Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s

Abstract

Lynching became a fact of American life after the Civil War, but it only became an important subject for writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and a subject for visual artists in the 1930s. During the Depression, antilynching works were first a reaction to the widespread outrage over the Scottsboro case and then part of the political and legislative efforts to make lynching a federal offense. In early 1935, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Communist Party's John Reed Club held competing art exhibitions that not only condemned lynching but also supported their legislative objectives. After World War II, when Civil Rights legislation became the main priority, images of lynching continued primarily in the works of African-American artists. But in these later works, lynching became the prime symbol of American racism, springing from a black perspective rather than from particular political campaigns or from contemporary experience.