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Lynching in the South
Following the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction ushered in a wave of civil rights activists and saw the enfranchisement of male African American voters. Previously enslaved people became elected officials, and Louisiana was no exception. The state saw the first African American governor in 1872 with P.B.S. Pinchback. However, the ascension of African Americans to elected office and the overwhelming power of the black vote threatened white people’s established white supremacist hierarchy. Thus, Reconstruction was followed by “Redemption,” a period during which Southern Democrats and others passed legislation to disenfranchise African American voters again, ensuring that the nation would not see another black governor for a very long time.
Lynching was part of this white retaliation against Reconstruction era policies. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has compiled reports of over 4,000 lynchings of black people in the American South between 1877 and 1950. Most notably for understanding Gaines’s novel is that 549 of those lynchings took place in Louisiana, which was among the top three states with the most reported lynchings after Mississippi and Georgia. Point Coupee Parish where Gaines lived had 11 reported, while the bordering parishes collectively had 49.
The reasons cited for lynching an African American varied, though it should be noted that white people in the South did not necessarily require a reason beyond the perceived need to enforce racial control over black people who they viewed as subhuman. Nonetheless, many lynchings occurred as purported “justice” for accusations of extreme crimes such as murder and rape. Impatient with the justice system, white people often took accused black people from jails and lynched them in the streets, often by hanging. In many cases, the victims’ innocence was proven following their deaths, underscoring the fact that all the white people had to go on was an accusation or suspicion. No investigation or trial took place. Other times, African Americans were lynched for nothing more than a perceived social transgression such as bumping into a white person or not using the title a white person wanted them to use when speaking to them. For public spectacle lynchings, thousands of white people—including men, women, and children—gathered to watch and participate in the torturing and killing of an African American person and then commemorated the day by purchasing souvenir ropes or body parts and posing for photographs with the bodies.
In South Louisiana specifically, the racial hierarchy that white people used lynching and terror to uphold formed the backbone of the sugar economy. While white members of the planter and merchant classes held real control, lower class white people such as white Cajuns often felt like they were in competition with African Americans for land and money on the sugar plantations and, thus, perceived themselves as having a vested interest in the destruction of blackness in order to retain their place above black people in the hierarchy.
Many of the documented lynchings in South Louisiana occurred in response to what white people perceived as slights against the sugar economy such as alleged attempts to burn down parts of plantations or alleged affronts to sugar plantation owners. In general, though, there were fewer lynchings in South Louisiana than in the North where the primary crop was cotton. However, they did occur and the fear of them was ever-present. One reason lynchings were less common in South Louisiana is that the white planter and merchant classes there had more trust in the legal system to dispense lethal justice. In the North, where executions were rarely ordered, lynchings occurred often. In contrast, South Louisiana conducted many more public executions of black people, often sans sufficient evidence or fair trials.
This connection helps explain why in A Gathering of Old Men, there are two primary fears simultaneously at work in the black residents of Marshall. The most overwhelming seems to be fear of lynching by Fix and his family. Many of the black characters such as Billy, Ding, Johnny Paul, and Tucker list ancestors who were beaten or lynched. Alongside this fear of extralegal violence is a fear of legal violence or execution, which Mapes threatens the men with when he describes what happens to men who face the fate of the chair they bring up from Angola. This history of lynching clarifies that both legal and extralegal violence were used to uphold racial hierarchies and that the black residents of Marshall had every reason to fear both. Despite this fear, of course, they gather and prepare to face Fix or whoever else might come their way.
Equal Justice Initiative. “Lynching in America.” EJI, www.lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2020.
Pfeifer, Michael J. “Lynching and Criminal Justice in South Louisiana, 1878-1930.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 40, no. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 155-177. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4233571. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
Pfeifer, Michael J. “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching: Collective Violence in Reconstruction Louisiana.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 50, no. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 189-201. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25478643. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.