Strange fruit

In 1946, as Wexler points out, other factors added to white Southerners' sense that they were under siege. Half a million black soldiers had returned to Dixie from overseas emboldened by the less racially stratified social life they found there and expecting to taste some of the freedom and democracy they'd fought for. Also, Georgia's blacks had recently won the vote and Wexler gracefully provides a backdrop of the white community's bubbling-up resentment and paranoia.

Barnette Hester was stabbed just days before a gubernatorial election that pitted an enthusiastically racist Eugene Talmadge against the relatively moderate James Carmichael. Wexler writes that a meeting of local whites called after the Barnette Hester stabbing helped foster the idea that a "lynching would punish Roger Malcom and keep black voters away from polls." Although Waltonites didn't lynch Malcom until after the election -- they were too drunk that night to plan properly -- and blacks peacefully voted in Walton, intimidation of blacks throughout Georgia led to Talmadge's victory that year. Surprisingly, Wexler reveals that Georgia had more registered black voters than any other state in the country due to a heroic voter registration drive. This is the unfathomable paradox of the time that Wexler brings to light: Georgia, and specifically Walton County, seem in some ways to be moving forward and yet eerily stuck in the past.

One of the most disheartening, and important, aspects of Wexler's book is her exploration of lynching laws. Local authorities consistently failed to prosecute lynchers; the federal government couldn't intervene because murder was a state crime. The federal government, Wexler explains, could only charge lynchers for violating federal civil rights statutes, Section 51 and Section 52. The first statute applied when the state, rather than an individual, infringed on another citizen's life and liberty. The second statute only pertains to those cases in which the sheriff or some law enforcement official yields jail keys to a lynch mob -- another common occurrence. (The possibility that the sheriff might have tipped off the lynch mob allowed FBI agents to descend on Walton County.)

Furthermore, all efforts to pass a federal anti-lynching law were quashed by Southern Democrats: "These senators not only claimed that a federal lynching law would infringe on a state's right to prosecute crime within its borders," Wexler writes, "but they also argued that the decline in the incidence of lynching proved there was no need for such a law. Lynching, they claimed, was becoming obsolete naturally." Congress tried and failed to pass an anti-lynching law over 100 times in 46 years.

We still don't have an anti-lynching law in America. But it's possible that the Moore's Ford lynching jolted the country out of its complacency -- if only because four people, including two women, were killed in the act. Finally, in 1991 a man named Clinton Adams, who was 10 at the time of the lynching and claims he witnessed it while playing nearby, came forward with a sketchy story about the crowd of men he saw shoot the Dorseys and Malcolms. As "Fire in a Canebrake" unfolds into what at first seems to be a satisfying whodunit, what Wexler actually proves (achingly) is how much the nation has lost in the absence of accurate accounts of the crime. Even today, lynching succeeds in its attempt to erase the past -- descendents and relatives of lynching victims have little chance of getting justice.

"Fire in a Canebrake" is full of chilling moments, but I found Wexler's accounts of those who remember the lynching particularly unsettling because they make lynching seem less like some freakish aberration out of a history book. Hughlon Peters, a Walton County man related to the Hesters, could barely lift his eyes from the TV set when recently questioned by FBI agents still investigating the case. Peters only remarked to his wife, "I don't think the Hesters killed anybody at Moore's Ford, did they?" In 2001, an anonymous individual called the editor of the Walton Tribune to name five men from the lynch mob: "It's been a family secret for so long. But I've heard the same story from three different people -- they did it, and they know they did it," the caller said. An 84-year old black man named Roy Jackson was still mad at George Dorsey for hanging out with white women.

Lynching in the traditional sense of the word may have died out, but the aftershocks of the violence of the past can still be felt today. Phillip Dray asks, "Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?" When you consider the disproportionate number of black inmates on death row, it's not a total surprise that Jesse Jackson and Bruce Shapiro gave their 2001 book about capital punishment the deliberately provocative title "Legal Lynching." (And they aren't the first to imply the connection.) "Perhaps not so coincidentally," the authors write, "the turn-of-the-century resurgence in the death penalty coincided with the great wave of lynchings of African-Americans throughout the South -- 'unofficial' executions running parallel to those sanctioned by courts." It was in 1920, during the height of a second wave of lynchings in the U.S., that many states reinstated the death penalty.

Comparing a legally executed death penalty with vigilante "justice" may sound inflammatory, but it shouldn't be forgotten that part of the formal definition of "to lynch" (according to Webster's) is to murder an accused person "without lawful trial." Death penalty trials may be technically lawful, but as recent studies have revealed, the application of the sentence is far from fair. (Last month, Gov. George Ryan commuted the death sentences of every prisoner on Illinois' death row because he had concluded that the penalty was imposed in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner.) An individual convicted of killing a white person, for example, is far more likely to receive a death sentence than someone found guilty of killing a black. Lynching per se may be a crime of the past, but the problem of rough justice has not gone away.

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