Confounding White Supremacy

The following is a guest post by Michael Ayers Trotti, author of The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South, which is available now wherever books are sold.

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This was not what white southern state officials in the 1880s thought punishment should be.

When African American John Williams, condemned for murder, was publicly hanged in 1881, he “fairly danced up the steps of the scaffold with a light and airy step, bounding to the platform in three jumps and bowing to the crowd.” “I am proud to have such a large audience present,” said John Thomas (also black and condemned for murder) as he began his gallows oration. A Georgia man, Bible in hand and looking out over the crowd gathered at the scaffold, said he was “ready to open the meeting.”^[i]

            Perhaps we all have an idea of what lynchings were like: vicious white crowds taunting and torturing a black man in the era of Jim Crow before killing him.  

            For the most part, our vision of legal public hangings has understandably paralleled that visceral image: legal and less overtly cruel, sure, but a related phenomenon. Adding to that perspective was the fact that the legal, public executions earning extensive press coverage were disorderly affairs that sparked comment and therefore left the most records. The public nature of public executions we have assumed was an extra punishment, with the crowds white and condemning. That is exactly what I thought my project was going to center on, the idea I carried into my research on southern executions.

            Nope.

            Perhaps they were more typically condemning in the antebellum period, when not only the sheriff would have been white, but so would the minister praying with the condemned. But after the Civil War?

            One of the fastest changes in the postwar South was the exodus of African Americans out of white churches. For some time, enslaved Americans had gathered together after the white services on Sunday morning to have “real religion.” With emancipation, they could build their own churches—the most important buildings/community centers in southern black neighborhoods for generations—and have their own services with their own ministers.

That is exactly what I thought my project was going to center on, the idea I carried into my research on southern executions.

            Nope.

            Religion is powerful and has helped to hold together communities in crisis. The radically egalitarian message of Christianity—that anyone might be saved by the grace of God, and that the poor and abused might have at least as clear a road to heaven as the rich and privileged—have been mighty forces giving not just solace but real strength to southerners in times of trouble. 

The persecution of Jesus and early disciples gave witness to this philosophy, as did many Bible passages, such as in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus stressed God’s attention to the poor (“for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”) and meek (“shall inherit the earth”). And this from Paul: “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

“The wages of sin is death” is one of the most harsh lines of the New Testament, relevant to the gallows. But that is not where the passage ends: “—, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

            After the Civil War, African Americans condemned and their ministers imported this egalitarian vision of Christianity to the very public sensation of punishment at the gallows.

Large crowds of white and black (and male and female) southerners would gather at the gallows, but now joining the white sheriff on the scaffold would be African American men who would perform a service. A black condemned—85% of those executed legally in the South in the generations after the Civil War were black—and a black minister from those newly-formed African American Methodist and Baptist churches would lead the “congregation” in prayer, in hymns of salvation, and with a speech from the condemned.

85% of those executed legally in the South in the generations after the Civil War were black

            Typically, whether the condemned admitted his crime (as often he did, blaming liquor in particular) or not (also often), he would confess his sins, announce his assurance that God has forgiven him, and end with something like “I’ll see you all in heaven.” Reports regularly mention the crowd/congregation at the scaffold calling out, praising the Lord, and praying for his soul to be saved. 

This confronted—confounded even—the goals of punishment in the Jim Crow South, and it was not the only time that such confrontation was inspired by religion.  

Quakers opposed slavery early; John Brown made his fight against slavery a religious war: “before God, . . . I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!” A major Civil Rights organization was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and many of the fronts of the Civil Rights fight were led by ministers, with thousands of participants gathering in (and pouring out into the streets from) churches. Churches were such important community centers that they became targets of violence because of their challenge to white supremacy.

The most peculiar finding in The End of Public Execution may be that even the public gallows offered yet another example of religion and resistance in the darkest days of Jim Crow. African Americans used the egalitarian, shared culture of Christianity to transform the events at the gallows into moments celebrating the penitent death of the confessed sinner, longing for God’s grace. And aren’t we all sinners?

Whites grew afraid of what this notable lack of solemnity from punishment might mean: “the criminal, under the ministrations of his preachers, usually professed to have ‘got religion,’ and from the shadow of the gallows called on his friends to follow him to glory.” What was an ideal execution according to one Louisiana editor? The convict “never once stating that he would ‘go straight to Heaven and know everlasting glory.’ . . . There was none of the ‘Glory Hallelujah’ sensational accompaniment.”

The most peculiar finding in The End of Public Execution may be that even the public gallows offered yet another example of religion and resistance in the darkest days of Jim Crow.

            Around the turn of the 20^th century, white supremacists in the South recognized this challenge to their authority at the gallows and sought to make executions more terrifying to the underclass. Executions would become a “secret, silent monster” by killing condemned behind walls, witnessed only by white men.  It was those private executions that had more in common with lynchings (clothing “the murderer’s fate with a horrible and terrible secrecy”), not the public ones which had featured black ministers leading Christian services.

            Wherever and whenever there has been white supremacy, so also has there been resistance to it.  At times this resistance has been overt and in the streets, and other times more subtle. At times, religion has been a foundation for that resistance. We think we know the past, but history has twists and layers and nuances just like the present, reminding us of how rich, how weird, how unexpected is our complicated inheritance from the past.

We think we know the past, but history has twists and layers and nuances just like the present, reminding us of how rich, how weird, how unexpected is our complicated inheritance from the past.