana University and the author of The Price of Liberty: A African Americans and the Making of Liberia and An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad.

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Troubled Ground

A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New SouthBy CLAUDE A. CLEGG III

University of Illinois Press

Copyright © 2010 Claude Andrew Clegg III
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07782-1

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................ixPrologue: Searching for a Troubled Past.....................xi1. Bygones..................................................12. Old Demons of the New South..............................243. The Reaping..............................................534. Presumed Guilt...........................................805. A Blot upon the State....................................1166. A Reckoning..............................................146Epilogue: New South, Old South..............................177Appendix....................................................183Notes.......................................................189Bibliography................................................211Index.......................................................221

Prologue

Searching for a Troubled Past

In 2000, a book was published that pictorially represented the history of lynching in the United States. I neither recall when I first heard of this work, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, nor the date that it arrived at my home as a mail order. Nonetheless, as a student of history, I felt compelled to peruse the book and add it to my collection. From beginning to end, the work is a grim journey through the darkness of America's racial past. It is a graphic rendition of nearly a century's worth of hangings, burnings, shootings, and butcherings of African Americans?and a few others?by mobs, abetted by the failure of the country's leaders and citizenry to make meaningful efforts to halt such extralegal executions. Comprised of postcard photos, newspaper snapshots, and other images, I found Without Sanctuary powerful, even overwhelming, in its unrelenting visual statements about the possible depths of human depravity. I also found the volume, wrapped in its solemn black dust jacket, a disturbingly grotesque undertaking, but one that I felt necessary. After all, while there is arguably no tasteful way to present the appalling distasteful, I could appreciate what the author was asking the reader to see and to contemplate.

As I turned the pages and fixed my eyes upon the next picture and subtitle, I tried to imagine what the white faces that gazed back at me represented as they grinned beside smoldering or hanging corpses. I wanted to know and, at the same time, did not want to know what they were thinking. There was too much going on in some of the images to psychologically digest all at once. Some of the photos had obviously been taken in urban settings with stores and paved streets, while others captured lynchings conducted in backwoods and remote rural stretches. There were crowds of all sizes, with many self-consciously aware of the photographer and others entranced by the gruesome spectacle that they had created. People posed dramatically, leaned against trees and posts, tugged on the leashes of hunting dogs, and angled for a better view of the camera. Children are present in several of the images, undoubtedly brought to the lynching site by curious parents, some of whom were likely perpetrators of the murder. Many of the pictures suggest a broad communal participation in the killing or at least its observance, judging from the presence of women, the professionally dressed, and the unmistakably festive atmosphere. The black-and-white coloring of the photos conveys a sense of age, of things long past. However, the racial configuration of the images is undeniable in its pattern and message.

To be sure, the book infrequently portrays the lynching of white men, and at least one black woman suspended from a bridge, her neck, like so many others, bent unnaturally into almost a ninety-degree angle by the hangman's noose. Still, the bulk of the book?as were the vast majority of known lynchings?is about black male victims and white (mostly male) mobs. For me, it was these images that were the most difficult to mentally process, given their explicit portrayals or veiled suggestions of dismemberment, disfigurement, and other tortures. One has to look hard at these pictures simply to have a chance at believing them. And to believe them means to be horrified and brutalized by them, prompting a reflexive desire to quickly turn the page.

I looked at more of the pictures and read their descriptions?Texas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, on and on. There are very few states in the country unsullied by this past, with some more steeped in this history of mob murder than others. As a historian, I had known about this quintessentially American phenomenon and had even taught classes on African American history that treated lynching in some detail. But none of this prepared me for one of the images that I came across as I thumbed through this most arresting volume. The picture itself, rendered in sepia tones as opposed to black and white, is not the most macabre in Without Sanctuary. In relative terms, it might strike the intrepid viewer?that is, those who could endure viewing the full contents of the book?as a typical lynching scene involving black men and their white tormenters at the turn of the twentieth century. Immediately one notices the peculiar arrangement of the hanging bodies, which had been suspended from a tree branch by ropes tied around the neck and right leg of each victim. Also, the tattered clothing of the men, each with chest exposed, is discernable. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that one of the bodies was obviously not that of a man, but of a boy, perhaps in his mid-teens. Moreover, evidence of torture was clearly visible on the torso of one victim, along with telltale blood stains on his clothing. In common with many of the other depictions, I learned later that this lynching had drawn a huge crowd. Yet in the photo, only one white face is clearly visible, although the hands of others appear at the edges as they touch the massive oak. As had become my habit before turning the page, I glanced at the description of the picture, image no. 12, to see where and when this tragedy had occurred. And there it was as plain as the photo that it referenced: "The lynching of five African American males. August 6, 1906, Salisbury, North Carolina."

Although it was several years ago when I first saw this picture, I recall the moment as if it had happened only seconds prior to the writing of this sentence. I gasped audibly upon seeing the place name and for an instant felt strangely outside of time. I had been born and raised in Salisbury, a small town in south-central North Carolina. I had gone to school there as a youth, and most of my mother's family still resides there to this day. While not the most progressive town in the country, Salisbury, in hindsight, did not seem a product of a particularly vexed racial past, no more than the average "New South" town. But there it was graphically on the page: black bodies dangling from a tree as white onlookers readied themselves for the camera. My childhood and pubescent years suddenly seemed touched by this obscene image in abstract ways that I struggled to understand. Later, I would learn that three, not five, people had been murdered during the 1906 lynching, all accused of killing a local white family. As it would turn out, this revised body count was of little consolation once I also discovered that another lynching had occurred on the outskirts of Salisbury...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252077822
• ISBN 13: 9780252077821
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande