Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State seeks to explain the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the American liberal regime and the illiberal act of lynching. Daniel Kato argues that the federal government had the power to intervene in lynching cases, yet chose not to act. The book presents the new theory of consitutional anarchy to further develop the ways in which the federal government relinquished its responsibility to act in cases of lynching and racial violence while nonetheless maintaining authority.
How could something as illiberal as lynching have occurred in a liberal country such as the United States? Contra the traditional accounts of lynching that depicts the U.S. as a weak state or as an apartheid regime, I will contend that the political configuration in the United States between 1883 and 1966 was one of constitutional anarchy. Drawing from Ernst Fraenkel's model of the dual state and Gerald Neuman's concept of anomalous zones, constitutional anarchy illuminates how the U.S. carved out legally bounded regions of lawlessness. (p. II).
Nearly 5,000 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1960. Over forty years later, Sherrilyn Ifill's On the Courthouse Lawn examines the numerous ways that this racial trauma still resounds across the United States. While the lynchings and their immediate aftermath were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for black Americans, are equally pernicious. On the Courthouse Lawn investigates how the lynchings implicated average white citizens, some of whom actively participated in the violence while many others witnessed the lynchings but did nothing to stop them. Ifill observes that this history of complicity has become embedded in the social and cultural fabric of local communities, who either supported, condoned, or ignored the violence. She traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is and issues a clarion call for American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy today. Inspired by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as by techniques of restorative justice, Ifill provides concrete ideas to help communities heal, including placing gravestones on the unmarked burial sites of lynching victims, issuing public apologies, establishing mandatory school programs on the local history of lynching, financially compensating those whose family homes or businesses were destroyed in the aftermath of lynching, and creating commemorative public spaces. Because the contemporary effects of racial violence are experienced most intensely in local communities, Ifill argues that reconciliation and reparation efforts must also be locally based in order to bring both black and white Americans together in an efficacious dialogue. A landmark book, On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed and urgent road map for communities finally confronting lynching's long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.
This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.
Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away.Legacies of Lynching examines the evolution of lynching as a symbol of racial hatred and a metaphor for race relations in popular culture, art, literature, and political speech. Markovitz credits the efforts of the antilynching movement with helping to ensure that lynching would be understood not as a method of punishment for black rapists but as a terrorist practice that provided stark evidence of the brutality of Southern racism and as America's most vivid symbol of racial oppression. Cinematic representations of lynching, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing, he contends, further transform the ways that American audiences remember and understand lynching, as have disturbing recent cases in which alleged or actual acts of racial violence reconfigured stereotypes of black criminality. Markovitz further reveals how lynching imagery has been politicized in contemporary society with the example of Clarence Thomas, who condemned the Senate's investigation into allegations of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings as a "high-tech lynching."Even today, as revealed by the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and the national soul-searching it precipitated, lynching continues to pervade America's collective memory. Markovitz concludes with an analysis of debates about a recent exhibition of photographs of lynchings, suggesting again how lynching as metaphor remains always in the background of our national discussions of race and racial relations.Jonathan Markovitz is a lecturer in sociology at the University of California, San Diego.
The Properties of Violence focuses on two connected issues: representations of lynching in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century American photographs, poetry, and fiction; and the effects of those representations. Alexandre compellingly shows how putting representations of lynching in dialogue with the history of lynching uncovers the profound investment of African American literature—as an enterprise that continually seeks to create conceptual spaces for the disenfranchised culture it represents—in matters of property and territory. Through studies ranging from lynching photographs to Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, the book demonstrates how representations of lynching demand that we engage and discuss various forms of possession and dispossession. The multiple meanings of the word “representation” are familiar to literary critics, but Alexandre's book insists that its other key term, “effects,” also needs to be understood in both of its primary senses. On the one hand, it indicates the social and cultural repercussions of how lynching was portrayed, namely, what effects its representations had. On the other hand, the word signals, too, the possessions or what we might call the personal effects conjured up by these representations. These possessions were not only material—as for example property in land or the things one owned. The effects of representation also included diverse, less tangible but no less real possessions shared by individuals and groups: the aura of a lynching site, the ideological construction of white womanhood, or the seemingly default capacity of lynching iconography to encapsulate the history of ostensibly all forms of violence against black people.
The history of lynching and mob violence has become a subject of considerable scholarly and public interest in recent years. Popular works by James Allen, Philip Dray, and Leon Litwack have stimulated new interest in the subject. A generation of new scholars, sparked by these works and earlier monographs, are in the process of both enriching and challenging the traditional narrative of lynching in the United States. This volume contains essays by ten scholars at the forefront of the movement to broaden and deepen our understanding of mob violence in the United States. These essays range from the Reconstruction to World War Two, analyze lynching in multiple regions of the United States, and employ a wide range of methodological approaches. The authors explore neglected topics such as: lynching in the Mid-Atlantic, lynching in Wisconsin, lynching photography, mob violence against southern white women, black lynch mobs, grassroots resistance to racial violence by African Americans, nineteenth century white southerners who opposed lynching, and the creation of 'lynching narratives' by southern white newspapers. This book was first published as a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History
This book deals with the quest for a preventive to lynching which can be undertaken only after one has an understanding of what it is that is to be prevented. This necessary analysis of lynching--its background, circumstances, and meaning--introduces many baffling elements. The author has made a detailed study of the lynchings of 1930 in an effort to find an answer to the complexities of the problem. Originally published in 1933. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Three pamphlets by a civil rights pioneer chronicle some of the most regrettable incidents in American history. Wells–Barnett's meticulous research and documentation of crimes from the 1890s offer priceless historical testimony.
Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit,” lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional. Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows how communities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings. Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.
