“Democracy Will Not Come”: The 1942 Lynching of James Edward Person in Edgar County, Illinois

Dr. Carr analyzes the 1942 lynching of James Edward Person in Edgar County, Illinois. As one of the earliest twentieth-century lynchings outside the South to result in federal officials indicting and convicting White persons for violating the civil rights of a Black person, Persons’s 1942 slaying deserves considerable scholarly attention. Employing a broad array of primary sources, including FBI documents and military records, his work explores how these forms of violence intersect with issues of gender and class. My presentation has two main tenets. The first is to comprehensively analyze Person’s lynching, which to my knowledge has never been explored in-depth. Scholars have devoted an enormous amount of attention towards lynch mobs, regions in which lynchings have occurred, and the growth and decline of lynchings, but little has been written about lynching victims themselves, who they were, their families, their lives, their “full humanity” and “personhood” as historian Kidada E Williams has stated. Lynching victims have been reduced to a list of names without a past. The second goal is to examine the aftermath of Person’s lynching, especially within the white communities implicated in it. His lynching has been all but erased from the public record, and what remains is a sustained pattern of silence and denial among both the communities themselves and the families of the mob.