Archiving Hate: Lynching Postcards at the Limit of Social Circulation

Abstract

To articulate past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it ready was.' It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Benjamin, These on Philosophy of History Subjects of photography, seized by camera, we are mortified: objectified, thingified,imaged. Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on Photography of History FREDERICK DOUGLASS BEGINS HIS 1892 ESSAY Lynch in South by placing lynching's practice within an international frame: The frequent and increasing resort to lynch law in our Southern States, in dealing with alleged offenses by negroes, marked as it is by features of cruelty which might well shock sensibility of most benighted savages, will not fail to attract attention and animadversion of visitors to World's Columbian Exposition. (221) The strategy is brilliant: thus understood, lynch law--the preferred name, since at least antebellum era, for a concatenation of practices widely held to be distressingly, exceptionally American--constitutes a global scandal inextricable from its regional outrage. Where organizers of 1893 World's Columbian Exposition strove to promote event as a sign of u.s. progress, not just index but glittering proof of national civilization, in this passage Douglass anticipates irony, and crisis, entailed for such an endeavor by lynch law's horror. Predicting lynching's repellant attraction for a fully international community of fairgoers, Douglass limns a key clement of ritual's cruel power: its spectacle. The Chicago fair, structured around spectacular displays, will be haunted by spectacle--lynching--it must fail, in excluding, to exclude. Intimately bound to ideology of in postbellum U.S., lynching for Douglass constitutes catastrophic supplement to national and international celebration of Columbian history. (1) Even more than Douglass--though in collaboration with him--Ida B. Wells worked to broadcast such supplementarity at Chicago's White City. The Reason Why Colored American Is Not in World's Columbian Exposition, pamphlet she edited and in large part wrote, managed to document for a global audience crippling contradictions at issue in fair's appeal to American civilization. (2) Over six chapters and 81 pages, Wells, Douglass, I. Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett relentlessly exposed and indicted regional and national, legal and extralegal forms of racism that together conspired to oppress African-Americans. Tae authors's analyses turn on a devastating irony: whereas tremendous accomplishments of black folk since Emancipation should epitomize meaning and substance of progress in U.S. instance, their exclusion from Chicago fair--like violence they face on a daily basis--can only mark barbarity, not civilization, of American whites. The key sign of such barbarity is, of course, lynching. (3) Lynch Law, pamphlet's fourth chapter and conceptual centrepiece, anatomizes full obscenity of practice for an international readership. Wells's argument here features strategy, already prominent in her 1892 polemic, Southern Horrors, that would underpin her subsequent antilynching writings: repetition and recirculation of lynching's outrages as drawn from reports in Southern newspapers. In so doing, Lynch Law chapter of he Reason Why substantiates her activist axiom: Out of their own mouths shall murderers be condemned (quoted in Schechter 294). While denouncing lynch law, though, pamphlet by no means isolates lynching's practice; instead, it insists on inextricability of such extralegal violence from what Wells calls class legislation (Chapter 2) and the convict lease system (Chapter 3), state-sanctioned forms of discrimination that exemplify systemic quality of race-hatred in United States. …