They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I by Kidada E. Williams (review)

The history of white on black violence in America is inseparable from the history of the United States. This violence dates back centuries and has assumed many forms over time. Exploring its forms is an important task and certainly a challenging one. Compared to the amount of violence spread over hundreds of years, there are few sources on racial violence against black people. Many are from the perspectives of white people, whether journalists, citizens or various officials. Processing those sources is difficult as well—scholars have to read into them, but there is only so far anyone can reasonably read before entering the realm of speculation. Sources with black voices, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Joint Select Committee that investigated Ku Klux Klan activity during Reconstruction and the WPA’s ex-slave narratives, have long been well plumbed, so what is left to give us new information on white on black violence during Reconstruction, Redemption and Jim Crow?

In They Left Great Marks on Me, Kidada Williams gives us a breakthrough in the reading of sources that reframes African American accounts of violence between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. As Williams argues, “Though historians have explored records documenting African Americans’ experiences of racial violence, their use of victims’ and witnesses’ testimonies to illustrate this violence leaves many unanswered questions about the effects of violence on blacks and about how some of them channeled the traumatic wounds they endured into orchestrated political action” (4). Focusing on extralegal violence throughout the South, from Florida to Texas and Oklahoma to Maryland, she uses Congressional hearing transcripts, letters from African Americans to politicians and newspapers, Freedmen’s Bureau records and activists’ reports on incidents of white violence against black people to present an unflinching account of the violence and fear African American citizens experienced daily in the South. While she of course examines lynching, much of her work is on the less spectacular “ordinary violence” white citizens did to black citizens in the pursuit of establishing and maintaining white supremacy in the decades following emancipation. This includes beatings, whippings, rapes and property destruction, abuses oftentimes combined within incidents. Williams shows how pervasive and persistent this violence was. In doing so, she thankfully avoids the pornography of violence into which some authors delve. We get a clear sense of the horrors that transpired countless times over decades throughout the South without gratuitous accounts of gore that leave us desensitized partway through the book.

While notions of white violence against free black people are nothing new, Williams uses African Americans’ written and spoken accounts of white violence to show how essential their testimonies were to organizing against that violence. She notes that “Testifying about racial violence was a crucial factor in African Americans’ individual recovery and their collective resistance to white supremacy because whenever victims related their experiences of this violence, they created witnesses to their trauma” (5). Black people’s testimonies, especially from those who were formerly enslaved, were hugely significant speech acts. African Americans relating accounts of violence they experienced or witnessed to anyone, whether neighbors, friends, investigators, newspapers or members of Congress, provided profoundly important psychic liberation to the individuals communicating them. Doing so also served political ends, as it went against the unique code of white supremacy imposed throughout the South and exploded any ideas of white southern honor and civility. “This knowledge and shared traumatic history,” Williams argues, “helped galvanize blacks and progressive whites to form a movement designed to end racial violence and other forms of racial discrimination” (10).

In shifting the focus away from white perpetrators of violence and activist proponents of anti-lynching laws, Williams does the curiously novel task of putting people back into the story of post-emancipation violence. Throughout her...