Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (review)

This book usefully reminds us that Americans have made lynching a metaphor for racism. The most famous example came in 1991 when Clarence Thomas, a conservative Republican and African American, accused Senate Democrats of trying to "lynch" him during his confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court. Prior to 1991, most scholars offered only case studies or statistical analyses of lynching, glossing the problem of defining the term. Into this void stepped Thomas. No scholarship existed to contradict his assertion. Academics have rushed to catch up ever since, including Markovitz, who begins his introduction with Thomas, devotes a chapter to Thomas, and concludes with Thomas. In some ways, Markovitz makes the Thomas accusation—lynching can be a metonym for all racial misconduct—his own. Markovitz despises Thomas and his conservatism, but his manipulation of lynching rhetoric inspired this book.

Chapter 1 interestingly looks at the fight between opponents and apologists of lynching about its meaning. Chapter 2 examines lynching, or the violence that the author thinks comparable to lynching, in movies. Chapter 3 critiques four big news stories involving race: Bernhard Goetz gunned down four African Americans on a New York subway. Charles Stuart and Susan Smith both fictionalized black assailants to cover their own crimes. Markovitz is not sure whether Tawana Brawley, a black woman, faked her victimhood. She claimed to have been beaten and covered with feces by rogue white cops. The last chapter revisits Thomas.

The author sometimes prefers commentary over vigorous research. The movie chapter, for example, covers, with one exception (Within Our Gates [1919]), movies released in 1989 (Do the Right Thing), 1995 (Just Cause), 1996 (A Time to Kill and Ghosts of Mississippi), and 1997 (Rosewood). It is tempting to conclude that Markovitz chose these mostly pedestrian movies because they happened to be playing as he pursued his graduate studies. In any case, he undercuts their value as evidence by indulging in film criticism, calling the lynching message in Do the Right Thing, for example, "blunted" (49). If so, then it offers only "blunted" evidence for the author's argument. A wider selection of more significant movies drawn from the entire twentieth century would have strengthened the argument.

As a first-time author, Markovitz should not be blamed for all of his book's shortcomings. His publisher might have warned him away from so much quoting. In one instance, the author puts six block quotes in the space of just two pages (16–17). All too often, pages contain more lines of quoted material than original text (12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 58, 78, 117). Even when he is not quoting directly, the author routinely relies on the findings of other scholars as a substitute for his own research and thinking. This brief book makes an important and useful point, but it could easily have been a lot better.