The “Lynching Bee” — Coming to Terms

In a historical context, the term bee brings to mind social gatherings or events where a group of people came together to accomplish a task or achieve a common goal. Often called work bees or community bees, they were associated with quilting, barn raising, and spelling—activities where a crowd assembled to work for a purpose, share skills, and socialize with one another. These collective endeavors had a sense of community, teamwork, and common purpose, as the effort involved cooperative social undertakings.((“Bee, n” OED Online, Oxford University, June 2022))

But while completing a study on lynchings for the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project in 2019, I discovered a disturbing association for the colloquial term. Newspapers often discussed lynching bees—occurrences where mobs conducted extrajudicial spectacle hangings for amusement. This contrasted with horrific, racially motivated violence inflicted on victims more quietly, often in the still of the night.  

---

Researching Lynchings

My focus on researching racial terror lynchings started twenty-one years ago on the Lower Shore when the literature on these crimes was scant, and traces of this dark past were elusive. Of course, secondary literature and original research have advanced in recent years. However, in 2002, all I discovered during my literature review was Dr. Polly Stewart’s groundbreaking research at the Nabb Center. After she started teaching at Salisbury University in 1973, the folklore professor learned that lynchings took place in the area.

So, she started investigating these incidents, applying academic rigor to determine the facts, issues, and dynamics around the undocumented history((Ross Altman, “Polly Stewart – Lynching in Maryland,” FolkWorks”)). The scholar encountered steep resistance to sharing this history, however. In those early years, Linda Duyer, a geographer, also did pioneering work building upon Professor Stewart’s investigations((Linda Duyer, “The Complex Task of Writing History,” Delmarva African American History, December 31, 2018)).^,((Linda Duyer. “Mob Law on Delmarva: Cases of Lynchings, near-Lynchings, Legal Executions, and Race Riots of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia 1870-1950.” Amazon, The Author, 2014 .))

Using the work of these two forerunners, I began fieldwork in the communities. Of course, open access to digitized periodicals had not evolved, and the undertaking involved struggling to read old microfilmed newspapers at libraries in Crisfield and Prince Anne. My investigation also involved days of fieldwork–interviews and records searches in out-of-the-way places such as attics and basements of municipal buildings and courthouses. The phrase never caught my attention as I pieced together enough information to develop case studies for my courses on the history of criminal justice on Delmarva at the University of Delaware.

---

Lynching Bees

My understanding of associations with the term changed in 2019 while completing the Maryland Lynching Memorial investigation. As I dug into the Maryland Archive holdings–19th-century circuit court records, judgments, case files, correspondence, jury records, minutes, pardon dockets, police blotters, and a much broader array of digitized newspapers–this puzzling, troubling term shocked me. What is a lynching bee I mumbled as the first notice caused me to dig much deeper into late 19th and early 20th-century periodicals to determine if this was an outlier. Correspondents and editors often used this phrase, as it turned out.   

Here is a recap of the first 3 column inch narrative from the Midland Journal in Rising Sun, which brought the phrase to my attention. Following an attempt in Rowlandsville, a rural community near the Susquehanna River in Cecil County, the editor applied a larger font to the headline. On Christmas day 1907, an account of a drunken “lynching bee” at Rowlandsville appeared in city papers, the editor wrote. As villagers celebrated with a shooting match that turned into a booze fest, an African American named Webster was lying in a drunken stupor.

“In the spirit of fun (?),” he was suspended by the neck from the wagon bridge and left hanging until life was nearly extinct.” The editor added that the account created considerable commotion and “different versions of its authenticity circulated around the area. Some stated nothing of the kind happened while others said it was greatly exaggerated, but something of the kind did actually take place.”((“Rowlandsville Boozefest, Christmas Celebration at the Town on the Octoraro,” Midland Journal, Jan. 3, 1907))

---

Understanding the term

A search of over 20 million pages at Chronicling America at the Library of Congress located 4,148 pages where a correspondent mentioned the phrase. For example, on March 31, 1900, the Baltimore County Union reported that Bel Air had a lynching bee. 

Using the idiom “lynching bee” to describe the horrific act of racial lynching was shocking. How could these appalling acts that terrorized generations of Black people be compared to other types of social bees? However, I had worked with this literature and the primary sources for decades, so I shouldn’t have been surprised as I knew about the shocking actions of jubilant spectators creating carnival-like atmospheres in many cases when any of these horrific acts occurred.

Note: Expanded from an article published in the newsletter of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.