10 - “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi

Summary

In the wake of the killings, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro American branded Mississippi's Hanging Bridge a "monument to Judge Lynch". As whites repeatedly lynched at the Hanging Bridge, the site dramatized the dynamic interplay between racial violence and protest politics in the Jim Crow era, even as it confirmed the consistent brutalization of black bodies by white hands. As a monument, the bridge served to shore up white power and deter black resistance. During decades when brutal repression isolated black Southerners from organized protest movements, racial violence spurred interaction between elite activists and rural people. In 1918 and 1942, the lynching of black youth at Mississippi's Hanging Bridge accelerated campaigns against racial discrimination. In both cases, civil rights activists deployed images of death and the dead to wield newfound political and diplomatic leverage.