Free A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Page B

charged with attempted rape for merely looking at a white woman. He was acquitted by a hung jury, but the message to black men in America was clear: If you even think about it, you’re dead.
    Technically McGee’s death was not a lynching, it was an execution. In the decades following the Civil War, more than four thousand black men were lynched in the former Confederate states, but by Roy Smith’s time, public lynchings had mostly given way to quasi-legal death sentences. (One notable exception happened in Oxford in 1935, when a mob broke into the city jail and lynched a black man named Elwood Higginbotham. He was killed while a jury was still debating his case in the courthouse across the street.) Between 1930 and 1964, 455 men were executed for rape in the United States. Most of them were black, and most of them were accused of raping white women. A black man accused of rape was a stand-in for his entire race, and he was lynched—or executed by the state—because a gradual mingling of the races had started to occur that racist whites were powerless to stop. Ultimately the purpose of lynching was not to dispense justice but to control the black population. Since lynching was primarily an instrument of terror, it mattered little whether the accused were guilty or not—in some ways killing an innocent man made even more of an impression than killing a guilty one—and the more gruesome the killing, the more terror it spread. As white power in the South gradually waned after the Civil War, lynchings inevitably attained a savagery that may have shocked even some of the perpetrators.
    In an 1899 case that became infamous throughout the South, a young black man named Sam Hose was burned alive in front of several thousand people, many of them Christians who had left their church services early to enjoy the spectacle. The ringleaders chained Hose to a tree, cut off his ears, poured kerosene on him, and then lit a match. When he finally stopped writhing, the crowd rushed forward and cut pieces from his smoldering body. When that was gone, they chopped up the tree he was chained to, and when that was gone, they attacked the chain itself. Later that day, spectators were spotted walking through town waving pieces of bone and charred flesh. Hose’s knuckles turned up at a local grocery store.
    Hose’s murder and many others like it warped the minds of an entire generation of blacks. So many blacks fled the South because of the threat of mob justice that farm owners began to have trouble finding workers for their fields. The South’s relationship with public torture culminated in 1937, when two black men were accused of murdering a white store owner in the town of Duck Hill, Mississippi. Duck Hill is about seventy-five miles from Oxford. The men were abducted by a mob on the courthouse steps and taken to some woods outside town where a crowd of several hundred men, women, and children had gathered. The accused would not confess to the crime—there was absolutely no evidence they’d had anything to do with it—so they were whipped with chains and then tortured with a blowtorch. Unable to withstand the pain, one of the men finally admitted to the killing and was quickly rewarded by being shot to death. His companion held out until his eyes were gouged out with a pickax and then he, too, confessed. He was finally doused with gasoline and burned alive.
    Roy Smith was nine years old when Duck Hill happened. It was one of the last public lynchings in America, but it clearly demonstrated that the white race was still a kind of third rail, and that if you were black and happened to touch it when it was on, you were dead. The deadly voltage of race continued to kill—more covertly—throughout the thirties and forties, but things were slowly changing. In 1951 the Civil Rights Congress, headed by a black man named William Patterson, submitted to the United Nations a document titled We Charge