Anti-Black Posse Killings in the Rural Midwest, 1910–30

Building on recent scholarship on racist violence in the Midwest, my research examines “posse-killings” of Blacks in the Midwest between 1910 and 1930. Identifying more than a dozen such incidents in seven states in this period, my work posits that this type of mob violence emerged as the preeminent form of anti-Black lynching in the Midwest by the second decade of the twentieth century and that its emergence – and its popular view as something other than real lynching – helps to explain why scholars have concluded that the number of lynchings declined precipitously in those years. Occurring during the ascent of a stricter regime of Jim Crow practices in the Midwest, these lynchings occurred almost exclusively in rural areas and in overwhelmingly white counties and received limited coverage outside of their immediate areas and virtually no coverage outside of the state.

Building on the recently advanced notion of a “late lynching period” in the Midwest from the late 1920s to World War II when white mobs carried out “underground” lynchings, this study supports the concept, but it suggests that this “late” period occurred much earlier than currently posited. It also challenges the popular supposition that the number of anti-Black lynchings declined rapidly in the Midwest declined rapidly in the early twentieth century, suggesting instead that they simply adopted another guise. Further, the work suggests that posse-killings, perpetrated by both law-enforcement officials and deputized and un-deputized citizens, challenge the distinctions often made by scholars between mob violence and police violence. Finally, by demonstrating how common posse-killings were in the twentieth century Midwest, the work encourages scholars to revisit the mid-to-late nineteenth century (the period of the largest number of lynchings nationally and regionally) to determine whether there were other unacknowledged such posse-killings in those decades as well.