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Southern Anthropologist

Abstract

The literal and metaphoric defining of postbellum America drew on a politics of exclusion, giving wider force to struggles over national identity and citizenship encoded by race, and inflected by sexual discourses. Despite emancipation claims, men of African descent were increasingly excluded from a citizenship based on notions of “whiteness,” and this was reflected in the shift from the spectacle of vigilante lynching to the spectacular trial. I use the case of George Stinney to illustrate how juridical law, like extra-legal lynching, affirmed a national identity articulated through the legitimation and restoration of white rule, perceived to be under threat. Convicted by an all-white jury of attempted rape and the murder of two white girls in South Carolina, 14-year-old George Stinney was the youngest person to be legally executed in America during the twentieth century. The hastily reached verdict was based solely on a confession obtained by two white police officers behind closed doors. Denied the right to appeal, Stinney would die soon after in a botched electrocution, too small to be properly strapped into the electric chair. The decision to legally execute him was informed by a series of interconnected ideas about sexuality, national danger, ‘civilization’ and ‘race,’ involving a nuanced set of reasons related to negotiations of national belonging through racialized alliances. The spectacle generated by this case indicates much about how white New South advocates construed national life and sought to construct a white ‘civilized’ collective identity, defending their region from Northern charges of Southern barbarism and asserting their place within the imperial politics of American nation building.

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