Lynching and the Making of Modern America

Lynching and its legacy have resurfaced as important themes in contemporary race relations. In 2000, James Allen, an Atlanta-based collector, exhibited in art galleries across New York City several dozen lynching postcards, which were viewed by more than 50,000 patrons. In 2005, the United States Senate officially apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation. In 2008, Congress approved the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, empowering the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute unsolved murders and acts of racial violence during the civil rights era. Since 2007, DiversityInc, an online news publication, has documented over seventy-eight instances in which lynching nooses have been discovered at American colleges, universities, work sites, and other public spaces. Taken together, these developments have raised vexing questions about lynching and racial reconciliation, the appropriateness and utility of publicly displaying racist material culture, and its impact on contemporary struggles against racism.

In recent years, historians have weighed in on these issues, resulting in several groundbreaking studies of women and the anti-lynching movement and of lynching and visual culture, focusing on the ways that photography and film shaped the history of lynching and the anti-lynching movement.¹ Amy Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle and Crystal Feimster’s Southern Horrors are recent examples of this trend. Both books examine the history of Southern lynch-mob violence and early twentieth-century anti-lynching campaigns, yet they do so from radically different vantage points. Lynching and Spectacle brings into clear focus the ubiquitousness of lynching imagery in American culture and Americans’ profound fascination with lynching. Feimster’s Southern Horrors sheds light on the racial and sexual politics of lynching by highlighting how black and white feminists posited competing (and often contradictory) visions of “the women’s question” and its relationship to lynching as a means of attaining female political empowerment. Both works make important contributions to lynching historiography and recent public debates about the legacy of lynching.

In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood is intrigued by two major themes: (1) how modern cultural mediums (such as photograph and film) shaped the way white Southerners witnessed lynchings; and (2) how lynchings and representations of lynching became cultural spectacles that imparted lessons about white supremacy, but ultimately undermined lynching as an acceptable social practice. For Wood, modernization (specifically Southern industrialization and urbanization) is the critical context for understanding the emergence of spectacle lynching because it undermined traditional forms of white authority and dominance. From the 1890s onwards, whites reasserted their racial dominance and authority through the symbolic power and spectacle of lynching. In fact, Wood contends that white supremacy relied upon lynching spectacles to give it political and cultural significance. While lynching spectacles were a reactionary response to modernity, Wood argues that they built upon established forms of spectacle and spectatorship such as public executions and religious rituals.

In part one of Lynching and Spectacle, Wood examines the sociocultural roots of lynching spectacles. She argues that, during the 1880s and 1890s, white Southerners flocked to state-sanctioned public executions, which imbued them with the notion that watching a public execution was socially acceptable. Wood contends that, because lynchings were closely modeled on public executions, the line separating them became so blurred it was likely that many white Southerners did not perceive any substantive difference between them. She also argues that Southern lynchers used Christian doctrine and symbols. White Southerners typically represented black lynching victims as “sinners” deserving of divine retribution, whereas lynch mobs signified a sanctified community of believers visiting God’s vengeance upon black “fiends.” Wood concludes that Southern whites framed lynching in religious rhetoric and symbols in order to legitimize the practice.

In part two, Wood moves on to examine how Southern whites witnessed and experienced lynching from a variety...