Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (review)

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 307 will take, even as it seems clear, with the publication of A Savage Conflict, that some sort of turning point is at hand. Sutherland himself—like most of the guerrilla war’s historians, a fellow traveler of the social historians of the home front—is at some pains to defend his technique. “It is best to proceed this way—chronologically rather than topically,” he writes, “because the unfolding of events over time is vital for understanding how, why, and when things happened” (p. xi). That is a tacit way of saying that many of the most influential works of the last twenty years have not proceeded this way—because that is not how many social historians go about their business. What he has proceeded to do, in other words, is give us a way of thinking about the guerrilla war as a comprehensive, far-reaching, deepreaching , whole. The evidence is literally in the narrative. PAUL CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON Clemson University Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. By Amy Louise Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiii, 349 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8078-3254-7. Historians have produced a rich literature on lynching during the last two decades. In addition to writing important books on particular lynchings , scholars have compared patterns of such mob violence in specific states and regions. Other studies have plumbed the cultural influence of the phenomenon and even the history of the term “lynching.” Amy Louise Wood contributes to this literature with an engaging treatment of the “spectacle of lynching.” Blending social and cultural history with insights from film studies, she focuses on lynching photographs as well as cinematic, fictionalized treatments of mob violence. Wood devotes particular attention to “lynching spectacles,” the most celebrated and grisly racial murders. In these killings, crowds assembled, and the lynching was ritualized and then commemorated with photographs , many of which were later made into postcards. While Wood explores the broad phenomenon of lynching, and especially its visual representation, she grounds her analysis in a careful reading of local newspapers in Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia. The book also contains four dozen photographs, including movie stills of mob violence. Lynching represented a regional response to modernization, according to Wood. Urbanization, national cultural, and economic currents encroached on small-town southern life during the late nineteenth century T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 308 and threatened the marrow of local culture, particularly its gender and racial hierarchies. Lynchings helped to the bolster these flagging hierarchies , restoring a sense of control to southern whites afraid of losing authority and status. Borrowing rituals from evangelical religion, lynching spectacles affirmed white unity, racial superiority, and masculine authority . Photographs reinforced this cultural message, providing seemingly indisputable evidence of civilized, restrained, God-fearing people taking decisive action to restore social and moral order. The photographs extended the reach of the ritual of “witnessing,” drawing spectators as well as those who saw and purchased the pictures into a community of like-minded citizens. Thus, spectators and purchasers, across class lines, became culturally connected to those who brutalized African Americans in the name of order, morality, and white solidarity. Early motion pictures initially reinforced this process but ultimately doomed it, according to Wood. She expands her analytical framework to include fictionalized accounts of lynching and mob violence. Wood devotes particular attention, for example, to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. For southern viewers, the film, like lynching photographs and postcards, affirmed the unity and virtue of whites who acted to regain control of a crumbling world. But by the 1930s Hollywood movies helped to transform perceptions of mob violence. Films such as Fritz Lang’s 1936 Fury were directed at national audiences and no longer treated mobs as righteous defenders of local society against the forces of evil. Instead, Lang and other directors depicted the mob—not its victims—as the threat to order and morality. Antilynching groups, particularly the NAACP, seized on this view and argued that mob...