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INTRODUCTION COMPARED TO OTHER FORMS of terror and intimidation that African Americans were subject to under Jim Crow, lynching was an infrequent and extraordinary occurrence. Black men and women were much more likely to become victims of personal assault, murder, or rape than lynching, and, as Richard Wright explained, they withstood all sorts of injuries and insults on a daily basis. But the news of a lynching shook Wright to his core. Despite, or even because of, its relative rarity, lynching held a singular psychological force, generating a level of fearand horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence. Even one lynching reverberated, traveling with sinister force, down city streets and through rural farms, across roads and rivers. As Jean Toomer described it, one mob’s yell could sound “like a hundred mobs yelling ,” and the specter of the violence continued to smolder long after it was over, “soft showering the homes of folks” like the ominous full moon in his story. All the everyday humiliations and hostilities that black southerners endured under Jim Crow could, in fact, be distilled into the experience of lynching, so that it came to stand as the primary representation of racial injustice and oppression as a whole. To be black in this time, according to Wright, was to be “the victim to a thousand lynchings.”1 Lynching assumed this tremendous symbolic power precisely because it was extraordinary and, by its very nature, public and visually sensational. Those lynchings that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of white spectators gathered and watched as their fellow citizens tortured, mutilated, and hanged or burned their victims in full view were, for obvious reasons, the most potently haunting. The sheer brutality of these mobs, as well as their flagrant disregard for legal order and authority, shocked and terrified because they struck against common notions of what civilized people could or should be capable of. But even less obtrusive lynchings, in which mobs 2 INTRODUCTION  or posses of a few men hanged their victims away from public view, resounded . Although relatively private, they were still sensational. They were often deliberately performative and ritualized, as if mobs expected their violence to be noticed. They were then frequently made public—even spectacular—through displays of lynched bodies and souvenirs, as well as through representations of the violence that circulated long after the lynchings themselves were over: photographs and other visual imagery, ballads and songs, news accounts and lurid narratives.2 Lynching, indeed, carried cultural force as a form of racial terror through its most sensational manifestations . Terrifying images of white power and black helplessness refracted not only into black homes and communities but across the American racial landscape. This is not to minimize the actual violence that mobs exacted on the bodies of their victims or the terrible consequences of so many lost lives. But even that violence and those deaths were themselves representational , conveying messages about racial hierarchy and the frightening consequences of transgressing that hierarchy. African Americans, however, did not need to see a lynching to be terrorized by it, to feel, according to Wright, that “penalty of death” hanging over them at every waking moment. As Wright explained, “The white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew. The actual experience would have let me see the realistic outlines of what was really happening, but as long as it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was compelled to give my entire imagination over to it.” Lynching terrorized Wright because it existed purely in the realm of representation, as horrific images that haunted his consciousness, images that, he wrote, “blocked the springs of thought and feeling in me, creating a sense of distance between me and the world in which I lived.”3 It was the spectacle of lynching, rather than the violence itself, that wrought psychological damage, that enforced black acquiescence to white domination. Even more, mobs performed lynchings as spectacles for other whites. The rituals, the tortures, and their subsequent representations imparted powerful messages to whites about their own supposed racial dominance and superiority. These spectacles produced and disseminated images of white power and black degradation, of white unity and black criminality, that served to instill and perpetuate a sense of racial supremacy in their white spectators. Lynching thus succeeded in enacting and maintaining white domination not only because African Americans were its targets but also...

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