- Living With Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 by Koritha Mitchell
Koritha Mitchell’s Living With Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 is a timely work that proposes a key paradigm shift in critical studies about lynching and African American performance. According to Tuskegee Institute research, almost 4,000 African American women, men, and children were murdered by extralegal mob violence between 1882 and 1968. Far from its euphemism, “death at the hands of persons unknown,” this violence lived on after the act in photographs disseminated through periodicals and postcards. In these mute representations, gleeful mob members surround the lynching victim’s corpse. Mitchell brilliantly reads lynchings as performance rituals through which whites dramatize their absolute power over black communities. From the hanging of the bodies, the dismemberment of the corpse for souvenirs, and the taking of photographs, lynch mobs carefully monitored, crafted, and scripted every detail of the process.
Mitchell argues that the academy has too long privileged the depiction of the lone, mute, mutilated black bodies in the photograph, citing the publishing success of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000). The unintended consequence of these inquiries, according to Mitchell, is that “the nation has again allowed the archives left by perpetrators to eclipse all others” (6). Rather than photographs, a form which is complicit in the mob’s triumph, Mitchell analyzes black-authored lynching plays from the period for their representations of black bodily integrity and community ties. She argues that “lynching plays served as mechanisms through which African Americans survived the height of mob violence—and its photographic representation—still believing in their right to full citizenship” (2). For Mitchell, black-authored dramas about lynching suggest that while black families and communities are damaged by lynch law, they are not destroyed.
Mitchell uses the phrase “lynching drama” rather than “anti-lynching drama” to show that artists “were not simply reacting against lynching; they were working to preserve community insights” (7). She begins by giving a history of black performance, arguing that while minstrelsy promoted buffoonish depictions of black people, early black-authored [End Page 490] musical comedies elicited race pride. Newspapers like The New York Age promoted black participation in drama by reviewing performances by black-theater troupes like The Lafayette Players and in places like the Lafayette Theater, the first Harlem theater managed by African Americans. Periodicals like The Crisis publicized black achievements alongside reports of lynching.
Her second chapter, “Redefining Black Theater,” analyzes Angelina Weld Grimke’s Rachel, the first black-authored lynching play. Mitchell situates Washington, DC, as a contested symbol of democratic values and the site of literary activity. In asserting the primacy of Angelina Weld Grimke’s place in black drama history, Mitchell challenges the notion that women do not create literary traditions. Grimké wrote Rachel (1914) as a corrective to earlier focuses on comedy; “she chose to represent African American life through its connection to mob violence and ‘living with lynching’” (54). In Rachel, Mrs. Loving reveals to her children Rachel and Tom that their father and older brother were lynched ten years ago. Grimké emphasizes Mr. Loving’s courage as an honest newspaper editor who openly critiqued lynching violence and his love for his family, characteristics that would not be a part of the lynching narrative. Therefore, lynching does not stamp out black crime; it is targeted at noble black fathers who enjoy domestic success and influence in their communities. The Loving family is weakened and forced to move to the North, and once Rachel hears the truth about her father’s death, she decides not to have children, thus showing the ripple effect that lynching has. Mitchell reads the play’s power in its ability to show white theatergoers the ways that lynching stunts the development of noble black characters and families.
Mitchell argues that lynching plays stored African American community knowledge during an era of racialized terror. Grimke’s successors kept Rachel’s depiction of black domestic life, but instead of writing for the...