The Southern rite of human sacrifice.

Human sacrifice to a vengeful deity conjures savage and exotic images that distance us from the practices they represent as being strangely inhuman. Just as savage but sadly less exotic are images of lynched African Americans in the Southern United States. The word, "lynched," rips from reluctant memories shame, guilt and anger at white atrocities. The stark reality behind the word is an historical presence that haunts heedless patriotic celebration and belies professions of national innocence; its condensation of white peoples' fury and black peoples' anguish is as intensely malevolent as human sacrifice.

The reality suffuses recent work by scholars who have turned their imaginations to explaining it as something other than calculated terror in service to the powerful. Recent publication of essays edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South joins his previous work and that of Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck together with earlier books by Jacquelyn Hall and Joel R. Williamson to prepare a solid base upon which to fashion an understanding of lynching in the American South. (1) Since the early eighties, scores of scholars have turned their attention to specific, dramatic incidents of violence, (2) or to patterns within geographical areas or in relation to associated issues such as gender. (3) The achievements have been impressive; but few have noticed what a few African Americans such as Gwendolyn Brooks understood when she observed that "the loveliest lynchee was our Lord." (4) Few have wondered why it made sense to imagine a lynched black man as Christ upon the Cross, (5) that is, to imagine lynching as a human sacrifice. Yet it is just this compound of sacrifice, crucifixion, and death and its association with the predominate religion of the lynching-South that begs discussion.

Scholars once attributed racial violence to a gladiatorial frontier tradition complemented by the logic of slave discipline. Violent resistance to Emancipation and Reconstruction contributed further to the terror that enforced white supremacy. Masking the political functions of their acts, white men invented a "sexual alibi" for punishing African-American men: the latter stood accused of having "ravished" white women. African Americans, then social scientists, and eventually activist Southern white women criticized the alibi. In briefly sketching the trajectory of these more substantial explanations of lynching, Fitzhugh Brundage points out that sociologist Robert Park influenced scholars to view mobs as made up of "individuals poorly integrated into the larger society." The solution to lynching, therefore, would have lain in integrating everyone happily into a modernizing society. Because they associated lynching with "rural culture corrupted by drunkenness, irreligion, illiteracy, poverty, and excessive license," social scientists thought, that as the South became urban and industrial, mechanisms of social control "would become strong enough to discourage extra-legal violence and discredit the values that sustained it." In another venue, psychologists who were arrested by the "sexual alibi" found in "individual psychopathologies" related to sexuality and gender and in the mechanism of projecting ones own forbidden thoughts onto black men the source of white men's lust for lynching. For some scholars, seething sexual tension in an ineffectively modernized section--especially in its most "backward" areas--explained lynching. (6)

Historians of the South, Brundage notes, took little interest in lynching until the late 1970s. By then they had been schooled by social historians to believe that collective action was not the result of "failed social control or exceptional social and psychological states" but of "ongoing political and economic contests present in all societies: violence is a by-product of 'normal' collective action" (7) The view that lynching was the act of well-integrated as well as poorly integrated individuals, and that it was an expression of long established relationships received an innovative jolt from Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's Revolt Against Chivalry. Moving closer to the meaning of social dramas (8) such as lynching than previous scholars, Hall rooted the act, in the patriarchal racial and gendered orders of the South to demonstrate how a complex public ritual could convey a broad range of meaning in one brutal event. The ritual reminded Southerners where each person fit into the racial, gendered, and otherwise classified hierarchy of community life. Sharing Hall's sensitivity to the sexual if not the gendered meanings of lynching, Joel Williamson teased out the psychosexual tensions released by economic insecurity and the shame evoked by fusing sex and failure in the dynamic conflicts of a changing culture. Bertram Wyatt Brown and Edward Ayers both delved into the culture of honor to explain collective white violence, but Ayers--like Williamson--reminded students to take account, too, of anxieties induced by an erratic economy. (9)

Perhaps the most impressive sustained analyses of lynching in the past few years have been Brundage's Lynching in the New South and Tolnay and Beck's A Festival of Violence. The latter is based on a careful, thorough analysis of an impressive county-by-county inventory of data on lynching in a South without Virginia and Texas but with Kentucky. The demographics, economics, seasons, and politics of lynching were patterned and correlated statistically to establish trends. Tolnay and Beck found that lynching was "an integral element of an agricultural economy that required a large, cheap, and docile labor force." When African Americans began to leave the South in significant numbers, they argue, "violence and terrorism" began to disappear. They agree with Brundage (as they understand his thesis) that lynchings were "crucial mechanisms" for assuring perpetuation of a plantation economy. (10) But Brundage also emphasizes that lynching happened where the political culture made it feasible. (11) The essays he brought together in Under Sentence of Death nicely complement these two books: they remind scholars of certain important things. These include the necessary insistence that along with lynching, there was near-lynching, and legal-lynching each of which has to be studied in order to understand the cultural context and public acts of ritualized vengeance. The essays also point out that the social genesis of lynching implies distance, hierarchy, polarization and objectification of the other. Although events can fall into patterns, analyzing the complexity of each case will yield knowledge that still confounds generalization. Combinations of gender and race, sexuality and distance, alternative trajectories and local histories all need to be taken into account before master patterns can be amplified. In his introduction, Brundage sketches the problems still to be addressed: the nature of contagion, a broad as well as close analysis of the linkages of "gender, race, and class", and lynchings that did not happen--among other things.

The causes of lynching are complex; there is no one explanation: but in the list of things still to study, it is important to add "studying religion and lynching." Above and around discussions of lynching endures a penumbra that entices further comment,. The lynching of Leo Frank, observed a reporter, was almost "like some religious rite;" there was a "curiously reverent manner" and sense of "grave satisfaction" among the actors. (12) Nancy MacLean's brilliant analysis of Frank's murder, seizes on the identification of Jews with capitalism but virtually ignores the lesson that adult Christians had learned before being plunged into Christ's death and raised in his resurrection: Jews had repudiated "the Lord." There are other references in Under Sentence of Death to ritual process or the "ritualized manner" in which blacks were lynched. (13) There was something quite transcendent to the experiences of individuals and groups in a public lynching; but that transcendence has been difficult to engage in a meaningful way except to recount that it was there--not knowing exactly what "it" was in "its" mystery and horror even though mystery can sometimes be understood in images. In Patricia Schechter's compelling discussion of "how anti-lynching Got its Gender," for example, there is a vivid "figure" the presence of which underscores silence about the meaning of ritual, symbol, rite, "reverent," and "satisfaction"; for these words all refer to a religious sensibility reflected in the crucifixion of a black man on a modern Golgotha. (14) The silence about the meaning of religion in discussions of lynching is strange because of the common knowledge that crucifixion, an act of violence, is at the very core of the Christian paradigm that was so essential a part of Southern culture. African Americans understood this; they understood that Christ, too, had been lynched.

Silence on the religious context is surprising because of the furtive presence of the sacred in studies of Southern violence. Discussions of lynching have sometimes referred to the almost "primitive" religion of people from whom perpetrators were presumed to have come. Thus, Arthur Raper, in his classic survey of The Tragedy of Lynching, included a religious profile of counties in which lynchings occurred. Although he located the causes of violence against blacks in racial prejudice, poverty, illiteracy, isolation, and ignorance, (15) Raper seemed to believe, too, that religion had something to do with lynching, but he could not quite come to terms with the meaning of his data in this regard. (16) He understood that religion and community (17) were fused and observed that clergymen all too easily reflected the values of their community that nullified Christian compassion for black victims. The ministers, he thought, had not taught their people "the sacredness and value of human personality." (18) This phrase reflected an insight of a Personalist Methodism (19) with which Raper was associated by background and marriage; but as a social scientist instead of a student of religion he could not move beyond his dismay that the religion which enshrouded lynchers was so primitive, simple-minded, and savage. Jacquelyn Hall, like Raper, fully understands that her story takes place within the Bible Belt, (20) and is profoundly sensitive to the gendered and class meanings of ritual behavior such as lynching. She exploits Clifford Geertz's famous analysis of a Balinese cockfight to define lynching through his description of a drama in which participants are caught up in "good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of an aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animality." (21) The weight of the citation in the context of Hall's discussion is on "masculinity" and "animality"--not "good and evil." The religious context--the biblicism of the Bible Belt, or Geertz's understanding of Religion as a Cultural System, within which such rituals occurred, was not Hall's concern in her innovative book on gender and lynching.

One who did attempt to address religion and violence was Joel Williamson in his prize-winning Crucible of Race; (22) but he preferred to think of religion as an alternative activity after a cycle of violence and radical racism rather than context. He ignored the gradual waxing of organized religion in the South throughout the period from 1870 to 1930 and preferred to think of it as an eruption of extreme "other-worldliness" after racist violence had failed to bring relief from the dissonance between the imperative and the empirical. Moreover, Williamson believes that what he calls "fundamentalism" and "otherworldliness" were innovations of the period after 1900, when they were merely part of a quickened and heightened trajectory of religious life begun with the First evangelical preaching of the 1740s and 50s. (23) Even though he ignores religion as context and thinks of it as an alternative to violence--not an altogether inappropriate hypothesis. Williamson does attempt to link religion and violence in a meaningful way. And so does Suzanne Marshall (24) who believes that both "were intertwined in the Black Patch [tobacco-growing] culture" of western Kentucky and north central Tennessee. This conclusion was suggested by encountering a religion that had scourged the area since the Great Revival with a wrathful, punitive divine Patriarch, draconian in His ways with men, women, children and nature, Whose punishments modeled the harsh penalties His devotees "meted to violators of community standards." The fusion of violence and religion flowed from Family as well as church; violence seemed an appropriate way for patriarchs to rear children and train wives, and it was not always easy to distinguish divine Dora human wrath. (25) Marshall does not argue that religion alone caused violence, nor does she explain how religion fused with other variables; but she does attempt to factor it into a cultural context that shaped a pervasive understanding of sanction, morality, and justice in an agricultural region under strain. (26) Except for Williamson's ruminations, Marshall's analysis is virtually unique. A survey of articles and books on Southern violence yields few if any other discussions of such a connection: so does a survey of works on religion in the South. (27) The subject is a mystery--not exactly a "black hole" that pulls light as well as matter into its maw, perhaps, but certainly a cultural artifact that begs explanation.

Part I Segregation and Religion

The overlay of religion and lynching in the New South is a compelling problem because both were waxing in influence throughout the region at the same time and because it seems natural to believe that a simultaneous increase in religion and illegal collective violence throughout the same region is at least a paradox if not a contradiction. Southerners may have been sloughing off the rule of church discipline by the Great War (28) but they had been joining the church in greater numbers since the 1880s. To be sure, southern white communities of faithful people had been devastated both physically and morally by the Civil War; their buildings had been damaged or destroyed; their colleges ruined; their periodical silenced; their young men slaughtered; their women demoralized. (29) Gradually churchmen and women had to rebuild local churches, colleges and denominational hoards and buy new presses. During the 1890s. denominational bodies could report that new educational and missionary facilities were producing more members than ever before although percentages of church members in the general population did not surpass 50 percent. (30) Statistics, however, under-report the percentages and numbers of people who could be said to have come under the influence of religion. That influence included a majority of people because women were a majority of church members and it may he assumed they did attempt to live up to cultural expectations by influencing both their children who were not on the rolls, and the men with whom they lived. Moreover, an increase in support for temperance legislation also suggests a trajectory of moral influence mixed of course with political calculation and class imperialism. (31) In addition, religion suffused the educational facilities of the New South; A.D. Mayo certainly believed as much. As Commissioner of Education for the U.S. government, Mayo--a Unitarian minister not infatuated with evangelical Protestantism--found in the South what he thought was a socially redemptive process. He saw it in the increasing number of young women in the 1890s who were entering Southern schoolrooms much as missionaries were entering foreign lands: to teach children the basic tools and values with which to bond communities together in a "common Christianity." (32)

Mayo's words are quaint--only a few people talk as he did anymore; when they do so their political agenda appears to be exclusivist and punitive. But this educational enthusiast was writing at a time when religions idiom and "progress" coincided. His words suggest that it is sectarian--secular or not--to identify the sacred only with "organized religion," magic, superstition, or "belief in God." All these things are religious, to be sure, but religion is something other than belief in a transcendent being, assent to a creed, participation in church, or the preternatural compulsion to sing "Amazing Grace" at funerals. Reference to a "common Christianity" was Mayo's way of saying that human brother-and-sisterhood were beginning to suffuse Southern society in such a way as to make it "Christian", that is by his lights, inclusive and just. That the trajectory of lynching was upward, that a "common Christianity" was anti-Semitic, and that he was far too optimistic even for a liberal are not impediments to understanding him. His insight was that religion can be understood as the pervasive ambience of society, the sum of its values, perhaps its ruling ideology--the pattern of ideas that normal people are supposed to believe. (33) Mayo's desire for a "common Christianity" was a comment about the future of society and reflected a belief in religion as integral to harmonious social relations. He understood that "religion" was to be found not only in institutions defined as "religious," but in the quality and tone of a society. Religion may be understood as the complex symbolic representation of the social order through which we learn transcendence. The concept of God may be birthed from our social consciousness--the experience of which transcends self to make demands upon us through a sacred sense of the other. Historians, at least, should consider this broader and socially rooted insight of the classic sociologist Emile Durkheim who argued, a disciple observes, "that religious feeling is the individual's awareness of the group." (34) Penalties--such as lynching--exacted of persons who were certified as having violated community in some way could be said to have been expiation rendered a power superior to individuals. (35) The rite, "reverent manner" and "grave satisfaction" reported at Leo Frank's lynching were not, therefore, strange; they flowed naturally from the situations and culture in which they were observed.

Durkheim's pioneering insights into the social creation of religion have helped generations of students move beyond traditional ways of working with "religion." The presence of the religious in society apart from specifically "religious" institutions and ideas relating to deity is now a commonplace assumption--no matter what the method or theory with which they work. (36) As anthropologist Mary Douglas said long ago, "We shall not expect to understand religion if we confine ourselves to considering belief in spiritual beings however the formula may be refined." (37) Clifford Geertz's classic statement of religion as a cultural system is an example of this fact, but with an innovative advance. The phrase, pervasive ambience, used above, is analytically vague, but it was used as a way of referring to that sense of a total contextual reality that may confront an observer in a moment of recognition as it did Dorothy when she exclaimed to Toto that the two were "not in Kansas anymore." A better word is "culture" which Geertz calls an "historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols." (38) Inviting scholars to think of religion as a cultural system, he defines a religion as (39)

   a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish
   powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and
   motivations in [humans] by (3) formulating conceptions
   of a general order of existence and (4)
   clothing these conceptions with such an aura of
   factiticty that (5) the moods and motivations
   seem uniquely realistic.

Symbols are models of as well as prescriptions for "reality" (40) and even a symbolically stark Southern Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian Christianity over the years employed symbols of Crucified Christ, Baptism, open Bible, communion wine, sanctified bread, and empty cross to represent the Christian drama of salvation. Symbols may also be negative and still convey a range of meanings that pattern imaginative as well as everyday life. Black skin, white skin, the "New Negro," the "black beast rapist," "pure white women," "Reconstruction," "Whites only" placards, "Colored" signs--all these were symbols that established "powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations, by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of facticity that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."

If "religious feeling," from wherever else it evolves, flows from "an awareness of the group," segregation must be understood as a religious system. An obsession with the "group"--the structure and substance of human relations--commanded Southern white elites and their mimetic constituencies after the Civil War. The media of this obsession were race and gender; and the ways in which law and violence worked together to distance human beings from each other, establish boundaries between them, and make dangerous the breaching of those boundaries were the ways of religion. Segregation was, to be sure, a political-economic system with laws to control workers essential to industrialization. (41) The system was developed from the logic of slavery and the separation of free blacks from whites in antebellum cities. Whereas masters and slaves may have lived in proximity before the war, vertical boundaries that reinforced white supremacy before Appomattox became horizontal and diagonal afterwards to fulfill the same functions. Southern public schools were segregated from their very beginning; and by 1884 nine of eleven southern legislatures had banned miscegenation. (42) Along with the acceleration of violence against African Americans there was also a remarkable increase in laws segregating the races during and after the 1890s. (43) By the end of the century, Southern states were preparing to separate blacks from the political system, too, through widespread disfranchisement. (44) The exclusionist goal of this policy suggests, as Howard Rabinowitz has pointed out, that the alternative to segregation was neither equality nor integration but exclusion from all public facilities; that is, there were worse things that whites could have done. (45)

What they did do in passing laws to perfect their mastery was to fabricate an elaborate system of boundaries, taboos, and etiquette in order to establish purity [whiteness] and therefore impurity [blackness] by distancing black people from white and making proximity dangerous. The Virginia historian and author Philip Alexander Bruce thought the results of this process to be "notable achievements" of "constructive local statesmanship." Segregating laws, Bruce believed, preserved racial "integrity," prevented conflict, avoided "moral contamination," discouraged "social equality," and relieved whites of painful "close physical contact" with blacks. (46) The "moral contamination" which Bruce feared flowed only in one direction. Like so many other whites, Bruce viewed African Americans in terms of pollution; when African Americans were marginalized by segregation laws, they were also made more dangerous in the minds of whites since the margins in culture are always dangerous. (47) Whites' perception of the danger inherent in a new generation of black people undisciplined by slavery was reinforced by the actions of whites themselves in legalizing segregation and sustaining it with a sacred aura.

These feelings of pollution and danger at the proximity of an anomalous other were reinforced by the tension that supported the "sexual alibi" for segregation. Bruce linked segregation of public education and the banning of miscegenation as part of the same impulse; and historians have long noted the hold of a "rape complex" on southern whites when justifying lynching. (48) But to assign the mental patterns behind this connection to a neurotic obsession unsupported by statistics is beside the point. In the cases of both lynching and segregation, the bodies of white females symbolized the social body whether as little girls in grammar school or as women in masculine fantasy; the idea is commonplace. Symbolically coupling white females with black males underscored the danger of crossing boundaries and quashing distance and stipulated the meaning of any breach. A culture that already made woman a religious surrogate or mediator for men as well as the fount of purity found it amiable indeed to establish boundaries and distances that pushed black men to the margin of society to "protect" her. The pervasive belief that female virginity was sacred, together with the Christian conviction that sexual intercourse outside marriage was immoral, and whites' widespread assumption of their "racial" superiority, combined with aversive custom and political will to fabricate a system that had the tone, ambience, and imperative of certainty and facticity. (49) Segregation became consensual among whites. It was right; the order of the universe confirmed it. It was sacred in that it placed certain issues beyond dispute; it approached holiness because it established boundaries that demanded individuals "conform to the class to which they belong.... Holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation." (50)

Lillian Smith certainly remembered segregation as sacred. In Killers of the Dream, she mused in a compelling, reflective and unforgiving manner about the ways in which "sin and sex and segregation" had suffused the lives of Southerners. (51) She could not separate the three motifs. Although as an adult she believed that Christian love impugned segregation, as a child she had been taught together with other white children "to love God, to love our white skin and to believe in the sanctity of both." (52) She had learned sin and guilt within the incubation of a "warm, moist evangelism and racial segregation" sanctified by a religion "too narcissistic to be concerned with anything but a man's body and a man's soul." The body was the "essence of morality" based as the latter was on the "mysterious matter of entrances and exits" with sin hovering "over all doors." Critics, favorable or not, commented on her weaving of Freudian insights into the fabric of her interpretation, but her primary focus was segregation. It was part of the mental process of pushing "everything dark, dangerous, and evil" to "the rim of one's life" where danger lurked. Evil was thought to have been purged from the sin-distressed self so that [white] Southerners had become fascinated with other people's evil rather than their own and had somehow been compelled to find personal salvation in the "death of Christ" without carrying the cross. (53) Their self-conscious, narcissistic purity had shriven them of a capacity for understanding religion as service to the kingdom. Although Smith was in what she later recalled as "a kind of amnesia about God" (54) as she wrote the first edition of Killers, she nonetheless understood the intense psychic power of values taught by God-like parents who fused the spectrum of white-purity-god-aversion into a powerful compound of holiness. She has been classified as part of a "shame and guilt" school of Southern writers; she was too passionate, eloquent and angry, her critics thought: she was too much the prophet. (55) Many people thought she was a heretic. Since she attacked the primary religious structure of the South, indeed she was.

Smith's scrutiny of separation and purity was based on her own experience and an outraged recognition of the meanings of the spectrum, sin-sex-and-segregation. The cultural patterns that connected law, practice, morality, and meaning were woven and sewn together through a long creative process and could reflect differing local fabrics and textures. If locales produced varieties of separation, those who were separated and those who did the separating never varied. "Moods and motivation" of distance and boundary suffused the South and if legal patterns fabricated with regard to transportation after 1890 were new, they merely replicated the sensibility reflected in educational segregation from the very beginning. There were few white Protestants in this medieval faith of hierarchy, separation, and distance; if there was a polarity between racial "conservatives" and "radicals" with the latter representing the pole of racial hatred, (56) both poles existed within the broader consensus of segregation. With the passing of each year after the onslaught of economic depression in the late 1880s and early nineties, separation-boundary-and-purity became ever more pervasive in public discourse and action. Prohibition movements in southern states provided impetus to the process of enforcing purity until the South became legally dry before the First World War. The white ribbons of women's temperance symbolized a ubiquitous Southern "purity" associated with light skin, white supremacy, self-discipline, and teetotal clarity. If repressed male sexuality combined with shame at economic weakness and guilt for real or imagined sexual trespasses accounted for the rage with which white men confronted the "threat" from black men, (57) there was a broader surge in white society that transcended the rage while making it authentic. That the body was elevated to sacred status--its boundaries secured, its orifices purified, and its distancing perfected--reflected a society whose elites were determined to master and to control. The fusion of southern Protestantism with prohibition, repressed sexuality, and the canonization of white women all combined to blur distinctions between sacred and secular where race was concerned.

Part II: Religion as Punishment

In a society where distinctions and dichotomies were so important, the clergy insisted upon polarity, too. Ultimately, perhaps, the dread polarity between God's Wrath and human sin was the most appropriate way of putting the matter; for "belief in someone's right to punish you," wrote Lillian Smith "is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture." If the polarity were softened into Christian-and-world, or salvation-and-sin, or love-and-hate, binary opposition nonetheless persisted as it did in segregation. The word that reflected one side of the dichotomy has traditionally been "other-worldliness;" but it was an otherworldliness plunged deep into this world. Christian commitment required a rigorous life of self-discipline, self-reproach, and self-denial which was decidedly "this-worldly." Equally so were the many distinctive ways in which communities of faithful people expressed their faith and communal connections all of which were particular (at least to insiders) and each of which was authenticated by appeal to Holy Scripture especially on contested issues. If "otherworldliness" was belied by the enchantment of "this" world in segregation, it was also affirmed by the need to understand and justify pain, moral failure, and death. Otherworldliness seemed to be associated with dogma, "narrowness," biblicism, and irrelevance. This perspective, as one son of Dixie remembered, demanded that preachers speak "of God, of Truth, of Righteousness, of Judgment, the same yesterday, today and forever." (58) The perspective was authoritative and certain. The hard and rigorous fundamentalism which Suzanne Marshall found throughout the violent culture of the Black Patch, and the primitive Calvinism which caught Arthur Raper's Methodist-lensed eye among vigilantes, and the punitive wrath which Lillian Smith recalled were all caught up in the Christian tradition that suffused Southern culture. Wilbur J. Cash captured the meaning of this "otherworldly" religion that so affected this world as "primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice." (59)

It is correct now of course to distance oneself from Cash for his sexism, whiteness, and capacity for sacrificing accuracy on the altar of meaning. His lack of proper respect for white southerners' intellect, or at least intellectuals, seems to be perfectly captured in the phrase. Citing a "primitive frenzy and the blood sacrifice" conveys the image of a savage South, a "savage ideal" that oversimplifies the region so cruelly that we are bereft of the generous ambiguity of a complexity that includes educated if tedious clergymen, tortured if ineffectual writers, prophetic if isolated dissenters, and quietly heroic women. But the phrase lingers because it is true; if "primitive frenzy" is translated as the result of repressed sexuality, challenged patriarchy, and reasoned violence fused in the act of murder, we may be able to understand it in less emotionally freighted ways. But the frenzy remains. The meaning of "blood sacrifice" is much more complex; and yet it is at the core of southern white fundamental Protestantism. Blood sacrifice is the connection between the purpose of white supremacists, the purity signified in segregation, the magnificence of God's wrath, and the permission granted the culture through the wrath of "justified" Christians to sacrifice black men on the cross of white solidarity.

To write that Christianity permitted lynching within a segregated society is not merely to make a homiletic point. Nor is it on the other hand a preface to linking specific acts of violence with specific people in a specific place who did hideous things because God told them to do so. To be sure, some people did believe they were absolutely justified, which amounts to the same thing; but that is not the point. The point is that because historians know that religious mood, ritual action, and moral outrage at black men were associated with illegal community acts of violence, students may want to go beyond mentioning such things to ask how we might understand this nexus, realizing that the task is not simple and that the connections run through the mentality of white Southerners if not necessarily their consciousness. At issue is neither the integrity of Christianity nor the ignorance and credulity of simple folk who believe myths that "sophisticated" modernists have rejected. At issue is the cultural reality behind what we have known existed but never had the temerity to confront; and the place to begin is with Lillian Smith's understanding of Christianity as punishment, and W.J. Cash's perception of the "blood sacrifice." It is important to ask: "How could Cash's words have come so easily; could he have meant that whites literally sacrificed blacks?" "Where could he possibly have conceived the fantastic metaphor that birthed such a preposterous idea?" The question is not rhetorical; there is a specific answer: "In church."

If Cash sloughed off loyalty to his Baptist past with the help of Baptist professors at a Baptist college, he could never escape the homiletic images of his youth, especially the most dramatic ones. And "blood sacrifice" is dramatic; it was an essential part of Southern culture before the Second World war because it was central to the Christian narrative of salvation. That narrative was preached throughout the South for over two hundred years, and its most vivid images, plots, and symbols lay in "Jesus Christ and Him Crucified." That phrase was the substance of preaching throughout the region although themes varied: they covered the range of Christian doctrines that began with salvation from sin. Theoretically at least, salvation lay not in abstinence from certain specific sins or in repression of the sinful self although abstinence and repression were among the means of revealing one to be a "child of God." Instead, salvation lay in Christ's work on the cross; it lay in being justified by faith, certainly, but also in reliance upon His saving act through which a "price" had been paid and satisfaction made; it lay in sanctifying a life of obedience in anticipation either of a struggle for perfection or faithful perseverance. The Bible which contained the story of salvation was to be read in the same way as sermons were to be heard--from the perspective of the cross; for if the Bible contained the Word it was the Word made flesh who dwelt "among us" and Who was crucified to set the universe aright. This was what the Apostle Paul had called the scandal of "the Cross." And a few agreed that the idea was indeed scandalous. When Thomas Jefferson edited the Bible into the "Life of Jesus" so as to focus on what really mattered in Christianity, every Christian who had been washed in the blood of the Lamb knew that Jefferson had ripped salvation out of the Bible and left only an impossible ethic and a remarkable man; that was all, and that was not enough. (60)

If churches and ministers could agree with Jefferson that the Christian life required strict morality, they dissented from the view that morality was sufficient for salvation as Socinians [Unitarians] and Deists were said to believe. If Christians who responded to evangelical preaching expected to be made forcefully aware of salvation through an inner conviction, the focus was not on sentiment alone, or the moment of illumination or on the physical manifestations of sentiment and illumination, but a "saving knowledge" that Christ had "died for me." The words, "saving knowledge," meant that "religious experience" went far beyond a mere inner feeling of being "saved." "Saving knowledge," meant knowing that one had been made just--justified--before God, but not justified through the experience itself. That experience had content: an inner knowledge that the crucifixion was "for me" and that it had conferred pardon through an objective act by a specific man[-God]: "Jesus Christ and Him Crucified." Every doctrine of Christianity that represented the supernatural action of salvation always returned the believer to the mystery of the Cross.

It would be naive indeed to assume that every Christian in the South could have successfully passed an examination in systematic theology on the meanings of the cross. But no matter how imperfectly understood or internalized and no matter how much the slippage between private doubt and public profession, images and feelings of salvation were expressed throughout the music, songs, and hymns that were the theological tracts of folk who sang of

... my Savior and God! O he died on Calvary, To atone for you and me And to purchase our pardon with blood. (61)

Familiar references to Christ as "Savior," "blessed Savior," "the Lamb," the "dying, risen Jesus," the "redeeming Lord" (62) all referred to a supernatural, vicarious and sacrificial act upon the cross:

Christ, the Lamb of God was slain He tasted death for me (63)

He did so "Appeasing the wrath of God" and shedding "forth his blood as the cost" of doing so. The mystery of this would be made clear in the end-time when Christians should at last,

... see the Savior With shining ranks of angels come, To execute his vengeance, take his ransom'd people home. (64)

References were not to a teacher: but to Lord and Savior. Southern Protestant Christians shared with the ancient Church and the Roman Catholic Church the western inheritance of Jesus of Nazareth transfigured and revealed as Christ and Savior: He was the Word through Whom creation came in the beginning and through Whom after the Fall it was restored through Crucifixion. No one had to understand it precisely ("we see through a glass darkly") for no one could, but everyone who claimed to be a Christian had to profess that salvation came through a saving act of God: and that act was referred to in the words of "price," "cost," "ransom" "penalty," "pardon," "satisfaction" and above all: "atonement."

At the heart of salvation were the metaphors of retributive justice; at the center was a symbol of torture and death. The word for Christ's saving action was "atonement." However differently various communities of faith may have interpreted the implications, influences and results of atonement, there was nonetheless significant agreement among white Southern Christians before 1930 on the signal importance of Christ's sacrificial death. That agreement reflected a pervasive moral sensibility that emphasized divine wrath with, cosmic penalty for, and condign punishment of sin. To be sure, the religion also emphasized vicarious payment of the penalty for sin by the Son of God through whose action salvation was made available; but according to tradition that action was a sacrifice--an act of violence. To be clear: the Christianity of the white South was a religion of sin, punishment, and sacrifice. It was a religion of violence. "Death is the penalty of sin," wrote the definitive Southern Baptist theologian of the late nineteenth century; (65) it was imposed, wrote a future bishop, by the "wrath of Almighty God" (66) Whose nature, warned a fellow Methodist, was to "punish the guilty." (67) As a Presbyterian divine insisted, "Vindicatory Justice [is] Essential to God." (68) This insistence on punitive justice reflected the absolute righteousness of God as opposed to the total depravity of humanity which had fallen through the disobedient agency of Adam-and-Eve whose guilt was imputed to all those who came afterwards. If imputation was a point of contention between Calvinists and Wesleyans (69) it did not preclude agreement until possibly the turn of the twentieth century that human beings deserved death as the moral penalty for the sin that thoroughly corrupted them. If they deserved death, however, how could they be saved from such a penalty? Their mere repentance, which was after all, their own act, could achieve nothing; the offense was too great, the resulting stain--some would say total depravity--was ineradicable. (70) Only an infinite act of Infinite Being could bridge the infinite distance between Divine Righteousness and human corruption.

Justice was associated with blood sacrifice. Because the Old Testament background of sacrifice revealed that "the orisons of faith and penitence must be accompanied with the streaming blood of a victim and the venging fire of the altar," (71) the words associated with sacrifice--propitiation and expiation--were assigned to the Work of Christ. "God set forth Christ," wrote E.Y. Mullins, "as a propitiation for our sins:" he reminded people who already knew it that "Death is the penalty of sin." Christ bore "the penal consequences of the sin of the race because of his complete identification with it." He "endured the wrath of God ... in the sense that he permitted the sin-death principle to operate in him." (72) Christ died, Thomas Ralston reminded his own readers, in propitiation for human sins, and referred them, as would any knowledgeable Methodist preacher, to Paul's Epistle to the Romans [3:25]: "Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forebearance of God. [KJV]]" Propitiation for both the Baptist and the Methodist as well as their Presbyterian and Episcopal colleagues meant that the punitive justice of Ultimate Reality had been meted out, the penalty for sin paid. (73) Moreover, because in the Old Testament the sacrifice of a victim was expiation, that is, it removed the sins of the people, both concepts applied to Christ's sacrifice. (74) That He acted for humans by becoming one of them while remaining "very God of very God" meant a vicarious (75) sacrifice because finite human power could not pay the infinite price: He acted in humanity's stead, atoned, that is "paid the price" demanded by God's justice, and "washed" humans in His blood.

Ministers knew that not all of their laity thoroughly understood or believed the complex connections that biblical scholarship provided; but there were other means to make the essential point. For people seeking to interpret their salvation and discipleship in a dialectic relationship between faith and hope, consciousness and orthodoxy could be conflicted. When it was time publicly to repeat the Creed or renew the Covenant or affirm the reception of "amazing grace," the sound of ones own voice uniting with others in song, prayer or public recitation confirmed the mystery represented by orthodoxy at least for the moment. Such people heard countless familiar and ritualistic sermons, whether read, exposited or chanted, that described the blood flowing from Redeemer's head, hands, side, and feet; they felt the terrible jolt against His searing wounds when the cross was plunged into the earth. They could not fail to have been impressed, as was the young Wilbur Cash, with the "primitive" feelings that would later allow him to understand the "blood sacrifice" as essential to the Mind of the South. The message of sin, guilt and punishment associated with the elemental and universal symbol of blood was conveyed further by exhortations, prayers, hymns, recitations, scowls, maternal tears, and patriarchal condemnation. All worked to cry "guilt," to teach guilt, to instill guilt: to make the offending soul shudder at the enormity of his/her guilt. The feelings that sustained the credibility of the incredible doctrine of penal satisfaction had afflicted generations of white Southerners by the twentieth century. Even tepid or rebellious believers learned that religion was punishment: they endured or remembered or heard about the connection in church trials; they heard and felt the depth of divine wrath from angry preachers; they learned, too, from admonishing looks, raised eyebrows, whispered confidences and the anguish of awakening sexuality the pervasiveness of sin and the necessity of retribution. All these things when contrasted with the righteousness of God taught children of conventional Christians that Someone had a Right--as Lillian Smith recalled--to punish you; it was also an Obligation. The mood focused on a mysterious, cosmic and violent transaction at the crux of Christian consciousness. (76)

The source of this penal theory of atonement was presumably the Bible; everyone who accepted it certainly believed as much; but it was not. As the great Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulen pointed out long ago, a thousand years had actually lapsed between the crucifixion and the first mature statement of the theory. During that time various understandings had circulated within the Church, and some of these played upon the motif that Aulen thought best expressed atonement in the phrase, Christus Victor. Conceding elements of sacrifice but pointing out that these neither emphasized punishment nor employed legal metaphors, Aulen argued that the message of Paul, the early Church, and Patriarchs was of a Christ Who broke human bondage to the Law, and the forces of evil as the victorious and Incarnate Lord. (77) References to sacrifice came out of Old Testament texts from a cultus that maintained the holiness of community through spilling blood (the "containing life force") of slain animals that substituted for the offenses of the people. Evil was channeled into an animal whose expiatory death became a "saving event." (78) The vicariousness of such rites is clear for the Day of Atonement [Leviticus 16]: in one ritual a goat is sacrificed for the sins of the people. In another, a goat [scapegoat] is laden with the sins of the people through prayer and driven into the wilderness thus banishing violence and guilt.

Against such references, however, may be cited others that subvert the importance of sacrifice. In I Samuel [15:22], Amos [5:22ff] and Micah [6:7-8], for example, sacrifice is repudiated in favor of humbly walking with God. Such contradictions in a complexity of books, laws, and ritual acts suggest why it is tendentious to write of a "biblical theology of sacrifice." (79) Yet Jewish discourse when Saul of Tarsus was a student included the redemptive qualities of suffering and a sacrificial death. Indeed, some thinkers fused the scapegoat mechanism and expiatory sacrifice. When he became Paul the Apostle, Saul labored to explain to a hostile Jewish community how an executed criminal broken on an engine of Roman torture could be the Messiah. His was not an easy task. He presented Christ Jesus as a "sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith," [Romans 3:25] which might have appealed to some Jews then engaged in thinking about sacrificial death, but his major emphasis was on participation in Christ. Paul was absolutely clear in his critique of the Jewish law and insisted that by dying under it, Christ had placed human life above it. This act was to bring Jews and Gentiles together into a new community in which all were reconciled to each other and to God by themselves becoming living sacrifices. (80) Because the biblical texts were ambiguous, however, no single theory dominated interpretation of the Cross for a thousand years.

Then came Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) who introduced a new metaphor to explain the work of Christ: satisfaction. He did so within the context of a society that was highly stratified and in which legal metaphors ruled. An elaborate code of "honor" sustained social solidarity. Offences against those of high rank demanded punishment or, in its place, satisfaction relative to the nature of the insult and the rank of the one offended lest the social order be unbalanced. The same could be said of the relation between sinful humans and God, observed the Archbishop of Canterbury in answering the question: Cur Deus Homo? Since we already owe God everything it is impossible for us to pay satisfaction for our sins. Worse, because dishonoring God is the dishonoring of Infinite Being, only an infinite satisfaction is appropriate. Therefore, Deus Homo (God-man) must pay satisfaction in humanity's place. Anselm came to this conclusion within the context of a church system of penance and of a society in which crime denied the "bonds of mutual trust and concern on which the community depends for its existence." (81) In such a culture, retribution in the payment of a debt "restores that fair balance of benefits and burdens" disturbed by crime, writes a student of punishment. The same was true of sin and Divine Retribution. Whereas the work of Christ was once conceived as victory over the power of evil [Satan], now it was conceived as payment to God to satisfy the debt owed by mankind for its sin. Once the devil had held mankind ransom, but now it was God; the God Who Paul believed had liberated Christians from bondage to the Law had become Law Itself. (82)

Over the next few hundred years, this theme shaped the medieval mentality which became "saturated with the concepts of Christ and the cross." Satisfaction, punishment, and suffering became the dominant themes of salvation. The focus on law and satisfaction lay not merely in religious sensibility and theological formulation, but also in the rise of the state with its mechanisms for bringing order out of chaos and law out of custom through the power to punish. (83) With the Reformation, Jean Calvin adapted Anselm's theory and improved upon it within the continuing context of political and judicial development. But whereas Anselm developed his theory within the church's system of penance, and thought of satisfaction as the payment of debt, Calvin relied on the metaphors and analogies of criminal law; for Anselm, Christ "pays our debts; in Calvin he bears our punishment." (84) Even Wesleyans who were not enamored of all Calvinist theology spoke the language of satisfaction and punishment, as we have seen. Thomas Ralston's abridgement of Richard Watson's Institutes labored to distinguish Methodism from Calvinism, but if he disagreed with Calvinists on the constituency of atonement, he agreed with the Genevan on its punitive model. For Southerners, who, like medieval knights, lived in a culture of honor, the clearest statement of the theory was made by Robert Lewis Dabney whose desire to distinguish clearly between faith and faithlessness made him an ideal spokesman for the religious of the region. He basked in the language of punishment. All of life's calamities, he wrote, are "penal," they have "moral significance" as "God's displeasure with men's sins." (85) He wrote easily of "God in his punitive providence," of a justice that demanded punishment, and of a Christ who "suffered legally and righteously for the guilt of sin imputed to him." (86) Furious with soft hearted "dreamers" who did not understand that the "guilt of sin must be avenged by the just penalty," he condemned the self-indulgent who ignored the axiom that "punishment of every sin is inevitable." The cosmic reality within which the Christian life was to be lived, according to Dabney, was the punishment which Christ had taken upon himself and which "satisfied the divine perfection outraged by our sins." (87)

Such theology could not remain in "otherworldly" abstractions, but effected the Christian's view of self and world. Dabney had defended his punitive theory of atonement by appealing to the horror felt by the virtuous such as he when criminals were not punished, and he reminded Christians of the oft expressed desire of Biblical writers for "proper retribution at the hand of God." The Christian, he insisted, should find pleasure in others' "suffering for sin"; Christians know, Dabney thundered, that criminals must suffer "penal retribution"--it was rational, just, and sacred. The Christian should realize that having participated "in the judicial triumphs of the Redeemer" through grace s/he was free to participate in righteous vengeance. To be sure, Dabney warned full retribution would come only at the Final Judgment, but allowing saints to anticipate participating in that act granted permission to enjoy vengeance in the interim. Belief that "righteous retribution is one of the glories of the divine character" could easily become belief that people benefitting from Cosmic retribution were righteous in their own determination to punish. If the "godly man" had in pursuing justice remitted final "penal settlement to a perfect God" and arrested "his own forcible agency as soon as the purposes of mere self-defence [sic] are secured," he was nonetheless justified in defending himself with godly "vengeance." Believing this, and believing that all of his own life after 1865 was a defense against the ungodly--Yankees, Socinians, Africans, it is not surprising that Dabney should have devoted himself to perfecting a theology of vengeance. (88) He knew that he would be dismissed as one of those "stupid old fogies besotted in their bigotry"; (89) he knew, too, that his view was condemned as a "brutal theology of ancient barbarians"; but he scorned such prissy "babbling." (90) Truth was hard; justice was hard; the Cross was hard. His personality, which demanded order, aloofness, hierarchy, absolute certainty and honor, found its justification in a Calvinism driven not by a confession of ones own sin but the draconian punishment of others. (91)

In this fashion, punishment was sacralized by the dominant religion of the American South. To be sure, as Dabney knew, there were Christians who contested this view. Centuries before, Anselm and Calvin had not prevented alternative views from Peter Abelard or Martin Luther; and by the end of the nineteenth century, a few Wesleyans were beginning to emphasize that the way of the cross was more revealing of Love than Justice (92) African American's views of Christ's work, too, were dramatically different; they had perceived that the one broken on the cross suffered with and not for them. They believed that He had come not to justify punishment but to break its power, not to encourage humans to participate in God's vengeance but to show that God was not enraged with them. (93) One can imagine Robert Dabney's infuriated contempt. He would not have been alone; indeed, as a few white Southerners began to shrink back from the punitiveness of a God Who ruled in terroristic rage, one of their savants objected to such cowering. Poet John Crowe Ransom's god was the "stern and inscrutable God of Israel" rather than the "amiable and understandable God" Whom liberals were then fabricating from the New Testament, modern science, and sentimental optimism. (94) Written in response to such namby-pamby idolatry and the anti-Southern fall-out from the Scopes trial, (95) Ransom's book, God Without Thunder, was precisely what the subtitle said it was, An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy. The son of a Methodist missionary-minister and the brother of a woman who wrote Sunday school lessons, Ransom attacked the new religiosity for embracing the myths of science and naturalism rather than those of the Oriental God Who delighted in burnt offerings and arbitrarily crushed Job into the dust. (96) The rage of such a god was magnificent. If Ransom eventually left both Church and South, he had indeed captured the religious ambience of his region in pleading with believers to "restore to God the thunder;" that is, the wrath and the penalty.

Part III: Sacrificing Christ/Sacrificing Black Men

Conceiving of God as Supreme Hangman and the Christ as Divine Substitute Who paid the penalty for human sin in blood sacrifice did not make white Christians lynch black people. The formula did however reflect a state of mind; it reflected the ways in which views of moral accountability and penalty could allow--when fused with whites' racial antipathy, patriarchal prerogative, sexual apprehension, and economic tenuousness--public violence against a black man associated with a crime of rich symbolic significance. In such an event we are confronted with a myth as powerful as that of Christian atonement for it is a myth also of a specific kind of fall, a resulting collective disorder, and a punishment appropriate to the crime. The offense was defined by the myth of the "black beast rapist" intent on ravishing innocent white women; (97) the myth inherent in the image became one of the most pervasive white Southern parables of sin, guilt, punishment and salvation. Both myths coincided in the shared recognition that punishment changes things in the community far beyond the mere effect of the act itself upon the "criminal". There is a shared sense that the one upon whom the myth is centered--the Christ or the rapist--must me to relieve the discord (sin, anguish, conflict) that is so dangerous to community. Both Christ and rapist become a sacrifice which, as Rene Girard points out, produces "the sacred." (98) They do so by plunging all the meaning of community into one act of violence that resolves potential collective conflict and therefore "saves" the community; the subjects of sacrificial violence take upon themselves the sins of community as the scapegoat did in ancient Jewish ritual when consigned the community's sins. The black man like the scapegoat in the Old Testament does not take on sin voluntarily. But voluntarily or not, he is sacralized by collective transference (99) to him of sin and violence. This violent transference is justified by appeal in both cases to the justice of God. With regard to Christian atonement, the sacrificial reading of Christ's death lays responsibility for the victim's death upon Divine Justice. (100) Killing the black victim is also understood to be the "will of God," that is, just. In both cases punishment is necessary to sustain sacred order, and in the case of the black victim, punishment may be a "sublimation of people's self-assertive instincts and hostilities." (101)

White Southerners did not think of their executions of black men as similar to Christ's sacrifice although black Southerners did so. (102) Walter White, the author and secretary of the NAACP, did not quite make the connection invoked by literary figures and historians, but he did believe that the religion of white Southerners had created the "particular fanaticism" that led to lynching. He recounted a list of atrocities inflicted by Christians against people unlike themselves from medieval pogroms through defenses of slavery to Belgian rule in the Congo; the list could have been much longer. He lashed the mentality that tried heretics and witches, preached "hell-fire" and racial superiority, and illuminated the night with fiery crosses. The "insane rage" he saw in posturing ministers represented an emotional and ignorant people and he lay all this to the [white] "Christian South." (103) Angry as he was at whites' religion, he did not probe the internal punitiveness of a religion he identified with ignorance and fanaticism to think about the sacred nature of the violence he documented in his work. Given the brutality of lynching and the contempt with which its victims were treated, one might be excused some skepticism that in executing a black victim, whites were making him sacred. Such skepticism reflects a point of view, however, that does not see that in the ritual of lynching a communal transference to the subject of violence all of the violence implicit in community itself; or, if it sees the transference, does not understand its religious ambience. Yet reporters at both the lynching of Sam Hose in 1899 and of Leo Frank in 1915 wrote that in a ghastly event they observed something "sacred" was happening. (104) As Girard points out, from one point of view "there is ... hardly any form of violence that cannot be described in terms of sacrifice." (105) He believes that the violence which many, perhaps most scholars believe always has its reasons will inexorably find its victim within community as long as the reality of violence in collective life is hidden from communal consciousness.

It is important to remember that Girard thinks of sacrifice not in terms of a priest appeasing deity, but of the practice in ancient societies of selecting outsiders, persons of no status, to provide sites of violence that "solve" problems of collective unrest and implicit conflict because they may be killed without fear of vengeance. (106) And, as Edward Ayers, among others, has pointed out, black men seized for lynching were often marginal to the communities in which they were sacrificed. (107) Sacrifice is "an act of violence without risk of vengeance," just as is legal execution within the judicial system; it exacts judicial punishment as a substitute for private vengeance that avoids a circle of violence that would otherwise never stop. Sacrificial rites are "essential" in "societies that lack a firm judicial system," Girard writes; they take the place of revenge. (108) (On this point one may wonder at the extent to which even a well developed judicial system transcends revenge, given public comment on a jury's indecision about punishment in the second trial of an accused conspirator in the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building.) (109) It is possible to think of the American public's vengeful participation through the media in such matters as jury trials, verdicts and executions as indicative of a sacrificial mentality. The accused subject is sacralized in that he [sometimes she] bears the burden of all implicit violence within community when attention is focused upon him or her. The violence of which one is accused becomes symbolic of all violence inflicted upon "the innocent" which becomes in collective perception "the community" that believes itself to have been victimized.

The scapegoat mechanism that allowed Christ to take on the sins of the world in a sacrificial reading of atonement, also allowed Christians historically to transform Jews into scapegoats. During plagues in the fourteenth century, for example, Christians murdered Jews in order to stop the fatal consequences of the black death. This and other Christian persecutions of religious minorities was justified by the same scapegoating mechanism that applies, Girard points out, even if those accused are actually guilty of what they were charged with having done. Accusers still seek in the accused "individual the origin and cause of all that is harmful" (110) in the community and perhaps even in the society beyond. The prosecution stereotypes the accused in a way that transforms him into a symbol or representative of the evil deplored in the scapegoating process. If one is selected from a stereotyped, persecuted class of "others" as a lynching victim, it may be because he had not sustained in his own person or actions the differences by which the persecuting authority had insisted those whom he represented should have been distinguished. (111) And in fact, we know that black men who had stepped beyond places assigned African Americans by law and tradition, and especially if they had been known as a renegades or had appeared as strangers without significant connections to the community, could in times of economic and social crisis be sacrificed to the communal expectation of obedience to the rubrics of kind, order, class, race and gender. Moving out of place to be like white people instead of remaining "black" could be fatal. (112) When such anomalous behavior could be associated with sex--even if the charge was not strictly speaking linked with any real "crime"--the juxtaposition of gender, sex, power, and disobedience in the minds of white people could make lynching seem appropriate. Horrified as perhaps most white Southern Christians actually were at the lynching of black men, they could blame the latter for their own victimization with little guilt.

Consider the cases of Atticus Haygood and William Northen, two men of good will who thought of themselves as friends of "colored people." Haygood was president of a Southern