Whiteness and political purpose in the noose, an antilynching play by Tracy Mygatt

Abstract

The article examines the first known US antilynching play by a white woman, Tracy Mygatt's The Noose (1919). Early takes up the notion of the antilynching drama as a site of political struggle, exploring the interface between social movement culture and personal identity and art production. Specifically, she explores how Mygatt, a feminist, socialist, and pacifist activist, sought to connect the politics of lynching in the South with that region's hegemonic white supremacist patriarchal system. She argues that Mygatt found white women complicit in lynching and used her play as a vehicle for urging politically aware white women to develop a strategy of resistance to it well before the formation in the 1930s of an organized white women's movement against lynching.