Prior to the racialization of lynching in the mid- to late 1880s, black Americans understood black vigilantism in light of warranted lynchings carried out in response to certain violent crimes. By “warranted lynchings,” I am referring to the ways in which black vigilantism was understood as a necessary and legitimate response to alleged violent crimes that were precipitated by black persons. However, after lynching became a racialized phenomenon, black-authored narratives about black vigilantism increasingly suggested that instances of black vigilantism were unwarranted, regardless of the precipitating allegation. The reason was that black vigilantism lent tacit support to the black beast rapist narrative and undermined black-authored victimization narratives of the lynched black body. Here I argue that black-authored narratives about black vigilantism that condemned it occurred in response to the racialization of lynching.

This chapter is organized around explaining the social and political logic that informed black vigilantism and how that logic unraveled in the face of the racialization of lynching. The first section begins by providing a brief overview of the broad social and political motivations that gave rise to black vigilantism in the South, carefully examining the history of black vigilantism in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta regions. The experience in the Deltas is a useful lens for exploring the dynamics that resulted in black vigilantism, because approximately one-third of all documented instances of black vigilantism occurred in those areas. In addition, the first section analyzes particular instances of black vigilantism in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas and the allegations that provoked them. In charting the allegations that gave rise to black vigilantism, the goal is to explain the circumstances in which black vigilantes believed lynching another black person was warranted. The chapter's second section explains how and why the racialization of lynching precipitated the decline of black vigilantism and especially how it impacted black-authored narratives about black vigilantism.

BLACK VIGILANTISM AS WARRANTED LYNCHINGS

The Social and Political Context for Black Vigilantism

According to sociologists Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck's inventory of Southern lynching, between 1882 and 1930, black vigilantes executed approximately 148 persons across ten Southern states. Of those 148 victims of black vigilantism, 54 were executed in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas (see map in Figure 3).