Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930

Conclusion: Documenting Black Performance: Key Considerations

Conclusion Documenting Black Performance Key Considerations Of what use is fiction to the colored race at the present crisis in its history? . . . Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—religious, political, and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us: we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.” —Pauline Hopkins, September 1900 prospectus for her first novel, Contending Forces Drama, more than any other art form except the novel, embodies the whole spiritual life of a people; their aspirations and manners, their ideas and ideals, their fantasies and philosophies, the music and dignity of their speech—in a word, their essential character and culture and it carries this likeness of a people down the centuries for the enlightenment of remote times and places. —Theophilus Lewis, October 1926, theater critic for The Messenger Novelist Pauline Hopkins,1 quoted above, argued in 1900 for the value of writing fiction even when crises, such as mob violence, demanded African Americans’ attention. She insisted that creative writing preserved the race’s religious, political, and social customs by depicting the “inmost thoughts and feelings”of members of the group. I want to suggest (along with 1920s theater critic Theophilus Lewis) that black drama became increasingly important at the turn of the century for the same reasons.2 Yet drama was perhaps even more attuned to the historical moment; it directly addressed the fact that theater was strengthening the assault against African Americans ’ conceptions of themselves as worthy citizens. In the early 1900s, the mainstream stage acknowledged blacks’ existence with images that were denigrating and dehumanizing or comical. As an increasing number of African American authors began writing plays, their depictions of blacks did not match those created by mainstream theater. Black dramatists presented their communities as they knew them to be, and while doing so, several used their scripts to address lynching. By portraying black bodies participating in ordinary activities inside their own homes, these playwrights helped to (re)define what was “dramatic”— what was worthy of dramatic portrayal. Blacks at home? Not singing and dancing? You can almost hear a 1920s theater manager ask, Is that theatrical ? Black playwrights answered a resounding yes!3 In doing so, they worked to alter what theater accomplished. They understood that the mainstream stage perpetuated a discourse that defined African Americans as“problems” that must be contained, if not eliminated. In this climate, blacks could not use existing dramatic conventions or rely on American theater’s aesthetic tendencies. They had to transform theatricality in the United States from a mode that solidified blacks’ position as noncitizens to one that further asserted their right to citizenship.4 As we have seen, African Americans recognized lynching as a theatrical production, and when they engaged the mob’s destructive power, black dramatists preferred the less corporeal evidence of testimony to the physical evidence with which they were surrounded. Black-authored lynching scripts direct the gaze away from the brutalized body, finding its representational capacity to be insufficient. Committed to conveying the experience of devastated communities, the genre insists that truth cannot be gleaned from bones and charred flesh, mutilated corpses, or pictures of them.African Americans who lived with lynching left accounts of the violence that differ from the focus on “strange fruit” that modern Americans have come to expect. Likewise, lynching dramatists and their allies left different kinds of evidence than historians typically hope to find in the wake of theater practi194 conclusion tioners. Often, there are no playbills, programs, or box office receipts. Yet even without such records to prove that lynching plays were performed, these scripts served black communities. This unique genre challenges us to re-evaluate our assumptions about what creates theatrical power and what counts as proof of the impact that a production had on those who experienced it. One-act lynching dramas were most suited for informal productions among family and friends, and amateurs were more invested in participating in cultural activities than in documenting them. We must therefore recognize that a dearth of traditional documentation does not mean that the plays were not successful. Formal publicity and...