Notes
Notes Introduction 1. On the 2002 album Unleashed, Toby Keith and Willie Nelson’s duet on “Beer for My Horses,” in which the narrator tells of his “grandpappy” recommending lynching as a general remedy for criminality. The song’s lyrics provoke the reader with a repeated “you,” who is told to “saddle up [the] boys” and “draw a hard line” against “bad boys” who should “hang . . . high in the street.” Bizarrely, the song was adapted into a film—Beer for my Horses (Michael Salomon, 2008)—starring Toby Keith and Rodney Carrington, who “take justice into their own hands” to save the former’s girlfriend (Claire Forlani) from an evil Mexican drug dealer (Greg Serano) who kidnaps her. 2. As Jeffory Clymer has argued, “citizenship becomes an ideologically weighted term” for lynch mobs and the activists who militated against their violence (129). Because of the value and contestation of citizenship in the period of Reconstruction, both the mob and their opponents shaped their rhetoric around this subject of debate. For Ida B. Wells-Barnett, this resistance emerges in the construction of lynching as a “peculiarly national crime” that reveals that its mobs were “ ‘wedded’ to the ‘revolting’ violence of political disenfranchisement” (Clymer 2003, 130). 3. On February 18, 2010, white computer engineer Joseph Stack flew a small plane into an Austin, Texas Internal Revenue Service building, after burning down his own home and authoring a tax-resisting manifesto. Despite the similarities to 9/11, as Brian Stelter argued in the Media Decoder blog of The New York Times, the major cable networks evinced a studied refusal to call the act “terrorism” without the qualifier “domestic,” a reticence they did not demonstrate when US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at the military base at Fort Hood (Stelter 2010). 4. “A catalyst for the women’s club movement,” biographer Mia Bay writes, “Wells could never become a long-term club member herself ” because she came from a working-class background, began her work in isolation from the social networks of powerful male leaders, and espoused radical, rather than moderate, political positions (119). Urging armed self-defense and carrying a pistol in her purse, as black women 179 180 Notes to Chapter One began to mobilize for political and social action—she was an unlikely club woman— who nonetheless offered a powerful model of leadership (Bay 2010, 118–22). 5. Both Thomas Holt and Paula Giddings have compellingly argued that Wells-Barnett was ostracized and marginalized by the intra-racial community of the civil rights establishment. Giddings describes the coup inside of the NAACP that replaced Wells-Barnett with Celia Woolley, a white ally of Booker T. Washington’s with a reputation for fractious and patronizing relationships with black women (Giddings 2001, 8). Holt attributes the loss of support within the journalistic community, the NAACP, and the black women’s club movement as results of Wells-Barnett’s autocratic and uncompromising politics and personality (Holt 1982, 59). Jacqueline Goldsby discusses accusations of “harlotry,” vanity, and sexual malfeasance against Wells-Barnett by both the white press and black community (Goldsby 2006, 59). Chapter One 1. Gaines M. Foster defines the political ideology of the Lost Cause as “support for states’ rights, white supremacy, and the Democratic party.” In the early twentieth century, the Lost Cause became “a civil religion [that] rendered southerners a people set apart by a special sense of mission” (Foster 1989, 1134). The term was coined in 1966 by Edward A. Pollard, who wrote one of the first histories of the Civil War. During the nadir of race relations (1880–1920), the term was deployed to legitimize a Confederate public culture, the chief evidence of which is Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue and the shocking proliferation of United Daughters of the Confederacy monuments, placed even in states that did not exist in 1861. The landscape of the South is littered with UDC monuments that police the borders of Southern identity, standing at the site of the Free States of Jones with a tribute to the Confederate cause, lest current inhabitants grow too utopian about the potential for racial justice, and free counties across Kentucky and Missouri to dislocate their Unionist past (Loewen 1999, 104–105). 2. In The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams prefigured both Luce Irigiray’s claim of universal manhood from “This Sex Which Is Not One” and the founding notion of unmarked racial identity in whiteness studies by delineating marked regions and unmarked nationhood. “The...
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