Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (review)

One of the striking aspects of lynching in the United States was its public nature. Lynching was spectacle. It was carried out in full public view, often attended by large and diverse crowds. As spectacle, it also became a subject for photography; lynching photographs, taken by both professionals and amateurs, circulated widely as souvenirs of the event. The public nature of lynching receives heavily researched and imaginative treatment in Wood’s readable analysis. Wood, the first historian to probe the meaning of lynching as spectacle so thoroughly, describes lynching as performative. As a public ritual, it was attended by crowds that were often mixed by age, class, and gender, and sometimes even included African Americans, even though it frequently re-enacted and re-inscribed white supremacy. Wood also links the ritual of lynching to religious practice, particularly that of evangelicals.

Members of lynch mobs often posed for photographs, usually arrayed as decorously as possible to suggest that the mob was an agent of justice rather than extra-legal vengeance. Photographic conventions governed these images; although the genitalia of African Americans were mutilated in about one-third of the lynchings, genitalia were almost never revealed in photographs. But if photographs seemed at first to reinforce the rectitude of lynchings for many white southern viewers, by the 1920s, they were increasingly seen as embarrassing barbarous relics. Indeed, Walter White’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) effectively used photographs in the 1920s and 1930s to power its anti-lynching campaign. How African Americans interpreted these pictures remains uncertain, though there is some evidence that they kept them as mementoes of martyrdom.

A similar process prevailed with motion pictures. According to Wood, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) “swept the [southern] audience . . . like a tidal wave,” bringing cathartic validation of the Lost Cause and the Ku Klux Klan in it (147). (Birth’s reception presaged the jubilant reaction Atlantans would bestow on Gone With the Wind a quarter-century later.) The film’s power and danger led the naacp to launch a campaign to have it banned; following Ohio and Kansas’ lead, eventually as many as eighteen states prohibited its showing. Just as African Americans interpreted lynching photographs differently than did white supremacists, so too they came in later years to impose their own readings on Birth, cheering at “inappropriate” moments (172).

If Hollywood initially seemed implicitly to condone lynching, the studios pivoted by the 1930s to make films that were intended as critiques of lynching. The prime examples were Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), which, though compromised by the strictures of the Production Code Administration (Hollywood’s in-house censor) against violence and the industry’s squeamishness about political statements, leveled indictments of lynching. Tellingly, such pictures focused more on the dangers of mob violence than on lynching’s victims and the stain of racism. That message resonated with the international political scene of the 1930s and World War II and indeed dovetailed with the emphasis of the era’s anti-lynching campaign.

Wood provides abundant evidence that responses to lynching photographs and motion pictures varied widely according to region, race, and time. The knowledge that viewers brought to photographs and motion pictures may have been as important to their reactions as what they were watching. Yet Wood seems to doubt her own findings. Adopting the position of some film historians, she argues that “the classic Hollywood style constructed a seamless visual world, a self-enclosed narrative that absorbed the viewer into it” (226). Hollywood filmmakers may well have attempted to capture audiences in this way, but there is abundant evidence, some provided by Wood, that audiences were much more active, even resistant, in interpreting pictures. As Janet Staiger demonstrated in Media Reception Studies (New York, 2005), understanding how visual evidence is received is complex and controversial. Wood’s treatment would have benefited from more careful positioning...