Come as You Are, Hoods Not Required: The 1942 Lynching of James Edward Person

This article contextualizes the life of James Edward Person and the events surrounding his 1942 lynching in Illinois, an event that demonstrated the fluidity of racist statutes and the racial anxieties of countless White people in the Midwest. A Tennessee native, Person served in the US Army during World War II. After his discharge, he traveled to Indiana and then to Illinois, seeking better opportunities than he found in Tennessee and elsewhere in the South. Ultimately, a mob of White men lynched him even though he committed no crime. Person’s wartime lynching is more than a story about one Black man’s sojourn from the South or the significance of race in the Midwest. The lynching demonstrates that white supremacy in the United States has a more complicated history than many scholars have recognized or emphasized. As one of the first cases in the twentieth century outside the South to result in federal officials indicting and convicting White citizens for violating the civil rights of a Black citizen, the lynching deserves much attention from scholarly and lay communities.