Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1940 (review)

In "Between the World and Me" (1935), Richard Wright imagines coming upon the aftermath of a lynching. In the poem, Wright describes a grisly scene in the forest, where torn, bloodied clothes adorn white bones scattered on a "cushion of ashes." Before he can even identify what he has encountered, Wright feels "the thing" exerting control over him:

And one morning while in the woods I suddenly stumbled upon the thingStumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.And the sooty details of the thing rose, thrusting themselves between the    world and me . . .

Transfixed, Wright is transformed into the victim. As members of the mob smoke cigars, pass a flask of gin, and snack on peanuts, they beat, tar, and feather Wright before burning him alive. The reader watches as this happens:

And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my    limbs.Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of death.Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at    the sun . . .

There is a great deal to be gleaned from this poem by the scholar of literature. For the historian, it not only offers a nutshell description of a lynching, but also of its effect on the African American community at large. Wright, both as the poem's narrator and as the decorated and influential writer, was profoundly affected, even injured, by a lynching he did not see of a man he did not know. Why?

Amy Louise Wood offers one answer, and much more, in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1940. To Wood, lynching "held a singular psychological force, generating a level of fear and horror that overwhelmed all other forms of violence" (1). This power rested not only on the brutality of lynching, but also on its communicability, the way in which mob violence traveled from person to person, across state and regional lines, and from the striving white men of the South to African American activists in the Northeast. In the early twentieth century, lynchings could travel because they were orchestrated spectacles of white supremacy actively disseminated by photographers and filmmakers in order to reproduce and reinforce white dominance and black helplessness. For Americans, witnessing these acts of violence was an act of participation that for years abetted white southerners' desire to subjugate African Americans.

Wood's book, "a study of spectacle and sensationalism," as well as of "lynching's fraught connection to modernity," adds an important chapter to a branch of scholarship that must remain as fluid, and sometimes uncertain, as its subject. The elements that make violence fascinating—the gore, the pathos, the terror, the unpredictability—also make it very difficult to write about without straying into ahistoricism or an academic shrug of the shoulders. Lynchers' fervent embrace of cruelty, whatever their loyalty to ritual, can make the practice seem inscrutable, so much so that a good deal of the effort to describe it that has flowered in the past quarter-century has focused on understanding how Americans understood it. One way in which they did so, it appears, was the same way through which Americans understand the horrors of war, or the violence of the inner city—by seeing them, or more properly, witnessing them, in this case through photographs and moving pictures. These images, moving and still, comprise the heart of Wood's impressive library of sources, and her interpretation of their reception in stores and theaters lies at the heart of this book. Wood, in choosing a ritualized form of violence and a unique set of sources through which to examine it, has made both a wise and creative choice, which has yielded a rich and troubling history.

Although this book focuses on witnessing lynching, Wood begins her study by considering...