Lynching preachers: How black pastors resisted Jim Crow and white pastors incited racial violence

White lynch mobs in America murdered at least 4,467 people between 1883 and 1941, hanging, burning, dismembering, garroting and blowtorching their victims. Their violence was widespread but not indiscriminate: About 3,300 of the lynched were black, according to the most recent count by sociologists Charles Seguin and David Rigby. The remaining dead were white, Mexican, of Mexican descent, Native American, Chinese or Japanese. Such numbers, based on verifiable newspaper reports, represent a minimum. The full human toll of racial lynching may remain ever beyond reach.Religion was no barrier for these white murderers, as I’ve discovered in my research on Christianity and lynch mobs in the Reconstruction-era South. White preachers incited racial violence, joined the Ku Klux Klan and lynched black people. Sometimes, the victim was a pastor. Buttressing white supremacyWhen considering American racial terror, the first question to answer is not how a lynch mob could kill a man of the cloth but why white lynch mobs killed at all. The typical answer from Southern apologists was that only black men who raped white women were targeted. In this view, lynching was “popular justice” – the response of an aggrieved community to a heinous crime.Journalists like Ida B. Wells and early sociologists like Monroe Work saw through that smokescreen, finding that only about 20% to 25% of lynching victims were alleged rapists. About 3% were women. Some were children. Black people were lynched for murder or assault, or on suspicion that they committed those crimes. They could also be lynched for looking at a white woman or for bumping the shoulder of a white woman. Some were killed for being near or related to someone accused of the aforementioned offenses.Identifying the dead is supremely difficult work. As sociologists Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart Tolnay argue persuasively in their 2015 book “Lynched,” very little is known about lynching victims beyond their gender and race. But by cross-referencing news reports with census data, scholars and civil rights organizations are uncovering more details.One might expect that mobs seeking to destabilize the black community would focus on the successful and the influential – people like preachers or prominent business owners. Instead, lynching disproportionately targeted lower-status black people – individuals society would not protect, like the agricultural worker Sam Hose of Georgia and men like Henry Smith, a Texas handyman accused of raping and killing a three-year-old girl. The rope and the pyre snuffed out primarily the socially marginal: the unemployed, the unmarried, the precarious – often not the prominent – who expressed any discontentment with racial caste.That’s because lynching was a form of social control. By killing workers with few connections who could be economically replaced – and doing so in brutal, public ways that struck terror into black communities – lynching kept white supremacy on track. Fight from the front linesSo black ministers weren’t often lynching victims, but they could be targeted if they got in the way. I.T. Burgess, a preacher in Putnam County, Florida, was hanged in 1894 after being accused of planning to instigate a revolt, according to a May 30, 1894, story in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. Later that year, in December, the Constitution also reported, Lucius Turner, a preacher near West Point, Georgia, was shot by two brothers for apparently writing an insulting note to their sister. Ida B. Wells wrote in her 1895 editorial “A Red Record” about Reverend King, a minister in Paris, Texas, who was beaten with a Winchester Rifle and placed on a train out of town. His offense, he said, was being the only person in Lamar County to speak against the horrific 1893 lynching of the handyman Henry Smith. In each of these cases, the victim’s profession was ancillary to their lynching. But preaching was not incidental to black pastors’ resistance to lynching. My dissertation research shows black pastors across the U.S. spoke out against racial violence during its worst period, despite the clear danger that it put them in. Many, like the Washington, D.C., Presbyterian pastor Francis Grimke, preached to their congregations about racial violence. Grimke argued for comprehensive anti-racist education as a way to undermine the narratives that led to lynching.Other pastors wrote furiously about anti-black violence. Charles Price Jones, the founder of the Church of God (Holiness) in Mississippi, for example, wrote poetry affirming the African heritage of black Americans. Sutton Griggs, a black Baptist pastor from Texas, wrote novels that were, in reality, thinly veiled political treatises. Pastors wrote articles against lynching in their own denominational newspapers. By any means necessarySome white pastors decried racial terror, too. But others used the pulpit to instigate violence. On June 21, 1903, the white pastor of Olivet Presbyterian church in Delaware used his religious leadership to incite a lynching. Preaching to a crowd of 3,000 gathered in downtown Wilmington, Reverend Robert A. Elwood urged the jury in the trial of George White – a black farm laborer accused of raping and killing a 17-year-old white girl, Helen Bishop – to pronounce White guilty speedily. Otherwise, Elwood continued, according to a June 23, 1903 New York Times article, White should be lynched. He cited the Biblical text 1 Corinthians 5:13, which orders Christians to “expel the wicked person from among you.” “The responsibility for lynching would be yours for delaying the execution of the law,” Elwood thundered, exhorting the jury.George White was dragged out of jail the next day, bound and burned alive in front of 2,000 people. The following Sunday, a black pastor named Montrose W. Thornton discussed the week’s barbarities with his own congregation in Wilmington. He urged self-defense.“There is but one part left for the persecuted negro when charged with crime and when innocent. Be a law unto yourself,” he told his parishioners. “Die in your tracks, perhaps drinking the blood of your pursuer.” Newspapers around the country denounced both sermons. An editorial in the Washington Star said both pastors had “contributed to the worst passions of the mob.”By inciting lynching and advocating for self defense, the editors judged, Elwood and Thornton had “brought the pulpit into disrepute.” [You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Lynching memorial shows women were victims, too * Maryland has created a truth commission on lynchings – can it deliver? * An editor and his newspaper helped build white supremacy in GeorgiaMalcolm Brian Foley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.]] George Floyd protests aren't just anti-racist – they are anti-authoritarianThe massive protests that erupted across the United States – and beyond – after the police killing of George Floyd are billed as anti-racist mobilizations, and that they are. Demonstrators are denouncing police violence in minority communities and demanding that officers who abuse their power be held accountable. But I see something more in this wave of American protests, too. As a sociologist specializing in Latin America’s human rights movements and policing, I see a pro-democracy movement of the sort much common south of the border. The Latin Americanization of United StatesNormally, U.S. protests have little in common with Latin America’s. Demonstrations in the U.S. are usually characterized by pragmatic, specific goals like protecting abortion access or defending gun rights. They reflect, for the most part, an enduring faith in the constitution and democratic progress. American protests are rarely nationwide, and even more rarely persist for weeks.Latin America protests, on the other hand, are often sustained movements with ambitious goals. They seek regime change or an entirely new constitutional order. Take Venezuela, for example. There, millions have been protesting the autocratic President Nicolás Maduro for years, despite brutal suppression by police and the military – though the opposition has not yet succeeded in ousting him. Even Chile, a relatively stable democracy, in 2019 faced massive anti-inequality demonstrations demanding, among other things, that the country rewrite its dictatorship-era constitution.Today’s U.S. demonstrations call to mind this kind of Latin American anti-authoritarian movement. Americans’ famed faith in democracy has been eroding under Trump, a leader who, as a recent article in the Journal of Democracy noted, is “increasingly willing to break down institutional safeguards and disregard the rights of critics and minorities.” There is growing concern that voter suppression, especially targeting minority voters, will undermine the 2020 election. An ongoing study by sociologist Dana Fisher from the University of Maryland found that of hundreds of protesters in multiple cities, “people participating in the recent protests are extremely dissatisfied with the state of democracy.” Just 4% of respondents said they were “satisfied with democracy,” the author reported.And these demonstrations are spreading across the country, say protest researchers Lara Putnam, Jeremy Pressman and Erica Chenoweth – including into small, largely white towns with deeply conservative politics. In terms of nationwide participation, they have eclipsed the women’s marches of January 2017. Undemocratic tendenciesFor Latin Americans, much about the United States has become familiar since Trump took office that January. We recognize the strongman president, the politicizing of democratic institutions like the Justice Department, the open political corruption, partisanship on the Supreme Court and the president’s reverence for military leaders. As if to complete the Latin Americanization of this once archetypal democracy, Trump even deployed troops to suppress civilian protesters – something that’s almost never done in the United States.Washington has historically had few qualms, however, about using its military to influence Latin American politics and society. From the 1960s through the 1980s, authoritarian military governments ruled Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and beyond, with overt and covert U.S. support.Democracy retook Latin America by the last quarter of the 20th century, but the region’s recovery from authoritarianism is far from finished. My research on civil-military relations is part of a large body of academic literature showing that military forces remain a latent presence behind Latin America’s democratically elected governments. The scholar Cynthia Enloe calls this the “ideology of militarism.”From Nicaragua to Venezuela and Bolivia, many elected governments in the region have devolved into essentially authoritarian regimes. Their populist leaders use quasi-constitutional methods like plebiscites, voter suppression and constitutional amendments to strengthen their power. These undemocratic tendencies explain Latin America’s regular, sustained waves of massive anti-authoritarian protests. In a similar way, Trump’s undemocratic tendencies explain some of the energy driving these young, multiracial crowds on American streets today. According to University of Maryland researcher Dana Fischer, 45% of white protesters surveyed said Trump motivated them to march, compared to 32% of black people. Police violencePolice brutality is another underlying shared feature between American and Latin American protest movements.As Black Americans have long recognized, police brutality is an instrument of authoritarian repression. In some Latin American countries, police routinely execute those they determine to be gang members, drug traffickers or common criminals and face no consequences. We call it police vigilantism.Brazil is home to one of the world’s most lethal police forces. Last year, police in the state of Rio de Janeiro killed a record 1,810 people. The victims are predominantly young black and brown men from poor neighborhoods. In comparison, local police in the United States – which has about 100 million more people than Brazil – killed 1,004 people nationwide in 2019, according to a Washington Post analysis. Half of them were people of color aged 18 to 44. Most were male. The raw numbers may be lower, but I’m struck by the similarity of the victims and the rationale behind the killings – as well as the impunity that usually follows police shootings.I believe it is the overlap of continued police violence with the broader authoritarian creep in the U.S. that explains this unusual mass protest movement. Millions of Americans are taking to the streets for the same reasons as their Latin American counterparts – to fight for their lives, and for their democracy.[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.Read more: * Latest legal hurdle to removing Confederate statues in Virginia: The wishes of their long-dead white donors * Marcus Rashford, Black Lives Matter and a British premier who is out of his leagueLilian Bobea a mandate holder at the Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of people to self-determination.

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