DAVID A. GERBER
Lynching and Law and Order:
Origin and Passage of the
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law of 1896
Americans are increasingly discovering
that the United States has had a relatively
lawless and violent history and that the
problem of violent social disorder has con-
tinually plagued the nation. The truth
of this assertion as well as its implication for
a deeper understanding of the country's
social processes have tended to elude lib-
eral scholars bent on tracing the steady
progress of American society toward higher
civilization and on constrasting the
glowing promises of a democratic New World
with the corruption of monarchical
Europe. But the social traumas of the 1960's
have seriously undermined the
possibility of continuing to accept the old synthesis
of our past, with its promise of future
and inevitable glory. By heightening the con-
tradiction between what we have
professed and the way we have actually lived, and
by shaking our once firm confidence in
the liberal values to which traditional histo-
rians have responded, the last decade,
to which the late Richard Hofstader once re-
ferred as an "historical
slum," has forced us to confront the peculiar Americanness
of the Nat Turner Revolt, the Battle of
the Little Big Horn, and the Homestead
Strike. The 1960's have forced us at the
same time to examine the potentials within
our social order for curbing brutal,
anti-social urges.1
Given the long preoccupation of American
society with the problem of black-
white relations in the United States, it
is not surprising that racial violence has been
one of the most persistent of all types
of American social violence. The bitter, irra-
tional prejudices, the deep-seated
fears, the calculated manipulation of racial antag-
onisms for personal or corporate gain,
the cowardliness and evasiveness with which
we have confronted the fundamental
contradiction of our social values which racism
has posed: these have not readily lent
themselves to resolution within the estab-
lished social and political channels for
resolving conflict. At times, therefore, black-
white relations have seemed to take on
characteristics of a social war rather than to
1. For some outstanding reappraisals of
violence in American history, see Hugh David Graham and
Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in
America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, 1969);
Richard E. Rubenstein, Rebels in
Eden: Mass Political Violence in the United States (Boston, 1970); Rich-
ard Hofstader and Michael Wallace, eds.,
American Violence: A Documentary Record (New York, 1970).
Mr. Gerber is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of History, State University of New York at
Buffalo.
|
serious attempt to legislate lynching out of existence was made. The product of a collaboration between Harry C. Smith, a black state legislator and editor of the suc- cessful black newspaper, the Cleveland Gazette, and Albion Tourgee, a well-known white proponent of racial equality, the Ohio anti-lynching law of 1896 was a model for anti-lynching legislation in other states for years to come. The origin of the Ohio law, as it developed from state and national events and the milieu in which it was produced, have yet to receive scholarly attention. Nor in fact have the popular attitudes which sustained mob violence and made difficult the curbing of lynching received much treatment by historians. The tendency has been to see lynching as simply one more manifestation of racial intolerance, however lamentable, but almost as immutable as the racial hostility which gave rise to it.7 Though lynching was sustained by racial prejudice and certain cultural attitudes, it was behavior that ran counter to many of the political and social values in which nineteenth century Americans professed belief. Thus lynching and other forms of retributive mob violence presented serious problems of justification for the commu- nities in which they occurred. This was particularly the case for the respectable middle class citizens in smaller northern communities where, according to local newspapers, "the good citizens" and "men of high standing" were often said to be
7. Generally written by those participating in the struggle against lynching on one level or another, the historical literature on the subject has been relatively weak. The two best known works are Walter White, Rope and Faggott, A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York, 1929) and Frank Shay, Judge Lynch, His First Hundred Years (New York, 1938). |
|
who with the benefit of a just hearing might have been cleared of the charges against them.5 The majority of lynchings, of course, occurred in the rural South where over 90 percent of the black population lived at the turn of the century. Yet, there were lynchings and attempted lynchings in the North as well, particularly in the southern and central counties of Ohio and in neighboring Indiana and Illinois where a rela- tively large (for the North) number of blacks lived, often in an uneasy peace with large numbers of transplanted southern whites and their descendants.6 It was in Ohio, in response to a rash of lynchings in the early 1890's, that the nation's first
5. The N.A.A.C.P.'s investigation of the offenses with which victims of lynching were charged yielded the following for blacks: 35.8% murder; 19% rape; 9.4% attacks upon women; 9.5% "other crimes against persons"; 8.3% crimes against property; 12% miscellaneous crimes; and 5.6% absence of crime." The last category included such causes as "testifying against whites," "suing whites," "race prejudice," "defending himself against attacks," and even "wrong man lynched." "Rape" did not necessarily mean a con- summated sexual assault in the South of that day; entering a woman's room, a vague look of desire, a suggestive remark, or a touch were enough for a lynching to be justified on the basis of "rape." The cat- egory "attacks upon women" differed only in that newspapers, from which the N.A.A.C.P. gathered its evidence on lynching, stated the "rape" had not been committed. See N.A.A.C.P., Thirty Years of Lynch- ing, 9-10, 36. It is a strong comment on the psychodynamics of American racism that though "rape" and "attacks upon women" only constituted some 28.4% of the charges against black victims of lynch mobs, lynching was often defended only on the basis of it being the sole possible deterrent for interracial rape; see Baker, Following the Color Line, 198. At the root of the preoccupation with interracial rape was the belief in the uncontrollable sexual lust of Negroes, a belief which received a great deal of discussion in contemporary publications; see Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 273-288. 6. N.A.A.C.P., Thirty Years of Lynching, 31, 63-64, 85. |
34
OHIO HISTORY
consist of the ordinary give and take of
economic and social competition which have
generally characterized relations among
the various white groups found in Ameri-
can society.2
The late nineteenth and early twentieth
century was a time of increasing racial
tension. Promises of congressional
Reconstruction were being repeatedly broken or
ignored, and the black American was
sinking deeper and deeper into second class
citizenship. With the growing influence
of social Darwinism on racialist thought,
racial attitudes hardened throughout
society; at last intellectual legitimacy seemed
to have been found for the long felt
desire for the subordination of blacks. In the
South, increasingly after 1890,
legislation took the vote from the black man and be-
gan to segregate him in all areas of
social life, while sharecropping and the crop lien
system continued to enmesh him in a
cycle of debt and poverty. In the North, even
without specific legislation, the color
line hardened. Gains that blacks had made in
the twenty-five years since the end of
the Civil War through legislation and enlight-
ened public sentiment which allowed for
freer access to public accommodations and
the public schools were now increasingly
questioned and compromised.3
To a society that took pride in its
commitment to law, order, and justice, one of
the most disturbing manifestations of
the deterioration of race relations was the
growth of mob violence aimed at blacks.
Between 1889 and 1918, according to sta-
tistics gathered by the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(N.A.A.C.P.), 2,522 blacks were the
victims of lynch mobs nationwide, constituting
over 78 percent of the total number of
victims of lynching. In addition, numerous
urban race riots, which were generally
attacks by white mobs upon black neighbor-
hoods, took place throughout the nation.4
The most common incitant of such mob
violence against blacks was what
contemporaries called "Negro crime," a euphe-
mism which more often than not meant not
actually crimes upon persons or prop-
erty, but rather assaults upon the basic
canons and the daily etiquette of the Ameri-
can racial caste system. Thus, not
stepping out of the way when whites walked
down the sidewalk or the showing of the
least sign of interest in a white woman on
the part of a black man might be
examples of "Negro crime" in the South of that
day. By its very nature lynching denied
its victims the right to their say in court.
We shall never know, therefore, how many
persons suffered violent deaths, labeled
"fiends" or "brutes"
by the press for crimes they were alleged to have committed,
2. The most important recent effort at
providing theoretical perspectives for an understanding of racial
violence in the United States is Allan
Day Grimshaw, ed., Racial Violence in the United States (Chicago,
1960).
3. On the deterioration of race
relations in the South, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of
Jim Crow (New York, 1955), 11-108; in the North, see Ray
Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line
(New York, 1908), 111; John Daniels, In
Freedom's Birthplace: A Study of Boston Negroes (New York,
1967), 29-49; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem:
The Making of a Ghetto (New York, 1966), 4-52; Allen Spear,
Black Chicago (Chicago, 1967), 28-49. On the development of
intellectual racism and racialist thought,
see Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America
(New York, 1965), 144-175; George Fred-
erickson, The Black Image in the
White Mind (New York, 1971), 256-282.
4. National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the
United States, 1889-1919 (New York, 1919), 7-8, 29-41, 85. These riots bear
greater resemblance in type
to the Russian "pogroms" than
to the urban riots of 1919 in which blacks offered resistance to white in-
vaders or the ghetto insurrections of
the late 1960's. The riots of the late 19th century and the early years
of the 20th found blacks generally not
offering armed resistance to white invasions of their neighbor-
hoods; for a typology of racial
violence, see Grimshaw, Racial Violence in the United States, 105-115.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896
37
the leaders and defenders of lynch mobs.8
The primary rationale for lynching was
that certain heinous crimes, especially
rape and murders of unusual brutality
called for setting aside traditional legal proc-
esses and in their place substituting a
"higher law," the force of which was, in the
case of lynching, immediate and final
punishment at the hands of the enraged com-
munity. "Higher law" is and
has been an elusive concept. Commonly the term has
been used to describe an unwritten code
of justice, informed by the deepest human
moral passions, which supposedly lies
buried in the consciousness of all moral indi-
viduals and is ready to manifest itself
when a sense of outrage is quickened. The
written statutes, with their technical
precision, cannot, it has been said by exponents
of "higher law," embody this
profound sense of justice. Also, at times, the statutes
themselves have not been free of error;
they have on occasion committed societies to
unjust laws and untenable legal
processes. Under these circumstances, "higher
law" was used by individuals and
groups to circumvent statutes according to their
conception of justice.
The concept of "higher law"
has tended, therefore, to make strange bedfellows
since acts of cruel vengeance as well as
acts of idealism have been committed in its
name. In the nineteenth century, for
example, we find it was used by the enemies
of the Negro-the lynch mob and its
defenders-and by the allies of the Negro-the
abolitionists. The lynch mob, however,
was not bearing witness against the sub-
stance of unjust laws, as were the
abolitionists. It was, instead, simply impatient
with the slowness of legal processes and
the inability of law enforcement agents,
who were often held in extreme contempt
because of their commitments to such
processes, to exact the bloody and
immediate revenge demanded. Holding agents
of the law in contempt, the mob rejected
incarceration or trial of the accused; only
death would suffice if its conception of
justice was to be satisfied. Neither the mob
nor its defenders sought to explain
their actions by a reasoned statement of purpose,
as was most often the case with
law-breaking abolitionists. Rather, mobs and their
defenders revealed the purely vengeful
and irrational bases of their behavior when
they justified mob violence by employing
excessively passionate rhetoric. This is
evident in the editorials of an Ohio
newspaper which invoked "higher law" to justify
a lynching of an accused rapist in its
community: "There are occasions when statute
law abdicates in favor of higher law. In
dealing with human monsters each com-
munity is and always will be a law unto
itself. . . . Law is a good thing; order is
greatly to be desired. But the holy
rights of humanity and God's eternal justice are
above law and order." Under these
circumstances, the "higher law" is of course no
8. The author's perspective on lynching
is largely the product of a study of incidents related in various
secondary sources and of intensive
research into ten lynchings of blacks which occurred in Ohio during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
These took place at Oxford in 1877 and 1892; Sandusky, 1878;
Galion, 1882; Jamestown, 1887;
Winchester, 1894; Rushsylvania, 1894; New Richmond, 1895; Urbana,
1897; and Springfield, 1904. I have also
studied several serious, but unsuccessful attempts at lynching
which took place in Ohio at Washington
Court House, 1894; Akron, 1900; Lorain. 1903; and the well-
known Cincinnati riot of 1884.
On the participation of the "best
people" and the "good citizens" in mob violence, see, for
examples,
West Union People's Defender, January
4, 11, 1894, which said of a local mob that it was "composed of
the best men of the northwestern part of
the county"; Bellefontaine Examiner, May 17, 1894, which
spoke of local mob members as "ordinarily
good citizens." It must not be assumed, however, that par-
ticipation of persons of high status was
always the case. As of now, we know little about the social com-
position of lynch mobs.
38
OHIO HISTORY
law at all but is simply a rationale for
unleashing the passions for vengeance in an
angered mob.9
Also underlying the invoking of the
"higher law" where characteristically Ameri-
can attitudes toward popular
self-government, the evils of political centralism, and
the inefficacy of judicial processes. To
those who argued that the "higher law" was
simply a shameful excuse for lawlessness
and sadistic brutality, defenders of lynch-
ing argued that the ultimate standard of
justice in American democracy was the
people, not the courts and the laws,
though the latter were of course the creation of
the citizenry itself through a political
process which most Americans claimed to re-
spect. "The people rule this
country," said an Ohio newspaper in defense of the
lynching of a black accused of raping a
white woman, "and they have decreed that
in such cases every such monster shall
die."10 At the base of this demand (for the
assertion of unlimited sovereignty by an
enraged people) lay not only a feeling of
the special horror of interracial rape
itself or of other serious, violent crimes, but
also a belief that traditional legal
processes were much too lenient and inefficient,
that the courts could not be trusted to
mete out the people's conception ofjustice.
An unmistakeable disgust with Ohio's
courts, for example, was present during the
early 1890's, and the state's newspapers
often isolated this as an important casual
factor in several of the attempts of
enraged mobs to take the law into their own
hands. The respected Ohio State
Journal of Columbus stated in 1894 in connection
with a proposal for anti-lynching
legislation: "The leniency of the courts in this
state, the long-drawn-out machinery of
the law, and the ease with which a convict
who has any friends to push his claim
for parole or pardon can secure his early re-
lease from prison, have much to do with
the growing displays of lynch law in Ohio."
Only when a community came to be assured
that murderers and serious offenders
would be executed or receive long prison
sentences after speedy trials, concluded
the Journal, would mob
retribution cease.11
A lack of confidence in the courts and
elected and appointed law enforcement
agents helped to create the phenomenon
of the "law and order" mob: a mob which
rioted against its own legal agents in
the name of the preservation of order and the
substance, rather than the form, of
justice. Such mobs were involved in many of
the more typical lynchings of those
accused of crimes of various kinds. Two of the
most destructive urban riots of the late
nineteenth century were attributable to "law
and order" mobs. At Cincinnati in
the early 1880's anger over the failure of local
law enforcement agencies, which many
felt were the tool of venal politicians, to
prosecute those charged with serious
crimes had been brewing for years. Many of
the city's most respected citizens had
come to feel the need for direct action against
corrupt courts and police, and the
possibility of the formation of vigilante groups
9. Urbana Citizen and Gazette, June
10. 1897. In reference to the same lynching, the Urbana
Champaign Democrat neatly wove the themes of the higher law and the male
responsibility for the pro-
tection of female chastity, saying,
"The people of Urbana . . . have no apology to make for the lynching
of the negro brute .... They did their
duty and they are glad to have the world know that there is
enough of virtue and manhood in this
good city ... to visit the same righteous punishment upon every
such vile monster who invades their
homes and assaults their mothers, wives, and daughters." Ibid.,
June 10, 1897.
10. Urbana Champaign Democrat, June
10, 1897.
11. Ohio State Journal (Columbus),
February 23, 1894. For a protest against the interference of "mere
technicalities," in the words of
the Batavia Clermont Sun, with speedy retributive justice, see ibid.,
August
28, 1895.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896
39
was widely discussed. These complaints
crystallized in late March 1884 when a
young white man, a confessed murderer
whose father was thought to have spent
huge sums of money in his defense, was
given a relatively light sentence by a local
court. Charges of "fix" were
in the air as indignation swept the city. Shortly after
a public protest meeting, lynch mobs
attacked the jail where the prisoner was held.
Frustrated there by police resistance,
mobs battled police in the streets for several
days and burned the city's courthouse,
the symbol of their outrage, to the ground.12
Another "law and order" riot
occurred at Akron in 1900 when a mob, frustrated in
its attempt to lynch Lewis Peck, a black
man accused of raping a child, battled po-
lice for several hours and destroyed the
city's courthouse.13
Even though members of the mob were
willing to battle against police corruption
and the courts' failure to be concerned
with retribution, they were not above cor-
rupting the customary legal
investigative procedures, which followed lynchings, for
the sake of protecting their members
from legal prosecution. Thus, the mob's rem-
edy served only to worsen the disease.
Coroners' inquests, mandatory in cases of all
violent deaths, for example, seemed to
almost always, when the victims met their
deaths at the hands of lynch mobs,
result in the typical verdict: "The deceased came
to his death at the hands of persons
unknown."14 Such a verdict was hardly ever
warranted. Most lynchings during the
period took place in or near small towns
where people were generally known to
each other. Even when accomplished at
night, lynchings were rarely intended to
be secret; indeed, the desire to create a pub-
lic example of just punishment was often
present. Even where conspiracies did ex-
ist, they hardly were so closed as to
remain a mystery very long to local residents.
The tumult caused by an attempt to wrest
a prisoner from a jail also often worked
against the possibility of secrecy.
Whether out of sympathy for the mob's
work or in fear of jeopardizing political
careers, public officials often
displayed reticence in pursuing mob members. In the
South, coroners' inquests, when held at
all, usually were the only inquiries made
into lynchings. In the North, however,
investigations beyond the inquest were
more common, whether in deference to
enraged public sentiment against lynching
or to the Negro vote. In Ohio, for
example, investigations by grand juries and spe-
cial state initiated inquiries into the
activities of local officials frequently occurred,
but they usually accomplished nothing,
or at most rendered few indictments. Local
public prosecutors rarely showed much
zeal in seeking indictments against the per-
sons who elected them.15
Black responses to lynchings were a
complex mixture of anger and resentment
and fear and shame. Many, of course,
felt that the race, so recently admitted to full
citizen's status, was on trial in the
nation, and the blacks accused of crimes hurt the
image of the Afro-American. A common
immediate response, especially among
blacks of higher status was to lament
the shame the accused had brought upon the
12. Laird Kleine, "Anatomy of a
Riot, " Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, Bulletin, XX
(1962), 234-244.
13. Akron Democrat, August 23,
1900.
14. J. E. Cutler, "Proposed
Remedies for Lynching," Yale Review, XIII (May 1904-February 1905),
209.
15. Ibid.; Sandusky Register, September
17, 1878; West Union People's Defender, January 18, 1894;
Bellefontaine Weekly Examiner, June
7, 1894; Columbus Dispatch, August 9, 10, 11, 1897; Cleveland Ga-
zette, August
14, 1897; Baker, Following the Color Line, 208-209.
40 OHIO
HISTORY
race. Soon after the lynching of a young
man, thought to have raped a prominent
newspaper woman, at Urbana, Ohio, in
1897, Ralph W. Tyler, a Columbus black
newspaperman and political operative,
wrote to a friend of his frustration over the
defense of the young man by many blacks,
"I have no sympathy for the brute that
committed the rape .... There is always
a class of our people who are ever ready to
rush to the defense of some damned
brute, even at the expense of bringing disaster
to themselves, their families, and their
race, to say nothing of the general public at
large."16 Similarly, an
Akron black stated after the 1900 riot and attempted lynch-
ing in that city, "It is hard to
think that one wretch has made it so that I cannot walk
down the street and look a white man in
the face. I have lived here for 30 years,
have never been in any trouble, and am a
taxpayer. A scoundrel who has resided
in Akron less than a year commits a
crime that throws disgrace on every member of
his race. There is not a negro in the
city, who is not severe in his denunciation of
the ravisher Peck. There are many of
them who say that they would have been
glad to have had a hand in lynching him.
Akron negroes, as a whole are law abid-
ing citizens."17
Ironically, this statement revealed the
same willingness to break the law in order
to preserve the integrity of the law, as
demanded by the white "law and order" mob.
Fortunately, other blacks-no matter how
angered they were by lynching or the
crimes that were reputed to bring it
about-were more circumspect, realizing that in
the deteriorating racial climate of that
time blacks had nothing to gain from sanc-
tioning, let alone participating in, mob
violence. While many felt the situation of
the early 1890's to be desperate, few
spoke publicly of the possibility of retaliatory
violence. Though a national race
conference held at Cincinnati in July 1892 to dis-
cuss the alarming rise in lynching did
pass a resolution suggesting that black troops
and officers be trained at a proposed
Afro-American military academy supported by
the Federal Government and stationed at
"colored centers of population" for the
stated purpose of aggrandizing "the
colored factor in national glory," even this
veiled proposal for the establishment of
a black deterrent seems never again to have
been seriously discussed.18 Most
race leaders of the time would probably have
agreed with black Cleveland attorney and
political leader John P. Green who stated
in a newspaper article sometime later
that violence as a tactic for dealing with the
race's deteriorating status "is
utterly impractical and entirely out of the question,
not to be considered for a moment....
Even dynamite, that all potent leveler of
the weak and the strong ... is mewed up
in the custody of the [white] majority."19
While eschewing retaliatory violence,
blacks and their allies did not stop the
search for methods to put an end to
lynching. Not only were the number of lynch-
ings dangerously high, but lynching was
increasingly becoming a racial phenome-
non. While the number of lynchings in
the United States from 1884 through 1886
had been 533, of which 199 (37%) had
been of blacks, and from 1887 through 1889
had been 427, of which 233 (54%) had
been of blacks, by 1890-1892 blacks had
come to constitute 370 of the 511
persons lynched, a full 72 percent of the total.
16. Ralph W. Tyler to George Myers, June
5, 1897. George Myers Papers, Ohio Historical Society.
17. Akron Democrat, August 23,
1900.
18. Cleveland Gazette, July 9,
1892.
19. Ibid., October 6, 1906.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896
41
Lynching reached a peak in 1892. In that
year alone 226 persons (155 blacks,
68.5%) met death at the hands of lynch
mobs, an average of over four persons per
week.20
Fueling the fire of violent racial
hatred, the daily press increasingly utilized a sen-
sationalistic treatment of lynching
which irresponsibly exploited the existing shock
value of assaults upon racial and sexual
codes in order to attract and then hold a
mass readership. Typical of many
newspapers of the time were such headlines as:
"HE MUST DIE, IF NOT IN THE LEGAL
STYLE THEN BY THE LYNCH
ROUTE" and "OUGHT TO BE
LYNCHED." These accompanied articles that
spoke of the "lecherous
negro," the "colored brute," and the "colored
fiend."21
Some papers, perhaps unwilling to sell
newspapers by the intentional use of such
techniques, nevertheless, showed a
considerable lapse of professionalism in their de-
pendence on rumor and their uncritical
acceptance of local opinion in reporting
lynchings. Those papers dependent on the
national wire services, particularly the
Associated Press, simply printed stories
as they received them. The Associated
Press, especially, was criticized by
Negroes for its prejudicial, sensationalistic treat-
ment of the lynching of blacks and for
its employment of all the code words and
catch phrases of the day in discussing
the crimes which were reputed to result in
lynching. A black anti-lynching tract
published in 1892 singled out the AP for its
role in making lynching respectable:
The Associated Press, that agent so
powerful for the enlightenment of the public and the for-
mation of public opinion, gives its
assent to murder by branding the victims [of lynching]
with vile epithets, and many sleep in
bloody graves, stigmatized as "black fiends," "negro
monsters" and the like, who with
fair trials might have gone free.22
Through these terrifying, bloody days of
the early 1890's, Ohio blacks held prayer
meetings and passed resolutions, often
demanding that federal and state authorities
involve themselves in the struggle
against mob violence, particularly in the South.
But it was the lynching of a black
teenager closer to home in Adams County, Ohio,
in January 1894 which prompted black
leaders in the state to begin a serious search
for a legislative remedy for lynching in
Ohio. The boy had been taken into custody
in the first week of December by local
officials and charged with complicity in the
brutal murder of an aged farm couple
living in a remote section of the county.
Amidst threats of lynching, local
officials had taken him to jail in the next county.
When these threats subsided early in
January, he was returned to face trial only to
be seized quickly by a mob, said by a
local newspaper to be composed of the "best
men" of the community, and lynched.
No indictments were made in the case, how-
ever, because public sentiment,
including members of the grand jury, in the county
20. N.A.A.C.P., Thirty Years of
Lynching, 29: Grimshaw, Racial Violence in the United States, 58.
21. The headlines and racial epithets
quoted here are from the Cincinnati Enquirer, which was typical
of those papers which treated lynching
in a sensationalist manner. Cincinnati Enquirer, November 9,
1890, August 17, 1891, January 15,
February 21, 1892. On the paper's treatment of lynching, see two un-
published Howard University M.A. theses:
Shirley M. Smith, "The Negro 1877-1898, as Portrayed in the
Cincinnati Enquirer " (1948),
and Sebron Billingslea, "The Negro as Portrayed in the Cincinnati Exqui-
rer, 1901-1920" (1950). Billingslea has characterized
the Enquirer's position on mob violence as "a full
adherence to lynch law in so far as
Negroes were concerned." Ibid., 80-81.
22. A public letter: "To the
Colored People of the United States," March 1892. Item 6156, Albion W.
Tourgee Papers, Chautauqua County
Historical Society, Westfield, New York.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896
43
was in agreement with the mob, according
to newspaper reports.23
Immediately after the knowledge of the
lynching reached Columbus, Ohio's three
black state legislators, William H.
Clifford and Harry C. Smith of Cleveland and
Samuel B. Hill of Cincinnati, met with
Governor William McKinley in the hope
that he might be persuaded to use his
influence to pressure county officials to take
legal action against the mob. Strongly
motivating the three was, according to
Smith, the knowledge that though
lynching was fostered in the South, it-as well as
other forms of contemporary racial
discrimination-were "spreading north and
westward entirely too fast." The
three also called for petitions to the state legisla-
ture demanding an investigation of the
Adams County affair. Some weeks later,
Hill introduced a resolution denouncing
the lack of action by county officials and
appealing to "the law-abiding
citizens of Adams County to use their utmost endeav-
ors to ascertain the perpetrators of
this foul crime... ."24
Such efforts, while doubtless well
intentioned, availed little. Though the gover-
nor denounced lynching strongly, as
"murder-pure and simple," both he and the
legislature had few precedents upon
which to base the intervention into local affairs
that the black legislators requested. It
remained for Harry C. Smith and his long-
time friend and colleague in the
struggle for black rights, Albion Tourgee, to pro-
pose a law which would deal
comprehensively with lynching.
Though many years separated the
thirty-one year old Smith, then serving the first
of three terms he would have in the Ohio
House of Representatives, from the
middle-aged, Ohio-bred Tourgee, who had
been a Radical Republican official in
North Carolina during Reconstruction,
the two were united in what, to contempo-
raries, was a radical stand on the
southern question. Both urged the necessity of a
continuing commitment of both the
Federal Government and the Republican party
to the maintenance of the rights of the
southern freedmen at a time when such a
commitment was quickly fading. In their
pursuit of public support for racial equal-
ity and full citizenship for blacks,
both Smith and Tourgee through their writings,
speeches, and organizational activities
sought to mobilize public opinion against dis-
franchisement, segregation, and
anti-black mob violence. When Tourgee founded
a National Citizens' Equal Rights League
in 1890 to bring together all organizations
working for black rights around a common
program, Smith was an enthusiastic sup-
porter. During the early 1890's Smith's
Cleveland Gazette was always open to re-
prints of Tourgee's
"Bystander" column, which appeared regularly in the Chicago
Inter-Ocean. Later in the decade articles from Tourgee's own Basis:
A Journal of
Citizenship also appeared in the Gazette.25
Tourgee was no stranger to the fight for
a legislative response to lynching. For
several years, as director of his
citizens' league, he had campaigned actively for the
passage of federal anti-lynching
legislation which would establish the principle of
23. West Union People's Defender, December
21, 28, 1893; January 4, 11, 18, 25, February 15, 1894;
Cincinnati Enquirer, January 13,
1894; Cleveland Gazette, January 20, 27, February 3, 1894. On the first
black anti-lynching activities during
the 1890's, see Cleveland Gazette, May 7, 14, 28, June 4, 11,
July 9,
1892.
24. Ohio State Journal (Columbus),
January 18, 26, 1894; Cleveland Gazette, February 10, 17, March
10, 1894.
25. On Harry C. Smith, see William
J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (New
York, 1968), 194-198; Cleveland Gazette,
December 13, 20, 1941. On Albion W. Tourgee, see Otto H.
Olsen, Carpetbagger's Crusade: The
Life of Albion W. Tourgee (Baltimore. 1965). On the cooperation
between Smith and Tourgee, see ibid.,
310-313, 333.
44 OHIO
HISTORY
community responsibility and liability
for mob violence. The Harrison adminis-
tration, however, had proved itself
unwilling to make lynching a national issue.
Though Republicans had controlled both
houses of Congress during 1889-1893,
Harrison said and did little for most of
his presidency in response to the lynching
epidemic of the early 1890's. Indeed the
President waited until his last annual mes-
sage in December 1892, only three months
before a Democratic administration and
Congress were to take office, to
recommend passage of legislation to protect citizens
from lynching. The sole legislative
achievement on the subject during the Harrison
years was a federal law to protect
foreign nationals in the United States from mob
violence, prompted by the mob execution
of eleven Italian citizens at New Orleans
in 1890.26
Frustrated in attempts to win the
interest of the administration and unlikely to
find a sympathetic ear in Democratic
President-elect Cleveland, beholden to a sol-
idly Democratic South, Tourgee was
prompted by the Adams County lynching and
presumably by the presence of Smith in
the legislature to turn his efforts toward ob-
taining anti-lynching legislation in
Ohio. Shortly after the lynching, Tourgee ad-
dressed a public letter to Governor
William McKinley in which he outlined a plan
for a comprehensive anti-lynching law.
Pointing to the spread of violent crime in
America, not only lynching but also
homocide and armed robbery, he stated that
the nation was in a state of "near
anarchy" comparable only to Russia (then at-
tempting to confront revolutionary
radicalism under repressive, heavy-handed
Czarist rule). Tourgee also discussed the
fears of labor and farmer radicalism
which haunted contemporary political
conservatives. The year 1894 was after all
one of the worst years of a very severe
depression, the consequences of which were
manifesting themselves everywhere, much
to the horror of entrenched interests and
those of conservative temperament.
Agrarian radicalism in the South and West
had already given rise to the Populist
party, which now posed a threat to the bal-
ance of existing economic and political
forces in the nation. In the North, a large
number of bitterly discontended,
unemployed workers were organizing armies of
the jobless with the intention of
marching on the national capital. Pointing to the
participation of Adams County's
"best people" in the recent lynching, Tourgee, who
himself feared class as well as racial
violence, warned, "If the present financial con-
dition continues . . . we shall see
within a very brief time the same anarchistic spirit
displaying itself in the destruction of
property. The hungry and destitute will argue
that if the rich and respectable are not
punished for openly taking life they will be
equally exempt from punishment for
destroying the property which a large portion
of our people already believe has been
taken from them by legalized wrong."27
The law which Tourgee proposed was based
on the belief that because lynchings
"never occur except in a community whose citizens favor and approve
such out-
rage," the most efficient means to
check them was to make the entire community re-
sponsible before the law for mob
violence. This was to be accomplished, in his
words, by "touching the
pocket-nerve": establishing community financial responsi-
bility for lynching in the same manner
in which railroads were required to make fi-
nancial restitution to the legal
representatives of victims of railroad accidents in
which the operators were found
negligent.
26. Olsen, Carpetbagger's Crusade, 325;
Cleveland Gazette, June 4, 1892; Rayford W. Logan, The Be-
trayal of the Negro (New York, 1954), 85-86.
27. Tourgee's letter to the governor is
reprinted in the Cleveland Gazette, March 3, 1894.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896 45
Specifically, Tourgee suggested that the
legal representatives of victims of lynch-
ing in Ohio be allowed to sue the county
in which violence occurred for $10,000. If
the victim of the mob was not killed but
seriously injured, he might sue for not less
than $1,000, and if not seriously hurt,
for no less than $200. The money was to be
raised by a general tax levy in the
offending county. To counteract the possibility
of local intimidation of those seeking
redress under the law in the county where the
crime was committed, suits for damages
might be instituted in any adjoining county.
To check the possibility of relatives or
victims compromising or agreeing to take less
than the full amount of the claim, the
proposal carried with it the penalty of mis-
demeanor for such a settlement. Finally,
Tourgee's proposal did not exempt mem-
bers of lynch mobs from prosecution on
criminal charges.28
The Tourgee plan was founded upon certain
problematic assumptions about hu-
man motivation, violence, and interclass
relations. He assumed that the principle
of community liability in touching the
"pocket nerve" of the community's higher
status persons would move them to become
the most effective opponents of lynch-
ing. Also, as heavier taxpayers, they
would be discouraged from participating in
lynch mobs and would be forced to use
their power and prestige to restrain mobs
and bolster the efforts of local law
enforcement agents. To the extent that persons
of high status were members of mobs, it
was possible that the law might cause them
circumspection, though the size of their
loss in a heavily populated area would be
minimal-especially given the fixed
penalty advocated. Another weakness of the
law was that it considered the
composition of lynch mobs to be socially constant,
when in fact each mob might well be
different, depending on the size of the commu-
nity, the nature of the crime, and the
social class of its victim, and doubtless many
other variables. The proposal also may
well have overestimated the influence "best
people" had on those beneath them
on the social scale and the extent to which the
former would deign to involve themselves
in checking the violent behavior of the
latter. But perhaps the most fundamental
problem with the law was its dependence
on a calculation of rational
self-interest to dissuade a violent mob profoundly en-
raged by the occurrence-or rumored
occurrence-of a brutal crime, especially when
that rage was heightened by racial
prejudice and definite notions of the "place" of
blacks in society. Ultimately, while
such a law might be helpful to some extent, the
effort to eradicate lynching required as
its first prerequisite the most determined and
unyielding law enforcement by local
officials, perhaps supplemented when neces-
sary by the presence of the state
militia.
Yet, the Tourgee proposal was innovative
and certainly more comprehensive than
any other piece of legislation against
lynching enacted up to that time. In fact by
1894 only two states in the entire
nation, Georgia and North Carolina, had any anti-
lynching legislation at all. Both states
had passed laws in 1893 in response to the
outbreak of lynching in the South. The
Georgia law simply penalized sheriffs
found negligent in the protection of
prisoners threatened by mob violence and al-
lowed law enforcement agents to deputize
local citizens for the purpose of obtaining
aid in the protection of jails and
persons in custody. No penalty defined by the law
was greater than a misdeameanor, no
doubt offering little incentive for the sheriff to
become involved in a bloody struggle
against a mob. The North Carolina law was
even weaker. It simply made counties in
which lynchings occurred liable for the
28. Ibid.
46
OHIO HISTORY
costs of the investigation and
prosecution of persons involved in a mob.29
The need for anti-lynching legislation
in Ohio was again highlighted during the
legislative session in the spring of
1894 by the lynching of a black man accused of
raping an eighty-year old woman at
Rushsylvania in rural Logan County. The
woman identified her assailant just
hours after the supposed crime, but shortly after
the lynching she was not as sure as she
had been. As usual, though a grand jury in-
vestigation of the affair was held, the
refusal to indict known mob members closed
the affair forever.30
But pressing as the need for legislative
action appeared, Ohio's black legislators
were not united on a single approach to
an anti-lynching bill. Though Smith had
declared his intention to offer a bill
embodying Tourgee's proposal, his Cleveland
political rival and personal enemy,
William Clifford, took the opportunity presented
by a delay in Smith's plan to introduce
his own bill on April 18. The Clifford bill,
no doubt at least in part motivated by a
desire to upstage Smith, was hastily drawn
and unworkable. It defined as a
participant in lynching every person present at the
scene of mob violence, providing
sentences of five to twenty years for each. Not
only therefore might the Clifford
proposal have sent whole towns to prison (not to
mention uninvolved bystanders), but also
it nullified the possibility of there being
any witnesses by making everyone a
defendant!31
Smith's more comprehensive and viable
plan was in accordance with a revised
Tourgee proposal which reduced the
amount paid to victims of lynching or their
representatives, and was introduced a
short time later. It was doubtful, however,
that the General Assembly would act on
either bill that session since it was the cus-
tom of the legislature at that time,
when hearing matters relating to the interest of
Ohio's blacks, to wait until the blacks
had resolved the differences among them-
selves before proceeding. Thus, the only
anti-lynching measure passed that session
was Representative Samuel Hill's
resolution condemning the lynching at Adams
County. An opportunity had been lost,
and, since the state legislature was to begin
meeting biennially rather than yearly
after the 1894 session, action was postponed
until 1896.32
Events between the end of the 1894
session and the next legislature caused many
to lament the delay. Particularly tragic
was the violence at Washington Court
House. Attempts in that town to lynch a
Negro recently convicted for raping a
white woman, led to clashes between mobs
and state militia units which had been
rushed to the scene by Governor
McKinley. When the mob attempted to seize the
prisoner, the militia fired. As a
result, five youths in the crowd were killed and
29. Code of the State of Georgia,
Adopted August ... 1910 (Atlanta, 1911), II, 74-75; Thomas Womack,
etal., Revisal of 1905 of North
Carolina (Raleigh, 1905), 363. During
Reconstruction, in a minority of
southern states, there had been anti-mob
violence legislation, but in only South Carolina and Alabama
had the principle of community liability
been established. An Alabama law passed in 1868 to counter
violence against Radical Republicans
came closest to the Tourgee proposal, providing for the widow or
next of kin of murdered victims of mob
violence to recover $5,000 from the county where the violence
occurred. The South Carolina law allowed
for payment in the case of survivors of persons killed for
their political opinions. It is possible
that Tourgee, who served as a Republican judge during Recon-
struction in North Carolina, had been
influenced by these earlier, ephemeral measures, which are men-
tioned by Lerone Bennett, Jr., Black
Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction, 1867-1877 (Balti-
more, 1969), 376.
30. Bellefontaine Weekly Examiner, April
19, May 17, June 7, 1894.
31. Cleveland Gazette, May 12,
1894.
32. Ohio State Journal (Columbus),
May 9, 1984; Cleveland Gazette, May 12, 19, 1894; Ohio, House
Journal, 1894, p. 1007, 1098.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896
47
some twenty persons wounded. On the
heels of the nationally publicized Washing-
ton Court House riot came threats of
lynching at Newark and Hicksville, and sev-
eral weeks later at Springfield. More
violence occurred in 1895. At New Rich-
mond in August, a black man accused of
the murder of an aged banker, whom he
claimed had cheated him of a large sum
of money, was lynched. In October two
men were killed in clashes with
militiamen at Tiffin, to which the militia had been
called when a mob attempted to seize a
white prisoner who was being held for mur-
der of a popular local marshal.33
Such events no doubt helped to emphasize
the immediate need for anti-lynching
legislation when the newly elected,
overwhelmingly Republican state legislature
convened in January 1896. Harry C.
Smith, who would also obtain an important
revision of the state civil rights law
during the session, had been reelected promising
to pursue an anti-lynching bill.
Governor McKinley lent the prestige of a possible
presidential candidate to the cause in
his last annual message, making a strong plea
for anti-lynching legislation and
pointing to the tragic consequences of mob vio-
lence at Washington Court House and
Tiffin.
Smith introduced his anti-lynching bill
on January 20 and was optimistic regard-
ing passage. Allied with him were
several of the most prestigious newspapers in the
state, including the Ohio State
Journal (Columbus) and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Furthermore, unlike the 1894 session, he
enjoyed the full cooperation of his two
Afro-American colleagues in the House of
Representatives, William Stewart of
Youngstown and William Parham of
Cincinnati. Adding to Smith's optimism was
Tourgee's promise that he would appear
on February 5 before the house judiciary
committee.34
The bill, however, was soon in trouble.
Though the judiciary committee recom-
mended passage on February 20, a group
of house members of both parties led by
Representative Aquila Wiley, a Wayne
County Democrat, opposed not only the
principle of community liability but
indeed the very idea that anti-lynching legisla-
tion was needed in a northern state. In
forceful speeches Wiley called the bill a
"revolution of all laws and rules
of criminal jurisprudence." Assuming the guilt of
all victims of mob violence, Wiley
contended that the bill placed a premium on
crime by granting to the target of mob
retribution a large sum of money which, he
said, was in effect "a pension for
the worst criminals in the state." Wiley was also
something less than sensitive to
constitutional guarantees of a fair trial. Countering
Smith's claim that several southern
states were then discussing legislation modeled
after his bill, Wiley stated that such a
law was only needed in the South where
blacks were lynched for attempting to
exercise constitutional rights such as voting.
In the North, he stated, "Nobody is
lynched here except those who have been guilty
of so heinous crime that the indignation
of citizens arises in an uncontrollable
frenzy."35
The bill reached a vote on February 26
and was defeated. Though it received 50
votes, to the 34 cast against it, it
lacked a necessary constitutional majority of 57.
33. Cyclone and Fayette Republican (Washington
Court House), October 11, 18, 25, 1894; Batavia Cler-
mont Sun, August 28, 1895; Tiffin Seneca Advertiser, October
25, 29, November 1, 5, 1895; Cleveland Ga-
zette, October 20, 27, December 22, 1894, August 31, November
23, 1895.
34. Ohio State Journal (Columbus),
January 21, February 6, 1896; Cleveland Gazette, January 25,
1896; Harry C. Smith to Albion W.
Tourgee, January 27, 1896, item 8948, Tourgee Papers.
35. Dayton Daily Journal, February
28, 1896; Ohio State Journal (Columbus), February 27, 1896;
Smith to Tourgee, February 20, 1896,
item 9084, Tourgee Papers.
48 OHIO HISTORY
Voting against the bill were 12 of the
23 Democrats present and 22 of 89 Republi-
cans, while 28 members-most of them
Republicans-chose to absent themselves
from the floor. In general,
representatives from southern and central counties, where
almost all of the recent manifestations
of lynch law had occurred, failed to support
the bill. After several weeks of
intensive campaigning among house Republicans
the bill did pass on March 24 by a vote
of 61 to 22, but by only 4 votes more than a
constitutional majority. While a
relatively large number of southern Ohio Republi-
cans still continued to vote against the
bill or not at all, a change of 4 votes in the
Hamilton and Montgomery County
Republican delegations provided the margin of
victory. With a minor amendment, which
the house later approved, the bill then
passed the senate on April 8 by an
almost unanimous vote of 22 to 2. In its final
form, the Smith bill embodied all the
major provisions of the Tourgee revised pro-
posal with the compensation for the
relatives of those killed by mob violence cut in
half.36
The law soon became a model for
anti-lynching legislation in other states. South
Carolina in 1896 and Kentucky in 1897
passed laws directly patterned after the
Ohio law, while Illinois, Minnesota,
Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Vir-
ginia, and Wisconsin all approved
legislation after 1900 embodying the major provi-
sions of the law. When the N.A.A.C.P.
carried on a campaign for anti-lynching leg-
islation in Pennsylvania during
1912-1913, the Ohio law served as a model for its
efforts.37
Praised as it was elsewhere, the Smith
Law had to weather several serious chal-
lenges in the next few years, both in
and out of the legislature. Unfortunately, in
spite of the law, it was not long before
another lynching occurred in the state. At Ur-
bana in early June 1897 a young black
was brutally mobbed and lynched after
being charged with the rape of a wealthy
widow. Evidence reported in Harry
Smith's Cleveland Gazette in the
weeks following the lynching suggested not only
that there had been glaring cowardice
and remarkably poor judgment displayed by
local officials in guarding their black
prisoner and in their unsuccessful attempts to
quell the mob gathered outside the
Urbana jail, but also that very probably there
had been neither rape nor assault of any
type. As usual, however, neither local in-
quiries nor grand jury hearings nor
state-initiated investigations yielded punish-
ments for the mob and its supporters.38
The Urbana affair helped to provide an
excellent court test of the new law.
Shortly after the lynching, the
relatives of the victim instituted a suit for maximum
damages against Champaign County. At the
same time, a suit under the law was
pending in the Common Pleas Court of
Cuyahoga County, filed by three whites
36. Cleveland Gazette, February
29, March 7, 28, April 11, 1896; Ohio, House Journal, 1896, pp.
313-314, 320, 699-700; Ohio, Senate
Journal, 1896, pp. 602-603: Smith to Tourgee, April 8, 1896, item
9084, Tourgee Papers; Laws of Ohio,
1896, pp. 136-138.
37. James H. Chadbourn, Lynching and
the Law (Chapel Hill, 1933), 149-213; J. E. Cutler, "Proposed
Remedies for Lynching," 194-212;
Edward Pell, "The Prevention of Lynching Epidemics," Review of Re-
views, XVII (March 1898), 321-325; Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP,
A History of the National Associ-
ation for the Advancement of Colored
People (Baltimore, 1967), Vol I,
1909-1920, p. 214. Yet the Smith
Law has been neglected in the historical
literature on lynching. White's Rope and Faggott, Shay's Judge
Lynch, His First Hundred Years, and Chadborn's Lynching and the Law either fail
to make mention of
the law or simply list it along with
other state anti-lynching laws without discussing its influential and in-
novational character.
38. Urbana Citizen and Gazette, June
7, 1897; Urbana Champaign Democrat, June 3, 10, 1897; Cleve-
land Gazette, July 10, 17, 24,
August 7, 14, 21, 1897.
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law, 1896 49
who had been mobbed during labor
violence at Cleveland in 1896. In late July,
only three weeks after the Urbana
lynching, a Cuyahoga County judge rendered the
opinion that the Smith Law was
unconstitutional because it levied a tax for private
purposes and established fixed
penalties. In the Urbana case, a Champaign County
Common Pleas Court judge ruled the law
unconstitutional only to be overruled by
the county Circuit Court in October
1898. Both the Cleveland and Urbana cases
reached the State Supreme Court in 1900
on appeal, and the court sustained the
law's constitutionality. While the issue
was being fought in the courts, efforts to re-
peal the law in the General Assembly in
1898 proved unsuccessful. During the
1898 session, the law and the general
cause of anti-lynching were actually strength-
ened when Representative William Steward
of Youngstown, reelected for a second
term, obtained the removal of a section
of the Smith Law which it was feared would
be offensive to the courts. Furthermore,
a white legislator, Representative Chase
Stewart, successfully sponsored a bill
providing that persons breaking into jails and
attacking law officers in order to seize
prisoners for the purpose of lynching were to
be sentenced to terms of between one
year and ten years in the penitentiary.39
By the first decade of the twentieth
century Ohio, with the approval of her highest
court, had created a legal bulwark
necessary to protect a civilized community
against lynching. There is no way to
determine how many incipient mobs were dis-
suaded from forming by a knowledge of
the consequences for their communities
which the law now held, but the effects
of this legal bulwark appeared to be mixed
during the first decade of the new
century. While the number of lynchings declined
from five during the 1890's to two
during the first decade of the twentieth century,
the scale of violence in those attempts
at lynching and those anti-black riots which
did occur actually grew.
At Akron in August 1900 a mob led by,
among others, a prominent member of
the city council, became so enraged over
the rumor that a black man had raped a
white six year old that it fought for
ten hours with police for custody of the accused,
who had been spirited away to Cleveland
for safekeeping by an alert sheriff. Frus-
trated in its attempts at lynching and
spurred on by a newspaper which printed sen-
sational stories about the incident in
red ink, the mob ultimately dynamited the
city's government building-courthouse
complex and fired several nearby stores.40 It
was at Springfield, however, that the
most serious incidents of the early years of the
century occurred. There in 1904,
following the murder of a policeman by a Ken-
tucky Negro recently settled in the
city, a mob broke into the city jail, seized the
prisoner, and lynched him in a downtown
square. The lynching was followed by a
riot in which a white law and order mob
sought to uproot from the city a slum like
area of interracial vice and crime. Many
citizens of Springfield blamed the saloons,
brothels, and gambling dens found there
for the contempt for the law and its offi-
cers that was said to be so pronounced
in the city at the time among both blacks and
whites. The mob succeeded only in
burning down the tenements in which many im-
proverished blacks lived. The official
response to its violent deeds was predictably
ineffective and did little to strengthen
the forces of law and justice in the city. Only
a minority of those charged before a
grand jury were indicted, and little in the way
of punishment was meted out to those
forced to stand trial. Indeed, the only de-
39. Cleveland Leader, March 12,
1897; Cleveland Gazette, February 5, April 23, October 22, 1898,
March 25, May 6, 13, 1899, April 21,
1900.
40. Akron Democrat, August 24,
25, 1900.
50 OHIO
HISTORY
fendant actually charged with complicity
in homocide for his participation in the
lynch mob was acquitted.41
Springfield remained ripe for another
round of violence, and it came almost two
years to the day after the first riot.
The immediate reasons were attacks upon sev-
eral whites by blacks, whom the whites
were said to have taunted with racial slurs,
and by the shooting of a white railroad
worker by a black man. All the blacks in-
volved were quickly apprehended and sent
to the Dayton workhouse in order that
the scenes of 1904 might not be
repeated. But an enraged mob again attacked the
slums where vice and crime festered,
burning down a number of saloons and tene-
ments, dispossessing more of the
hapless, innocent black poor who were forced to
live amidst squalor and vice. Though few
mob members were jailed, the official re-
sponse was not without some merit: an
effort was made to regulate saloons and
close vice operations, and a civic
league of prominent white citizens was formed to
help combat vice and crime.42 The
rest of the decade in Ohio was quiet as far as ra-
cial violence was concerned, though the
lynching of a white man at Newark in 1910
at the hands of a white mob demonstrated
that the spirit of bloodlust which sus-
tained lynching was still capable of
inciting riot.43
While Ohio had actually witnessed relatively
few lynchings during the 1890-1910
period, the pattern of violence within
the state was broadly similar to that in the na-
tion at large. Following the peak of
lynching in the early 1890's, the incidence of
lynching began to decline after the turn
of the century. Never again, according to
available data, did the extent of
lynching ever reach its earlier very high levels. Ex-
planations of the peaks and ebbs in the
appearance of lynch mobs await a general
historical treatment of racial violence
in the United States. Perhaps as blacks be-
came increasingly mired in second class
citizenship in the first decades of the
twentieth century, trapped by poverty,
disfranchisement, and segregation in un-
questionable and unambiguous
socioeconomic and political inferiority, in the South
especially and to some extent in Ohio
and the North, the need to reinforce their
status through violent intimidation
declined. Perhaps law enforcement agents be-
came more conscious of their duty to
resist lawless mobs bent on lynching. What-
ever the explanation, there is certainly
a great need for historians to attempt to
come to terms with this bloody and too
easily neglected chapter of our violent na-
tional past.
41. Baker, Following the Color Line, 201-208;
Springfield Press-Republic, March 8, 9, 10, 11, 1904;
Cleveland Gazette, March 12,
April 2, 9, May 7, 1904.
42. Baker, Following the Color Line, 210;
Springfield Daily News, February 26, 28, March 1, 2. 3. 1906;
Cleveland Gazette, March 3, 10,
17, 31, April 7, 14. 1906.
43. N.A.A.C.P., Thirty Years of
Lynching, 85.
DAVID A. GERBER
Lynching and Law and Order:
Origin and Passage of the
Ohio Anti-Lynching Law of 1896
Americans are increasingly discovering
that the United States has had a relatively
lawless and violent history and that the
problem of violent social disorder has con-
tinually plagued the nation. The truth
of this assertion as well as its implication for
a deeper understanding of the country's
social processes have tended to elude lib-
eral scholars bent on tracing the steady
progress of American society toward higher
civilization and on constrasting the
glowing promises of a democratic New World
with the corruption of monarchical
Europe. But the social traumas of the 1960's
have seriously undermined the
possibility of continuing to accept the old synthesis
of our past, with its promise of future
and inevitable glory. By heightening the con-
tradiction between what we have
professed and the way we have actually lived, and
by shaking our once firm confidence in
the liberal values to which traditional histo-
rians have responded, the last decade,
to which the late Richard Hofstader once re-
ferred as an "historical
slum," has forced us to confront the peculiar Americanness
of the Nat Turner Revolt, the Battle of
the Little Big Horn, and the Homestead
Strike. The 1960's have forced us at the
same time to examine the potentials within
our social order for curbing brutal,
anti-social urges.1
Given the long preoccupation of American
society with the problem of black-
white relations in the United States, it
is not surprising that racial violence has been
one of the most persistent of all types
of American social violence. The bitter, irra-
tional prejudices, the deep-seated
fears, the calculated manipulation of racial antag-
onisms for personal or corporate gain,
the cowardliness and evasiveness with which
we have confronted the fundamental
contradiction of our social values which racism
has posed: these have not readily lent
themselves to resolution within the estab-
lished social and political channels for
resolving conflict. At times, therefore, black-
white relations have seemed to take on
characteristics of a social war rather than to
1. For some outstanding reappraisals of
violence in American history, see Hugh David Graham and
Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in
America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, 1969);
Richard E. Rubenstein, Rebels in
Eden: Mass Political Violence in the United States (Boston, 1970); Rich-
ard Hofstader and Michael Wallace, eds.,
American Violence: A Documentary Record (New York, 1970).
Mr. Gerber is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of History, State University of New York at
Buffalo.