Commentary: ​‘Southern Pride,’ White Mob Mentality, and the Death Penalty

The same brand of Southern pride that inspired lynch­ings after the U.S. Civil War fuels sup­port for the death penal­ty today, writes legal ana­lyst Joia Erin Thornton (pic­tured) in a com­men­tary on the web pub­li­ca­tion, Blavity. In The Dark Southern Pride Upholding The Barbaric Death Penalty, pub­lished December 23, 2021, Thornton argues that, just as Southern states in Reconstruction turned to extreme carcer­al pun­ish­ments to reim­pose vio­lent con­trol over Black Americans after the abo­li­tion of slav­ery, Southern states today lead the way in executions.

Thornton, the National Policy Strategist at the Southern Center for Human Rights, traces the South’s heavy use of the death penal­ty back to the region’s his­to­ry of Jim Crow and lynch­ings. She links cur­rent polit­i­cal atti­tudes of white south­ern­ers to the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of the Confederacy, writ­ing, ​“Many white Southerners began this ​‘lost cause’ rhetoric as a way to ratio­nal­ize how they were unjust­ly treat­ed by the rest of the coun­try and pro­ject­ed that one day ​‘the South will rise again.’”

“There’s a lot of pride in the south­ern region, but it’s also part of the South’s plan to reclaim its old val­ues, even if it means pun­ish­ing the rest of the coun­try for dar­ing to social­ly evolve,” Thornton writes. ​“The South real­ly wants to win, and it is, at sus­tain­ing the inher­ent­ly inad­e­quate and inhu­mane sys­tem of capital punishment.”

Thornton also finds sim­i­lar­i­ties to lynch­ings in the way cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is enforced today. White male mobs lynched Black peo­ple ​“for the sim­plest of actions, like fail­ing to cross the street if a white male or female was on the same side,” she writes. Today, death sen­tences are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly sought against Black peo­ple by dis­trict attor­neys, 80% of whom are white.

Thornton also casts doubt on a com­mon rea­son for sup­port­ing the death penal­ty — the idea that the pun­ish­ment deters mur­der and oth­er seri­ous crimes. She notes that the five states with the high­est homi­cide rates in 2021, accord­ing to the World Population Review, are south­ern death-penal­ty states: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

“Southern states are not deter­ring vio­lent crime with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sen­tences,” Thornton writes. ​“The pub­lic is not safer nor are offend­ers less like­ly to offend because of cap­i­tal sen­tences. The South is win­ning in one of the country’s most moral­ly shame­ful races ever: the death race. The death penal­ty is an old guard in the South well past its dishonorable discharge.”

Citing DPIC’s Enduring Injustice report, Thornton dis­cuss­es the his­toric role the death penal­ty has played as an instru­ment of social con­trol in the U.S. During slav­ery, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was a tool for con­trol­ling Black pop­u­la­tions and curb­ing rebel­lions. After the Civil War, pub­lic offi­cials promised legal exe­cu­tions as a means to dis­cour­age lynch­ings. As lynch­ings decreased in the ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry, exe­cu­tions began to take their place in cir­cum­stances that ear­li­er would have drawn a lynch mob. Across the South, African-American men were con­demned and exe­cut­ed for the alleged rape or attempt­ed rape of white women or girls. No white man was ever exe­cut­ed for rap­ing a Black woman or girl.