Writing Victims’ Personhoods and People into the History of Lynching

Abstract

In mid-May 1922, newspapers around the country reported that a mob of 2,000 whites killed an African American teenager named Charles Atkins, near Davisboro, Georgia. Some headlines read “Negro, Fifteen, is Burned at Stake,” “Colored Boy, 15, Tortured and Burned by Georgians,” and “Negro Boy Tortured and Burned at State in Georgia After Killing White Woman.”1 The reporting reveals the alleged facts of the killing—whites accused Atkins of robbing and killing a white postal carrier named Elizabeth Kitchens. Themob tortured the boy for fifteenminutes before burning him at the stake. Most of the coverage suggests contemporary journalists and their readers accepted Atkins’s alleged confession as the gospel and did not connect it to the torture likely used to extract it. The newspaper coverage of Atkins’s killing was the official, most public record on his young life and atrocious death. Fitzhugh Brundage, along with Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Robert Zangrando, and George C. Wright, helped pioneer the establishment of lynching, along with other forms of racist violence against African Americans, as a distinct field of study, and thereby enabled scholars to tell stories about lynching, like Charles Atkins’s. In Lynching in the New South, Brundage explored the dimensions of more than 600 extralegal killings and provided a needed corrective to our understandings of lynching’s complex character, the sociocultural forces informing it, and the factors of its decline and thereby helped to lay the foundation for the field.2 He, and many of the scholars following in his wake, entered the archive asking and answering pressing foundational questions. What was lynching? How many were there? When and where did they occur? How did they vary? Who were the perpetrators and victims? How did communities and institutions respond? To what degree was resistance possible? What cultural products did lynching produce? What do the killings say about race, community, the state, or nation? This essay takes up Brundage’s expansion of the study of racist violence against African Americans and resulting efforts to understand their varied responses to it. In it, I embrace the spirit of this issue’s interest in taking stock of how far we have come as a field while suggesting future directions we might take. I urge more scholars to take seriously the full humanity of the victims whose stories they cover and to explore lynchings’ enduring personal impact on their people.3 Using correspondence from a lynched boy’s kin to tell a different story about his killing, I hope to make a case for scholars moving beyond an overreliance on fictive kin (as seen in artistic representations of lynching) and on people who only experienced