A. The Logic of Lynching
The history of lynching is a lesson in harsh punishment. The peak of the practice came after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which ended private ownership of slaves. Although the amendment was a major civil rights milestone, it was followed by what is described as the ““lynching era,” a five-decade killing spree in which thousands of lynchings were reported in the South, with likely many more going unreported. As emancipation ruptured a centuries-old social structure, “Southern whites-- poor and rich alike--were utterly outraged.” The southern response to abolition was to inflict terrorism against ex-slave populations through mob violence and riots, most notably through the practice of mass killing of ex-slaves. This volatile social period saw a tremendous spike in lynching against former slaves, and as one scholar argues, during the fifteen-year period from 1865 to 1880, more lynchings occurred than in any other similar time in American history.
Academic inquiry into the ritual aspects of lynching remains limited, but not completely absent. Professor David Garland has argued that lynching is a ritual form of punishment driven by ideals of white power, which:
[E] merged at a historical moment of unusual stress in the racial and class politics ... a transitional moment in which older mechanisms of racial domination and social control had either been dismantled or else were no longer perceived to be effective, and alternative structures of control had not yet been put in place.
In this era, the social spectacle of bodies being hanged, genitally mutilated, and burnt alive sent messages of power and recemented social hierarchies. Garland describes the events as:
[C] ollective performances that involved a set of formal conventions and recognizable roles; a staging that was standardized, sequenced, and dramatic; and a recognized social meaning that set the event apart as important, out-of-the-ordinary, highly charged in symbolic significance. Lynchers sought to represent their violent acts as collective rituals rather than private actions--seeking the public authority that came with the crowd--and they used the ritual forms of criminal punishment to do so.
As Garland notes, the lynchers did not choose just any form of violence, but co-opted the legitimate form of criminal punishment, hanging. As the state's mode of execution, the practice of hanging lent legitimacy to activities that subverted the law itself, since they were used to carry out unlawful killing against an individual who had not been tried by a court.
As the lynchings may illustrate, ritual acts often overlap with the notion of sacrifice, where violence and killing are part of the ritual script. In this regard, Rene Girard's influential mimetic analysis of ritual violence contributes to Garland's study by suggesting that society needs sacrifice as a means to maintain stability, maintain order, and “keep violence outside the [religious] community.” From this perspective, the will to violence derives from competition that produces “dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.” Hence, ritual sacrifice is a way of channeling violence such that the scapegoat is used to avert more ominous forms of violence.
Under this scheme, sacrifice channels the community's tensions and polarizes its aggressive impulses, redirecting them toward victims who may be actual or figurative criminals. In the context of lynching, the immediacy of the act was important, and Garland notes how the lynching's proximity to the alleged crime allowed for a cathartic release of powerful emotions: “[t] he public ritual provided an occasion for acting out communal outrage and an opportunity for injured victims to express their (socially sanctioned) fury. Contemporary newspaper reports emphasized that the people were ‘aroused,’ “incensed,' ‘impassioned,’ ‘furious,’ ‘bent on vengeance.”’
The lynching spectacle produced a cohesive effect and positive psychological impact on the community. Garland observes: “The outrage provoked by the alleged crime made it possible to stage a collective action that surmounted these conflicts and channeled the hostilities that they produced.” Here, the concern was not so much with law. The concern was with society since the activity helped bind people closer together, which of course was to the exclusion of the victim's community:
Carrying out the ritual over and over again is what serves to keep the group tied together. Now in the case of punishing criminals, the group that is held together is not the criminal's group. It is the rest of society, the people who punish the criminals. The criminal is neither the beneficiary of the ritual nor a member of the group that enacts the ritual, but only the raw material out of which the ritual is made.
