On the Courthouse Lawn: Revised Edition

There is a kind of dual focus to this book. The first is to expose the history of lynching on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—a locale that people might assume was too far north for such a history—and to use that specific history to analyze certain aspects of the history more broadly. I do think it accomplished that goal, though I wonder about the choice of that locale. The specificity is useful; it gives the book a concrete place to work from. But like most potential readers, I don’t have much personal connection to that area, and I don’t think Ifill fully established why this particular locale should carry the broader narrative. Maybe the book needed a little more explanation of the representative quality of the Eastern Shore, or maybe it needed a wider frame. I can’t say this really undermined the book, but it did occasionally feel arbitrarily restricted. The second focal point, embodied in the book’s title, seems to me the more significant: a look at the connection between lynching and “public” spaces. Truthfully, I found that aspect of the book more thought-provoking, and I kind of wish the author had been more directly focused on that. I think she was successful with it, as far as she took it, but it feels like there’s more to be said, and it feels like she would be a good person to get into it. The book did make me think more broadly, especially on this aspect, and I would have loved more. We tend to think of spaces like courthouses (and their often significant lawns) as public, generally neutral, and often even sacred. Ifill’s book has me seriously questioning those assumptions, which I wouldn’t have expected going in. We’re all pretty aware of the kinds of memorials in such spaces that have been contentious in recent years—monuments to Confederate soldiers, that kind of thing. But what I hadn’t given much (any?) thought to is the memorials that typically aren’t in these spaces, because they have rarely been considered, and/or have casually been dismissed. Or, more specifically, they’ve often been (casually or not) relocated. Civil Rights monuments, for example, are often segregated into predominantly Black parts of town. Why? Not that such areas don’t deserve them, obviously, but the monuments themselves deserve to claim a central position in our broader civic memory. Then too, we frequently allot public space to commemorate those who have died in battle, but how often do we commemorate those who died at the hands of mob “justice”? Refusing to erect such monuments—whether by actively rejecting them or passively neglecting to consider them—minimizes a crucial aspect of our history. And it hardly seems incidental that these “neutral” spaces are being used to perform that de-centering. In her focus on the Eastern Shore, Ifill also takes the opportunity to explore the complicity of other public institutions—especially the media. As far as I can see, this is an aspect of the lynching phenomenon which was more prevalent in the North. Ifill points out the press’ role in instructing whites how they are expected to behave—mostly after the fact, and with the typical imperative of basic silence. I suppose such guidance was more common in the North because it wasn’t as necessary in the South. In any case, the instances she cites should be reminders that the media was making a very clear (and complicit) choice. They could have called for justice, and instead they called for normalcy. One of Ifill’s strongest points—which she’s not the first to make, but which bears repeating again and again and again—is that lynching was never the act of a few brutal individuals. Such acts could only take place—especially in such a public manner, in such a public location—with the support of the broader white society. Spectators, the police, newspaper editors, church leaders, judges, neighbors—in almost every single case, they chose to shield the direct perpetrators from any kind of reckoning. Again, they called for normalcy. Over time, lynchings themselves simply became part of that normalcy.

Insightful details that cast light on lynchings that most of us have never heard of primarily in the birthplace of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Maryland and other southern counties and states. Essential reading.