James R. McGovern

Always being interested in what motivates otherwise normal (although some might question the normality of the redneck South) people to run amuck brutalizing those of another skin color or religion, I read two very interesting books on anonymous lynchings: James MCGovern's Anatomy of a Lynching: the Killing of Claude Neal and Howard Smead's Blood Justice, the Lynching of Mack Charles Parker.

Claude Neal (1934-Florida) was accused of murdering a young white girl whom he had known for many years. The crime enraged the community and in a particularly savage attack Neal was kidnapped, horribly tortured, his body mutilated, forced to indulge in self-cannibalism, and then hung on public display in the front yard of the girl's house. Little children were encouraged to poke sticks at the body. Mack Charles Parker (1959-Mississippi) was accused of the rape of a white woman (she was otherwise unharmed.) He was forcibly taken from the jail where he was being held, beaten, shot, and dumped into a local river. In both cases the complicity of the local police was required. Neal's lynching was even publicized over the local radio station. In fact, the event was so well publicized prior to the actual lynching (Neal was held for several days) that an American Legion group from Ohio on their way to Florida for a convention stopped in town to ask directions to the lynching. It was estimated that over 1000 people attended the lynching and public display of the body. Photographic postcards showing the hanging body (his mutilated fingers and genitalia quite obvious) were hot items, selling for 50 cents.

Both Smead and McGovern interviewed many of the participants in the lynching and many of the local community in preparation for their books. Both emphasize that lynching --here it is important to note that lynching as defined by these authors is not the bloodless hanging by vigilantes popular in western lore; but rather the extralegal punishment administered by a mob, often with the complicity of the police, usually including mutilation, burning and/or dismembering. The idea was to make the lynching as horrible as possible since lynching was an instrument of social control not revenge or justice. In fact it became the underpinning of the whole system of whi te supremacy. I t was not necessary to have committed a crime, merely to be black. Emmet Till was lynched in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. He was from Chicago and whistled on a dare not realizing the potential consequences.

Lynching was often administered capriciously. Several thousand blacks were lynched between reconstruction and the last lynching in 1981. By 1959 whites had become prisoners of their own bias. They had prevented blacks from voting through use of the poll tax and harassment. Because of this blacks were not on the jury rolls since so few had registered to vote. Then the Goldsby decision (ironically a state not federal supreme court ruling) held that blacks could not get a fair trial if no blacks were on the jury. Several blacks were released on technicalities. The Poplarville Mississippi community felt justified in lynching Parker because they rationalized he would be let free on a technicality if indeed he was convicted. (The guilt or innocence of Parker and Neal has never been established.)

The lynchers in most cases were upstanding, conventional normal people in the community, the so-called "good" citizens. In fact, they were defended by the community and not viewed as an aberration. The Poplarville lynch mob was never tried nor charged even though the FBI knew all the details and all the members of the lynch mob. Unfortunately murder is not a federal crime and there was not enough evidence to prove that Parker had been taken into Louisiana (even though just briefly) which would have made it a federal crime under the Lindbergh kidnapping statutes. There were strong pressures to conform very similar to those felt by those who cooperated with the Nazis. They wanted to perpetuate the status quo and to remain "accepted in a conformist society." Hannah Arendt has argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil that Eichmann and his type of "organization man" were more interested in establishing their usefulness to the Nazis than in venting hostility on the Jews. Ironically what precipitated the downfall of lynching as an effective weapon of social control was massive hostility from the rest of the country toward this kind of behavior. The Neal case created a tremendous amount of negative publici ty as did the Parker killing. McGovern marks the Neal lynching as the watershed of an era. Despite scattered incidents such as the Till and Parker lynchings and the murder of 3 civil rights workers in 1964, lynching virtually disappeared as an instrument of social control, especially as blacks became more empowered and part of the political mainstream following WWII and the civil rights movements.

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