Lynching Reconsidered by William D. Carrigan

Author:William D. Carrigan [Carrigan, William D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317983958
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Acknowledgements

I thank Michelle Craig McDonald, Michele Mitchell, Moses Ochonu, Tracy Collins Pfeiffer and John Pfeiffer, Patricia Ranft and Nicole Stanton for their comments on different versions of this essay. Thanks to William D. Carrigan for helpful suggestions for revisions.

Notes

[1]

See Allen et al., Without Sanctuary. Violence that occured ‘between (racial or social) equals’ influence my belief that interracial violence was unique enough to merit examination here. For one analysis of the distinctions between participants in interracial and intraracial violence, see Blok, ‘The Narcissism of Minor Differences,’ 125. See the following on intraracial violence: Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, and Beck and Tolnay, ‘When Race Didn’t Matter.’

[2]

This reality remains despite the collectors’ and exhibitors’ admirable efforts to contextualize the images shown. The National Parks Service in Atlanta at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, Jackson State University in Mississippi, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan and the New York Historical Society have exhibited Without Sanctuary photographs. Exhibitors are mindful of the sensitivity with which they need to display these images, but the focus for many is revealing the violence – displaying them in a bare room where somber music from the genres of blues, gospel, spirituals, and freedom songs plays in the background. When I attended the public meeting, the Charles Wright Museum was in the initial phases of exhibiting the work. In their 2004 exhibition the Museum chose to reflect agency in the midst of lynching through the work of antilynching crusaders. Susan Sontag and others have spotlighted some consequences of representations of suffering. Sufficient work on this subject is reason to exclude further analysis on my part. See Kleinman et al., ‘The Appeal of Experience’; Scarry, The Body in Pain, 56–7; Sontag, Against Interpretation; On Photography; and Regarding the Pain of Others.

[3]

Ida B. Wells was among a cohort of activists convinced that increasing the public’s awareness of lynching was the only way to stop the practice. Wells used her own investigations and strategically used reports of this violence compiled by the Chicago Tribune to catalog and chronicle lynching because she knew critics might question her word but not those of leading white male journalists. See Wells-Barnett, A Red Record and Bruce, The Blood Red Record, Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Daniel A.P. Murray Pamphlets Collection. For specific examination on the representations of lynching see Goldsby, ‘After Great Pain’; Hale, Making Whiteness; Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry; Harris, Exorcizing Blackness; MacLean, ‘The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered’; Mitchell, ‘A Different Kind of ’strange Fruit.’

[4]

The historiography on violence, its nature, mentalities, and justifications behind the practice is rich. See Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; Brundage, Lynching in the New South; Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown; Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind; Hale, Making Whiteness; MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry; Patterson, ‘Feast of Blood’; Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence; Williamson, The Crucible of Race; Wood, Black Scare. For extensive examination of antilynching activity, see Bederman, ‘“The White Man’s

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