Black people were violent, not the slaveholder, not the lyncher, not the cop.
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We have paid less attention to the progression of racism that often follows racial progress: how the law, the lyncher and the creditor replaced the master, the whip and the slave patrol in locking black people into destitution to white exploiters.
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The Lyncher in Me; A Search for Redemption in the Face of History. Read, Warren.
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White men came up and started beating him, and then policemen dragged him to the jail. Hester warns Pauline they want to lynch him. Dr. Grey offers to run over to the judge to speak with him but Hester points out that he's “a lyncher his own self” and not to trust him. Pauline quickly thinks of an idea and is not going to let her son be lynched.
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Oney, 2003, p. 526, quotes Carl Abernathy as saying, "They'd go to a man's office and talk to him or ... see a man on the job and talk to him," and an unidentified lyncher as saying "The organization of the body was more open than mysterious." This event was a catalyst in the re-formation of the new Ku Klux Klan. Events in Nazi Germany also attracted attention in the United States.
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Governor Glenn ordered three companies of state militia to the scene, but it was too late; the five were already dead. The next day, Glenn, at the sheriff's request, sent the military companies to Salisbury to guard the jail now holding one alleged lyncher. Glenn went to Salisbury himself two days later to testify in the trial of the soon to be convicted lynching "leader," George Hall. Eventually, the lynch mob leader was tried and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, the first such conviction for lynching in North Carolina history.
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But I know this: their existence, however brief and cruelly > interrupted, is forever woven into the fabric of my own life. My son will > continue to be raised in an environment of tolerance, understanding and > humility, now with even more pertinence than before. Read has written a memoir exploring his learning about his great-grandfather's role in the lynching, as well his decision to find and connect with the descendants of Elmer Jackson, one of the men killed that night. Read's book, The Lyncher in Me, was published in March 2008.
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Oney, 2003, p. 526, quotes Carl Abernathy as saying, "They'd go to a man's office and talk to him or … see a man on the job and talk to him," and an unidentified lyncher as saying "The organization of the body was more open than mysterious." The second Ku Klux Klan, which grew enormously in the early 1920s by promoting "100% Americanism", focused its hatred on Jews, as well as Catholics and African Americans.Thomas R. Pegram, One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s (Ivan R. Dee, 2011), ch 1.
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In her Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman describes how various people of the time either challenged or upheld the idea that "civilization" is predicated on white masculinity. She closes with a chapter on Tarzan of the Apes (1912) because the story's protagonist is, according to her, the ultimate male by the standards of 1912 white America. Bederman does note that Tarzan, "an instinctively chivalrous Anglo- Saxon," does not engage in sexual violence, renouncing his "masculine impulse to rape." However, she also notes that not only does Tarzan kill black man Kulonga in revenge for killing his ape mother (a stand-in for his biological white mother) by hanging him, "lyncher Tarzan" actually enjoys killing black people, for example the cannibalistic Mbongans.
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