Gianluca De Fazio wants to have an honest conversation about the uglier parts of Virginia’s past.
“There really wasn’t that much research out there about Virginia and lynching,” says the associate professor of justice studies at James Madison University. “But if you look at a map, it was basically everywhere. No region was immune from lynching.”
De Fazio is the editor of “Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and Its Legacy” (UVA Press), a provocative series of essays and examinations that dispel notions about life in the Jim Crow Commonwealth, specifically that lynch mob murders of African Americans simply didn’t happen here. The book will be released on Aug. 22.
“Yes, it’s true that we had fewer incidents of lynching compared to the rest of the South,” De Fazio says. “But, as we show, Virginia also had hundreds of lynching threats and what we call ‘legal lynchings.'”
“Lynching in Virginia” is one in a series of historical books recently published by UVA Press that explores Virginia’s racial past, including “The Struggle for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Virginia,” by Marvin T. Chiles, and “Faith, Race and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church,” by Christopher Alan Graham, which focuses on Richmond’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis worshipped.
“Lynching in Virginia” is the direct result of a database of known lynchings in Virginia, The Racial Terror Digital Project (https://www.jmu.edu/africana/racial-terror.shtml), that De Fazio started with his students at JMU, who scoured archives to compile contemporaneous newspaper accounts of lynching. “I was thinking that it was going to be a one-off, one-semester project in terms of collecting as much historical material as possible in Virginia. It snowballed into this much larger project.”
The database was inspired by a similar initiative, documenting known lynchings in Georgia, that De Fazio worked on as a graduate student in sociology at Atlanta’s Emory University, under the tutalege of academic advisor Roberto Franzosi. “Roberto constantly reminded me that behind those hundreds of articles were the stories of real people who had suffered unimaginable terror and who shouldn’t be forgotten,” De Fazio writes in the book.
Lynching got its name from the term, “lynch law,” meaning punishment without trial, first used during the Revolutionary War by a Virginian named Charles Lynch. Lynchings became prevalent in the South after the American Civil War, and were frequently used by whites as a way of enforcing societal power on blacks in the Jim Crow era.
To explore this horrific topic, the professor was set on producing something more than an analytical tome laden with statistics. “I wanted this book to be filled with all kinds of authors — academics, journalists, activists. The goal was to tell stories that brought these people to life, and speak not just to academics but to more mainstream audiences.”
Some of these accounts are heartbreaking, like in the opening chapter, “Impossible Love,” which tells the story of a Black man, Arthur Jordan, who was lynched in 1880 in Fauquier County for being in a relationship with a white woman, Elvira Corder. Author Jim Hall recounts how Elvira’s pregnancy resulted in the couple fleeing to Maryland. Jordan was later kidnapped and brought back to Virginia where a mob broke into his jail cell and hanged him.
“In this story, you can see how paranoia informed ethnic and racial relations,” De Fazio says. “This fear of the Black man, of miscegenation, of Black men and white women having children together. Arthur and Elvira had a consensual relationship, but the danger to that society was in having mixed-race babies, this fear of the mixing of the races. White women in the imagery of the South are to be put on a pedestal, but they themselves didn’t have agency in choosing their sexual partners or their husbands.”
De Fazio’s Racial Terror database shows historical documentation for more than 100 incidents of lynch mobs in Virginia, compared to more than 400 in Georgia, but the state wasn’t the kinder, gentler place that statistics suggest. “Virginia was one of the most important states in terms of legally executing people, so the death penalty was a tool used to undermine lynch mobs but also a way to terrorize the Black community. And all you’d need is a flimsy accusation of sexual assault between a Black man and a white woman and there was a whole legal process in place that closely resembled a legal lynching.”
“Virginia didn’t want to be like the other Southern states. We passed the first anti-lynching law in the nation” says book contributor Dale Brumfield, the former executive director for Virginians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty (and a frequent Style Weekly contributor). “Leaders were afraid to scare business away, because Virginia wanted to attract Northern businesses. Lynching was going to hurt that.”
Virginia was killing Black men legally, though the court system, he says. “We were executing faster than any other state. Lynching wasn’t required. And we had more capital crimes for which Black people could be executed.” From 1900 to 1959, Black men were put to death in the state at a rate six times that of whites, according to research from the Death Penalty Information Center. In that time, 46 whites were executed legally, all for murder, while 258 Blacks were put to death, 73 of them for the crimes of rape, attempted rape or armed robbery.
Brumfield’s chapter in “Lynching in Virginia” outlines how white newspapers and political figures responded to lynching. It turns out that most of them decried the act but never did anything about it, while concurrently working to dehumanize victims. “Virginia was using the influence of lynching to craft laws and lynching threats to dictate law enforcement tactics. Even as late as 1951,with the Martinsville 7, when they had those Black men in custody and were interrogating them, the police were saying, ‘There’s a mob outside this precinct and if you say you’re innocent, we’ll just let you out that door.’ I mean, almost anyone would be scared into confessing.”
“Lynching in Virginia” also introduces readers to interesting historical figures such as Gov. Charles O’Farrell, a former judge who actually curbed lynch mob violence. “He was very forceful in his rhetoric but also in his actions, protecting African American prisoners,” says De Fazio. “In a case where two African American men were accused of killing a white woman, he went above and beyond to protect their lives. Although he was a former Confederate soldier and was a staunch white supremacist, he saw a real threat to white authority in these mobs.” During his time as governor, 1894 to 1898, there were only two documented lynchings. “When authorities decided to shut down lynching, they were usually successful.”
There are also bonafide heroes in the book, such as John Mitchell Jr., the publisher of The Richmond Planet, one of the state’s leading Black newspapers. “In its editorials and cartoons, ‘The Planet’ didn’t pull any punches and openly shamed whites for not stopping the lynching,” the professor says. “Mitchell was also open in telling African Americans to arm themselves, which was a very risky proposition. He was also a businessman very connected with the white [power brokers] and he knew they would read his newspapers.”
The wrenching stories told in “Lynching in Virginia” may be hard to absorb, but they are a necessary corrective, De Fazio maintains. “We have a kind of collective amnesia about our past and our relationship to this terrorism and we need to address that. It’s important to have a counter-narrative. We should treat a victim of racial terrorism the same way we honor and remember other forms of terrorism.”
It’s a rewrite of history that some people aren’t always ready to accept, he notes. A highway marker in Wise County, commemorating the 1920 lynching of David Hurst, a Black coalminer, was stolen in 2022 (according to the book, Southwest Virginia had the greatest number of lynching incidents in the state).
“In some corners of Virginia, not everyone is pleased with the current efforts to commemorate this history,” he says. “And maybe that’s because some of the forces that created lynching are still with us today.”
For more on “Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and Its Legacy,” go to https://www.upress.virginia.edu
