62 books in W&L libraries (Annie KW: 'lynchin*')
From a quick google.com search for 'lynchings maps':
The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1980-1950 by Robert A. Gibson (Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute)About Lynching (Robert L. Zangrando --Excerpted from a longer article in The Reader's Companion to American History. Ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty. Copyright © 1991)
review of LYNCHING IN THE NEW SOUTH: GEORGIA AND VIRGINIA, 1880-1930. By W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993. (HV6465 .G4 B78 --and there are others nearby on the shelf that would be apposite, including Festival Of Violence: An Analysis Of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 By: Tolnay, Stewart E.)
The racial violence that convulsed the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the subject of a number of historical works in the last fifteen years. Case studies of individual lynchings have comprised much of this scholarship. Despite the contributions made by the authors of these highly detailed accounts, historians have failed to explain why some regions of the South witnessed so many more lynchings than others.W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a Virginia native who is an assistant professor of history at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, has ventured into this breach. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 is the most in-depth treatment of lynching as a distinct form of violence since Arthur F. Raper's 1932 classic, The Tragedy of Lynching. Brundage wrote his doctoral thesis at Harvard in 1988 on lynching and since then has published several articles on the subject. Lynching in the New South, his first book, will shape the historiography of Southern mob violence for years to come.
Eschewing the case study approach adopted by many scholars, Brundage comprehensively compares lynching in Georgia and Virginia. Georgia was representative of the violence-prone Deep South, and Virginia was selected as a typical border state. Drawing upon news clippings and the treasure chest of data on lynchings painstakingly compiled by organizations such as the Tuskegee Institute and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Brundage devotes the first five of his eight chapters to a comparative analysis of the two states' experiences with vigilantism. In the balance of the book, Brundage contrasts anti-lynching efforts in Georgia with those in Virginia and examines the multiple forces that contributed to the decline of mob violence in both states by the 1930s. Brundage makes a compelling case that lynchings were complex, varied phenomena that cannot be understood simply as expressions of whites' collective obsession with reaffirming their hegemony over blacks. While some lynchings were carried out by huge, celebratory throngs and heavily laden with ritual, others were furtive executions accomplished by small groups.
Brundage explores why lynchings were so much more frequent in the Deep South than in border states. He argues convincingly that Virginians were no less committed to white supremacy than Georgians. Moreover, whites in both states vigorously defended segregation for decades after lynching had disappeared as a tool of oppression. Despite similar levels of racial animosity between 1880 and 1930, Georgia's 458 lynchings compared with only 86 in Virginia.
Brundage plots the geographical distribution of lynchings within both states through maps and tables. Virginia's southwestern counties' twenty-eight lynchings, more than any other region of the state, primarily occurred in the 1890s outburst of violence in the rapidly modernizing Appalachian region. The majority of these lynchings took place near "centers of change" such as Roanoke, Bluefield, and Richlands, communities which attracted black laborers as a result of a brief boom in mining and railroad building.
For Brundage, the social strains of industrialization and economic depression account only for brief spasms of lynching, such as occurred in many states during the early 1890s. Brundage's novel thesis is that lynchings resulted lss from the trauma of industrialization than from the form of labor relations prevalent in the region. Lynching was most frequent and persistent in the plantation South, where "sharecropping, monoculture agriculture, and a stark line separating white landowners and black tenants existed." Brundage argues that the likelihood of lynchings decreased "in rough proportion to the degree that a particular region diverged from the plantation South." In Brundage's view Virginia had relatively few lynchings because the Old Dominion was distinguished by diversified agriculture and ad hoc day labor. Largely absent from Virginia were the coercive and inherently violent labor practices that typified staple-crop agriculture throughout much of Georgia and other Deep South states. Virginia planters learned in the late nineteenth century that the "lash of wages was at least as effective as time-honored methods of coercive labor."
While Brundage demonstrates that the demise of lynching had a host of causes in both states, he suggests the proximate factor in Georgia's case was the introduction of New Deal programs into the southern cotton fields, where lynching had been endemic. Modern agricultural techniques and capitalist labor relations altered irrevocably the Deep South's plantation-based economy. The disappearance of lynching was also attributable to the proselytizing of humanitarian reformers and the gradual formation of a consensus among conservative elites that mob violence was an indefensible assault on law and order.
Brundage's argument that differing levels of mob violence in Virginia and Georgia represent patterns that prevailed throughout the South is both insightful and open to question. For example, Kentucky, another border state with a small plantation sector, has a significantly more horrific history of racial violence than does Virginia. George C. Wright has documented 353 lynchings in Kentucky between 1865 and 1940, one of the worst records in the South. Much of this violence occurred in central Kentucky where tenant plantations were uncommon.
Brundage's book also suffers from a distracting collection of minor errors. The number of lynchings exhibited on his map of Virginia does not match the number found in his text. Some of the footnotes would have benefitted from closer attention. The author, for instance, misstates the publication dates of three anti-lynching editorials written in 1925 by P. B. Young, the illustrious black editor of the Norfolk Journal and Guide.
The prospects certainly are strong that Brundage will receive a chance to correct these defects in a second edition. Lynching in the New South is a great leap forward in the rapidly evolving study of American vigilantism and catapults this young scholar to the forefront of historians struggling to understand the racial violence in our past.
Paul G. Beers, Esq.