The General Sense of Justice

Abstract

This chapter explores the enduring relationship between lynching and capital punishment in North Carolina in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Lynching was an essential way North Carolinians communicated their racial animus to official state actors, who responded with legal lynchings—the unfair trials of African American defendants before all-white juries. The threat of lynching hung over many death penalty trials. The starkly racist application of the death penalty pleased lynch mobs because of its hostility to Black people, and pleased state officials because of its apparent orderliness.