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97 4 “A union of art and propaganda” The NAACP believed that it could use the arts to change white perceptions of African Americans, and for much of the first three decades of the twentieth century it also used this principle to challenge attitudes toward lynching. The NAACP’s strategy for ending mob violence was based on its conviction that the responsibility for lynching lay with the American public. Association president Moorfield Storey told the 1922 annual conference , “The people of the United States have the power to stop lynching and for all the lynchings that occur they are responsible, since they can if they will prevent them. . . . our appeal, then, is to the conscience of America.”1 lynchings occurred because people allowed them to occur, through either their explicit support or their acquiescence. This argument was an extension of the NAACP’s idea that racism was formed by the attitudes of white Americans. Therefore, the solution was the same: education and persuasion. The NAACP needed to stop white approval of and apathy toward lynching. To do this it had to educate whites about the true nature and extent of the practice. Education and persuasion were to be achieved, in part, through the arts. The association helped develop and disseminate representations of lynching in a range of media. It commissioned, staged, and published lynching dramas; Walter White helped establish the Writers’ league Against lynching (WlAl), a pressure group of authors, poets, and journalists who used their talents to condemn lynch law; White also put together an exhibition of paintings that dealt with lynching. He was, he said, “trying delicately to effect a union of art and propaganda.”2 White and his organization wanted to use the arts to bring about political change. The plays, paintings , and poems were used to expose the truth about lynching, to change white attitudes toward mob violence, and to elicit support for antilynching legislation. The NAACP did not always admit that it was using art as propaganda, particularly during the period when it laid those very charges 98 Art for EquAlity against Communists. In the 1930s, the Communist Party threatened not only the NAACP’s position as chief protector of black rights but also its role as champion of African American culture. Ironically, although neither side wished to admit it, both the Communists and the NAACP used culture in similar ways during this decade. lynching—“the summary execution by a mob of an individual who had committed an alleged crime or a perceived transgression of social codes”—was an American phenomenon. Figures from the Tuskegee Institute show that 4,743 people died in the United States at the hands of lynchers from 1882 to 1968. It was also primarily a racial phenomenon. of those victims, 3,466, or almost 73 percent, were black. lynching was a form of control that punished any violation, or considered violation, of the racial order. It was used to keep African Americans as an underpaid and exploited workforce, particularly in the South under the sharecropping system. Mob violence could also halt economic progress by punishing those who forgot their “place” or became too successful. lynchers themselves argued that lynching punished, and therefore deterred, the “usual crime” of black men raping white women. But in his 1929 book on the phenomenon Walter White argued, “lynching has always been the means for protection, not of white women, but of profits.” lynchings during the first decades of the twentieth century were notable for their use of torture and mutilation and as spectacles. The victim was often burned, hanged, or shot in a public place, sometimes in front of a crowd of hundreds or thousands who had traveled to see the event. The taking of mementos—whether photographs or body parts—was common, and the body was frequently displayed for days after the attack. These practices further degraded and dehumanized the victim and, indeed, all African Americans. lynching was thus a crime not simply against an individual but against an entire race.3 In the South there were some moderate whites who looked on lynching less favorably. Some southerners, while not necessarily opposed to mob violence on moral grounds, had concerns about its impact on the reputation and development of the region. The South was newly industrializing , and they feared that reports of burnings and torture would deter potential investors. Furthermore, one of the South’s greatest economic assets, its labor supply, was disappearing with black migration out of the region. The NAACP wanted...

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