ABSTRACT
Reports of lynchings in southern newspapers at the turn of the last century often showed a remarkable consistency. In otherwise distinct regions and places, news reporters frequently tended to describe lynch mobs, a term that usually connotes unruly and chaotic irrationality, as methodical, orderly, and united. They would recount that the lynchers, although certainly impassioned with righteous anger, acted with cool-headed deliberation and systematic organization. The mobs, accordingly, comprised ‘the best citizens’ carrying out their masculine duty, sometimes before the eyes of women and children. These images of a powerful, yet controlled white citizenry were not uncommonly recorded over and against corresponding images of unruly and savage black men. The lynching victim was, at the moment of their capture or death, at times described as the inhuman ‘prey’ or ‘fiend’ that white supremacist ideology purported them to be. Other reports took care to describe the victim as struggling, crying, pleading, lacking in the self-control and mastery that supposedly characterized the mob. 1
