Capital Punishment Considered

African American Lynching,
the Ku Klux Klan, and Hate Crimes

African-American lynching happened all over the United States. South and north—African-American lynching claimed a high percentage of victims at the same time that African-Americans were legally executed in high percentages.

African-Americans received a legal or illegal death sentence more often than European Americans who were accused of the same offenses. Common accusations resulting in death for African-Americans included rape, attempted rape, robbery, and second-degree murder. Many others were lynched—that is, accused, convicted, and executed without a trial, without rules of evidence, without a defender—for offenses such as "talking back," "looking at a white woman," or not being able to repay 10 cents interest to a white lender.

The sheer number of African Americans lynched or legally executed in the South was much higher than outside the South—some 4,921 in 10 Southern states between 1882 and 1930 alone, compared to 572 European-Americans lynched or executed. These numbers partly reflect high African-American populations in Southern states. The disproportion in the numbers points to active community support for collective violence against African Americans.

When it comes to African-American lynching, many people attribute community support to the work of the "Ku Klux Klan." But this title doesn't mean much unless we know that there's been more than one Klan. Different Klans over time have had different impacts on

• African American lynching
• lynching of non-African-Americans
• the assaults, bombings, and assassinations of the Civil Rights era
• the hate crimes of today.

African-American Lynching and the Ku Klux Klan:
The Terrorists

Members of the first Ku Klux Klan were domestic terrorists with a focused objective: to intimidate freed former slaves and their white supporters. Burning down houses and businesses, administering beatings, whippings, shootings, and hangings—Klan terrorism succeeded in preventing African-Americans from using their newly won rights. The Klan's aim was to prevent African-Americans from voting, getting an education, competing for jobs—and owning property instead of being legally considered as property.

This first Klan was orchestrated in 1866 by Southern political conservatives as part of their strategy to take back government in former Confederate states. In a few short years, Southern blacks found themselves excluded from almost every kind of opportunity we as Americans take for granted now. The first KKK as a formal organization did not last long. It was investigated by Congress, and Southern conservatives as a national party seem to have disowned the Klan by about 1870.

But this ending doesn't mean that African-American lynching stopped. Instead, lynchings came to be presented differently—a theatrical spectacle that said, "The community has come together in a spontaneous outpouring of outrage against an African-American who committed an atrocity." Rather than receiving a secretive visit from the KKK at night, victims of terrorism were lynched in public by a mob. Often the victims were taken from a jail where they awaited legal punishment.

No doubt the ordinary citizens who carried out the killing, or simply showed up for the spectacle, did support the hanging or burning of an African-American. The cover photo on the dust jacket of The Hangman's Knot shows the crowd when it has turned away from its victim, hanging from a tree, in order to pose for the camera. Most of the photo is taken up by this sea of self-satisfied faces.

But close investigation of individual lynching cases has shown that the guiding hand was the community's local leadership of cotton planters, merchants, bankers. Both elite and lower-income European-Americans felt threatened after slavery ended. African-Americans were only able to improve their lot when they began to migrate north in great numbers between 1900 and 1930. No longer were they the South's most abundant and most intimidated labor force.

Leo Frank:
Lynching of a European-American in the South, 1915

Southern whites had another reason for economic fear—industries controlled by corporations outside the South. These firms too could compete for scarce labor, and they didn't necessarily care about the interests of either local leaders or local workers.

In 1913, Southern hostility to outsiders was dramatically demonstrated when Leo Frank, manager of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta , Georgia , was convicted of the murder of factory employee Mary Phagan. Evidence against Frank rested heavily on the testimony of a factory janitor who may in fact have been the real killer. However, Leo Frank was sentenced to hang. Two years later, when the governor commuted Frank's sentence to life, a band of armed men kidnapped Frank from the state penitentiary and hanged him from a tree.

Tom Watson, a Georgia landowner and politician, played a part in the drama of Leo Frank. After Frank's sentence was commuted, Watson's fiery speeches and written diatribes implied that anyone who lynched Frank would simply be carrying out the death penalty Frank deserved. Watson raged against "outside interests" of any kind, and also denounced the Roman Catholic Church and Jews (such as Leo Frank) as well as African-Americans. During Watson's era, many whites besides Frank were lynched. They were often immigrant labor organizers or contenders for local political power.

The Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915-1944

Tom Watson advocated reorganizing the Ku Klux Klan. It isn't clear that he actively took part, but a new KKK was born in November, 1915, with one William J. Simmons as Imperial Wizard. The Klan's platform was a smorgasbord of equal-opportunity bigotry similar to Tom Watson's—but it also advocated moral precepts such as sobriety, marital fidelity, and church-going. There is no doubt that the second Klan spread and institutionalized bigotry, and justified intimidation and violence. But documented fatalities are few. The second Klan played to widespread American racism and resentment of all who threatened white Protestant entitlement.

The Klan's overwhelming influence during the early 1920s, in states from Colorado and California to Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to Texas and Alabama, was due not to terrorism but to political lobbying and backing of political candidates—paid for by commercially stimulated Klan "initiation fees." The Klan's estimated membership of 2.5 million by 1924 would never have been reached had not William Simmons hired a publicity team who—in exchange for 80 per cent of profits—carried out a massive advertising and recruiting campaign and organized the Klan by sales regions. Klan hirelings also ran spinoff companies selling KKK regalia and managed the Klan's real estate holdings.

In the late 1920s, the Klan's largely middle-class membership—neither elite nor "white trash"—defected after criminal cases and lawsuits began to be brought against Klan leaders. The second Klan came to a sticky end when the federal government brought a ruinous suit for taxes in 1944.

The Civil Rights Era and the Klan:
Lynching, or Just Plain Murder?

In 1955, an African-American teenager from Chicago was murdered while visiting family in Money, Mississippi , a town with a population of 55. Emmett Till's "capital" offense: trying to flirt with a store owner's European-American wife.

Till had acted on a dare from his cousins and their friends, but four days later he was dead. After his beaten, unclothed body was found in the Tallahatchie River , two men were charged with his murder: Roy Bryant, husband of the store clerk, and Bryant's half brother. It was unusual that the men were even prosecuted in court but, in 1950s Mississippi , their acquittal was a done deal. Emmett Till's murder closely followed the 1954 school desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Till was furtively murdered by only two men for reasons that were not political, but it was Till's death and the national publicity it received that galvanized both violent white racists and the Civil Rights movement.

This time around, white racists, whether Klan members or not, were on the defensive. Once again the "Klan" was a secret society—in reality, a composite of local groups with only a loose affiliation across the South. Klans created a deadly synergy with "White Citizens Councils" that sprang up to resist integration after Brown. The Citizens Councils supplied the rhetoric and applied political and economic pressure in preference to openly advocating violence, but local Klans stood ready at hand to carry out assaults, bombings, and assassinations.

As in the case of the second KKK, "respectable" European Americans began to dissociate themselves from the Klans once they realized that the federal government had tardily become serious about prosecuting civil rights crimes. At this time, many local Klans consolidated as the anti-black terrorist group "United Klans of America"—with the notorious Robert Shelton as their Imperial Wizard. But in 1979, 13 of Shelton 's Klansmen were sentenced to federal prison for perpetrating violence in Talladega County, Alabama. The death blow to the UKA came after they lynched a randomly chosen African-American teenager, Michael Donald, in 1981. The UKA was ruined financially when Donald's family sued for damages and in 1987 received ownership of the UKA's 6.5 acre national headquarters in Tuscaloosa . Several Klansmen were convicted of Donald's murder. One—in an unprecedented example—was actually executed.

Hate Crimes and the Legacy of the Klan

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