White Mob Research Articles

“Foul Abolition Calumny”: Reframing Racial Violence in William Wells Brown’s Clotel & the Antebellum Press

Abstract Focusing on Brown’s Clotel (1853), this essay reconstructs the surprising print history of an infamous antebellum lynching that became a national sensation twice over: first, in 1842 when the Mississippi Free Trader published a graphic report legitimating white mob violence that went viral in the Northern press and, later, when Brown reframed that report in his 1853 novel. Brown’s remix was subsequently reported in the New-York Dialy Tribune, the nation’s leading daily, which attributed the report solely to the Mississippi paper. The Free Trader in turn lambasted the Tribune for its “foul abolition calumny,” not realizing that this sly critique of slavery and lynching originated with an African American author. Besides bringing to light a new source and context—an important discovery demonstrating that Clotel had a much greater presence in the antebellum US than previously assumed—I situate Brown within an earlier gallows tradition and a later practice of antilynching activism (à la Ida B. Wells) to argue that Clotel constitutes a critical inflection point: an early African American intervention in public discourses about criminalized Black people and white mob violence that played out before the Civil War—the standard starting point for scholarship on anti-Black lynching.

“I Knew Then Who I Was. I Was a Negro”: Black Armed Defense in Walter White’s A Man Called White

Abstract This essay investigates literary and autobiographical representations of the defense of Black-owned property in the face of anti-Black mob violence during the first decades of the twentieth century. In his autobiography, A Man Called White (1948), NAACP leader Walter White represents guns as desperate tools of an always tenuous security marked by the violence of the world wars, lynchings, and racially motivated massacres. The backdrop for these struggles is woven from White’s youth amid terrifying events that will later come to be known as the Atlanta “race riot” of 1906. Repeating those events in his autobiography, White unmasks the juridical and sociopolitical order of its civilizing appurtenances and invokes the gun as a symbol of Black armed self-defense. In White’s autobiography, even as guns are used to enforce anti-Blackness they may yet be turned against the white mob to secure Black lives at the local level and turned into legal arguments by a Black collective at the national level via an organization such as the NAACP.

Re-examining CCTV Footage and Re-imagining Justice through a Critical Black Gaze: The ‘Justice 4 Dea-John Reid’ Campaign’s Dark Sousveillance

On 31 May 2021, a 14-year-old Black boy was racially abused, chased through the street by a white mob, and fatally stabbed in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Dea-John Reid’s family and friends had the hope that the trial in 2022 would result in a racially aggravated murder conviction. However, a jury with no Black members dropped the racism charges, acquitted most of the defendants and convicted the main suspect of manslaughter. As this article shows, the ‘Justice 4 Dea-John Reid’ campaign’s dark sousveillance challenged the jury’s white innocence by publicly re-examining and re-narrating key CCTV evidence used in the trial through a critical Black gaze. Driven by the critical hope for a more inclusive and diverse justice system, the JFDJR campaign is proposing concrete steps to improve how suspected racism cases in the UK are handled.

Repairing Historical Trauma in Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves

Abstract: Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves fictionalizes an historical account of three Native Americans who were hanged without trial by a white mob for the murder of various members of a white family. These acts become foundational traumas, part of patterns of colonial suppression that are transmitted intergenerationally and play out in repetitive dysfunctional relationships in the fictional white small town of Pluto, North Dakota, bordering a reservation. In order to unravel the complex threads of Erdich's narrative of repressed and displaced traumas that entangle different generations, races, and families, social and culturally oriented theories of trauma must be put in conversation with Native American studies' concepts of historical trauma and Native American/Ojibwe culture-specific healing strategies.

A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now by Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis

Reviewed by: A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now by Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis Britt Halvorson Michael E. Brooks and Bob Fitrakis, A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now. Columbus: Trillium/The Ohio State University Press, 2021. 243 pp. $24.95 (paper). A central problem in critical whiteness studies has been what historian Kathleen Belew has identified as a perceived bifurcation between violent White nationalist groups and mainstream American life. A History of Hate in Ohio joins a variety of other recent works in challenging that division. Although it focuses mainly on White power groups, the book examines White supremacy broadly and gives attention to its many forms, from segregated [End Page 199] public schools to settler violence toward Native Americans. Collectively, these different manifestations paint a portrait of racism across different periods of Ohio history in legislative and everyday forms as well as among White mobs and White hate groups. While readers should be warned that the content is disturbing, the book's unflinching, detailed account of White racial violence in Ohio can serve as a valuable reference for not only experts but also anti-racist organizations and perhaps even movements toward reparations. One of the book's contentions is that, due to Ohio's well-documented abolitionist history, the state's longstanding White racial violence has been hidden behind a "mythology of Ohio as a racial utopia somehow free from the racism of the South" (65). The authors point repeatedly to Ohioans' ties with White hate groups and discriminatory legislation elsewhere in the U.S., questioning the state's exceptionalism in this regard. For instance, the author of the book's first half, historian Michael E. Brooks, describes how nineteenth-century Black Laws in Ohio restricted the movement of free Black individuals and were based directly on similar laws in Virginia and Kentucky that supported plantation owners' interests. The state required that, beginning in 1804, Black individuals carry a certificate of freedom. Employers could not hire people without this certificate and were subject to fines if they did so. Through a sleight of hand, the Ohio legislature even passed laws beginning in 1829 that ensured that public taxes went to the education of White but not Black children, because persons of color were not levied property taxes in support of schools. Combined with an 1861–1887 ban on interracial marriage, these laws created a far-reaching system of racial inequality, even though racial discrimination was officially banned in public spaces by a little-enforced 1884 civil rights act. Through its historical reach, the book also assembles a view of both White mob violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its relationship to the later terror campaigns of the Black Legion, Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and other neo-Nazi groups. In one case, a White mob formed in 1862 when Black dock workers in Toledo began receiving the same wages as White laborers. In another, a White crowd of fifteen hundred gathered in Akron in 1900 when a Black man, Louis Peck, was accused and convicted of assaulting a White girl, even though Peck was later pardoned by the governor in 1916. Such mob violence eventually morphed, following the cultural rise of sympathetic portraits of White nationalism in Birth of a Nation and elsewhere, into public Klan rallies in the 1920s. These were major [End Page 200] spectacles, with one at the Wood County Fairgrounds numbering fifteen thousand people. Over the next century, White power organizations went through numerous re-groupings in Ohio, as leaders were sometimes tried for crimes or had ideological disagreements. Against this backdrop of the continued reorganization of White hate groups, the book shows that civil rights had to be legally and socially fought for by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Black activists at each step, from Black customers being refused service at a Yellow Springs barber shop to Black patrons being denied entry to Cincinnati's Coney Island theme park (which did not admit Black patrons until 1955). By offering a meticulous analysis of Ohio's White hate groups through the present, the book also gives scholars and activists...

Here. Again. Anti-Asian violence in the city

ABSTRACT Over the course of 2020 and 2021, several Asian-owned businesses were vandalized and individuals of Asian descent were attacked in Tacoma, Washington, part of the alarming increase in anti-Asian violence in the past several years. The incidents occurred in parts of the settler colonial city, which sits on the ancestral territory of the Puyallup nation, that are embedded with histories of privilege, dispossession, and anti-Asian violence. Many of the targeted businesses are just blocks away from where riotous White mobs with torches drove away Chinese residents in 1885, an episode known as the ‘Tacoma Method.' These very same streets were later locations on which Japanese immigrants had businesses and homes prior to being driven out and incarcerated during WWII. This paper excavates the reappearance of racialized violence in the same city spaces through the work of Allan Pred as well as scholars who consider the complexity of belonging in the settler colonial city. This excavation aims to make visible that which is unsaid and silenced in our urban landscapes so that we may counter the reproduction of expulsion/alien status and material violence in the settler colonial city.

Strange Fruit: Racism and Community Life in the Chesapeake—1850 to the Present by John R. Wennersten

Reviewed by: Strange Fruit: Racism and Community Life in the Chesapeake—1850 to the Present by John R. Wennersten John G. Deal Strange Fruit: Racism and Community Life in the Chesapeake—1850 to the Present. By John R. Wennersten. (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2020. Pp. xiv, 225. Paper, $24.00, ISBN 978-1-7359378-4-7.) In Strange Fruit: Racism and Community Life in the Chesapeake—1850 to the Present, John R. Wennersten examines race relations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to challenge assumptions about race on the national level. Organized chronologically, Strange Fruit will appeal to a general audience, [End Page 145] thanks to its lively prose, vivid descriptions, dramatic photos, and historical overviews that serve as guideposts for each chapter. It is a relatively short book of just over two hundred narrative pages. Wennersten begins with a brief history of Somerset County, noting its geographic isolation, which caused residents to identify themselves regionally, rather than as Marylanders. Wennersten moves quickly through the trajectory of race relations beginning in 1850, when Somerset County had a proportionately large number of free Black and enslaved persons (4,571 and 5,089, respectively), while the white population stood at 15,332. Owing to its isolation, the county had about the same population in 2020 as it did in 1850. Wennersten describes the abuses and indignities heaped on enslaved persons, the domestic slave trade, and (thanks to Somerset County’s border state location) escapes to freedom. Despite efforts by the county’s slaveholding elite, Maryland’s new state constitution outlawed slavery in September 1864. In post–Civil War Somerset County, freedmen faced white intransigence as they entered a world of new political opportunities, demanded civil rights, and participated in a free labor economy. Many formerly enslaved people became watermen and contributed to the Eastern Shore’s expanding seafood industry. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, race relations deteriorated further with the advent of Jim Crow segregation and efforts to restrict Black voting rights in Maryland. Making effective use of local and state records, contemporary newspapers, and his own interviews, Wennersten hits his stride as the narrative enters the twentieth century. To show how violence against Black people in Somerset County intensified, he vividly describes the murder of George Armwood in 1933. Armwood was falsely accused of raping an elderly white woman. A white mob hauled him out of his jail cell, stabbed him to death, and dragged him through the streets, at which point he was hanged and burned. In response, a New York City teacher named Abel Meeropol wrote a poem that began with the verse, “Southern trees bearing strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots” (p. 137). The state of race relations on the Eastern Shore during the twentieth century mirrored conditions in other regions. The local canning industry exploited Black labor, and many young African Americans migrated elsewhere in search of work. While exploring these larger themes, Wennersten also reveals interesting details, such as the use of German prisoners of war as agricultural workers during World War II, a move that undercut Black wages. Like other communities around the country, African Americans on the Eastern Shore demanded an end to segregation in schools, restaurants, and hotels during the 1960s. Blacks had few white allies in their efforts, and protesters were met with violence that sometimes escalated into riots. Aligning with the present-day African American experience nationwide, Black people on the Eastern Shore continue to confront limited access to medical care, higher mortality rates, underrepresentation in public offices, and violence perpetrated against them. Reflecting on the persistence of racism in the Chesapeake, Wennersten titles his last chapter “Semper Eadem,” which translates to “always the same” (p. 205). [End Page 146] John G. Deal Library of Virginia Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

“Shame Upon the Guilty City”: Riots and White Rage in the American Past and Present

On May 14, 1838 abolitionists, black and white, converged in Philadelphia for the dedication of a newly erected building constructed as a meeting place to freely exchange ideas about liberty and equality for all. Three days later, on May 17th, the building was in ashes, burned to the ground by a white mob while government officials did little to intervene. Philadelphia, the former capital of the nation known throughout the country as a beacon of freedom and hub of abolitionism, became another setting of collective racial violence fueled by white rage. In response to the events, abolitionist Frederick Douglass condemned Philadelphia scathingly writing, “Shame Upon the Guilty City!” Almost two centuries later, the nation’s Capitol and symbol of liberty was besieged by a wrath-filled, mostly white mob in a manner similar to the Philadelphia riot of 1838. The preconditions of both violent attacks, the role of the state in their unfolding, and subsequent historical amnesia in their wake underscore the cyclical nature of white rage. This article argues that analyzing the example of Pennsylvania Hall’s destruction alongside the Capitol insurrection reveals historical trends within violent rioting incited by threats to the status quo of white hegemony.

Little Rock, Arkansas. Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison and Danielle Allen on Education and the Public Sphere

Three years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter a school previously reserved for white students in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was confronted by a white mob, spitting on her and shouting racist insults. The photographs taken that day went around the world. They inspired three different ways to think about the relationship between democracy, the public sphere, and education: Hannah Arendt, Ralph Ellison and Danielle Allen interpret the photos in very different ways – and their interpretations reveal much about their understanding of the public sphere. In this contribution, I will explore these three interpretations – and at least hint at their implications for the relationship between the public sphere and education.

The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900

Rural histories often explode onto city streets. In an excellent new book, K. Stephen Prince illustrates this phenomenon for the American South at the dawn of the twentieth century. The defiance of one rural migrant, a Black Mississippian named Robert Charles, convulsed New Orleans, Louisiana, and the New South's Jim Crow racial order in the summer of 1900. On July 23, Charles defended himself against members of the New Orleans Police Department who first attacked him with nightsticks and then attempted to arrest him. Over five days, Charles killed seven white men, including four policemen. In retaliation, white mobs indiscriminately killed at least six Black men and women, injuring countless more. White law enforcement proved indifferent to or incapable of protecting Black life and property despite the deputization of 1,500 citizen policemen.But Prince doesn't stop there. In admirably accessible prose suitable for graduate and undergraduate students, he has written “a book about the nature of historical inquiry” (9). The author waded into sources believing he could “write a concise, narrative history” of the New Orleans riot (7). He emerged from research less certain, deciding instead to focus on the construction of the event's historical record and legacy, the “silencing, forgetting, and erasure” at the heart of Jim Crow's archive (9). Prince signals a notable example in the book's title. In 1938, the jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax about the existence of a song about Robert Charles. “I once knew the Robert Charles song,” Morton says, “but I found it was best for me to forget it.” His reason? “This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department . . . due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder” (1). Even after Charles's death, Prince argues, the Jim Crow state imposed a “narrative inequality” by policing the memory of Black rebellion (9).Perhaps Prince's greatest innovation is the book's structure. After an introduction in which the author reviews relevant histories of Jim Crow, the carceral state, and Black life, comes a prologue where Prince sketches the New Orleans riot in its simplest terms. Five thematic chapters follow. In chapter 1, “Setting,” Prince recreates the spatial and racial geographies of Jim Crow New Orleans. “Silence,” chapter 2, focuses on the known and unknowable life of Robert Charles, from his agricultural roots to his paid position selling Black nationalist and African emigrationist literature amid the sounds of early jazz. Chapter 3, “Riot,” explores the mob disorder of July 1900 from three vantage points: “white rioters, black New Orleanians, and the city's political and economic elite” (89). Prince considers local and national meaning-making in the aftermath of the riot in chapter 4, “Reckoning,” before closing with chapter 5, “Remembrance.” Prince ends with an eight-page epilogue that reconsiders New Orleans's twentieth-century history of urban inequality and violence as a spectral memorial to the life and death of Robert Charles.Yet how urban was Robert Charles's New Orleans, anyway? Readers of Agricultural History might take special interest in Prince's interrogation of space. In chapter 1, we learn that unimproved swampland constituted much of today's Crescent City in 1900. Charles and other poor Black migrants alternately thrived and survived in the back of the town on the marshy periphery that became more important as racial segregation limited the mobility of Black residents through the so-called Metropolis of the South. Prince argues that Black New Orleans “served as the hub of a diasporic community, a way station in a cycle of internal migration . . . a migrant community” (47). This New Orleans was less cityscape than a constantly reconstituting shelter for refugees from the plantation regime.On the other hand, New Orleans's white elite imagined a capital of the industrial South. Like progressives elsewhere, they terraformed their city to marginalize the Black working classes necessary for the creation of white wealth. They deployed a police force to draw fictional lines between white and Black space. And on the night of July 23, 1900, Robert Charles was the reminder of segregation's folly. “The audacious act of being in the city,” Prince writes, “constituted . . . an affront to white supremacy” (53). The rural could be Black, not so the urban.Ultimately Prince urges us to scrutinize such hard boundaries: known/unknown, urban/rural, remembered/forgotten. His study of Robert Charles and the social upheaval attached to his name opens new directions for American and southern historians of police power and Black rebellion. He also offers a model of careful historical analysis of biography, place, and event. Readers will find few heroes or villains in his account, and fewer injunctions. Instead, The Ballad of Robert Charles seeks to understand the manifold violence necessary to maintain white supremacy in America.

Transgressive frames

This article revisits the lynching photograph to consider the rhetorical and cultural practices that instructed the unseeing of white mobs for what it reveals about dematerializing representations of the state in social media imagery documenting anti-Black police brutality. To do this, the author draws on creative, curatorial, and architectural examples that bring the eye into confrontation with the state’s hidden hand – the rig that naturalizes the public’s first-person (shooter) perspective, the body-worn or (para)surveillance camera footage, obscuring contemporary lynching’s stately face from public view. The author reflects on the staging and circulation of lynching photography as well as the exhibition of representative artistic renderings; an example of transgressive spatial engagement at the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama; and then turning to Canada, the author offers a case study that considers the outer-national visual implications, concluding with example works by visual artists, Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan, whose transgressive creative practices demonstrate disinvestments in repair.

Human Events and Whited Sepulchres

Human Events and Whited Sepulchres Virginia Scharff (bio) Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021. 140 pp. Images, books and articles consulted. $15.95. In 1988, when my son Sam was three, Chevron Oil transferred my geologist husband from Denver, Colorado to Houston, Texas. We moved to a nice townhouse complex on the west side of the city, interim home to Oil Patch nomads from all over the world. Families from Nigeria and the Netherlands, Indonesia and the Emirates, Louisiana and Colorado gathered around the pool in the abundant hot weather, and mingled at holiday parties thrown by the remarkably hospitable women managing the complex. During the Houston rodeo, the managers turned the rental office into an Old West saloon and dressed in cowgirl gear, complete with a serve-yourself bar open throughout business hours. It was the friendliest and most diverse place I have ever lived. We had some trouble finding daycare for Sam. We eventually settled on The Memorial School of the Oaks, a nearby place with a name that sounded like a funeral parlor, but which we were assured was among the best preschools in the city. One day, when I picked Sam up and drove him home from school, he was bubbling over with joy. "We had history lessons today!" he told me, excited to share knowledge he knew I would value, aware (so early!) that I was a historian and spent my days reading and writing at my desk, surrounded by piles of files and books. "Great!" I replied. "What did you learn?" "We learned about George Washington, Mom! Did you know he wrote the Declaration of Independence?" This brought me up short; I admit, I went there. "Well actually, Sam," I lectured, "Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence." This did not faze him. "And we also learned about the heroes of the Alamo!" he enthused. Dreading the answer, I asked, "And what did you learn about them?" He stood very straight, put his hand over his heart, and spoke in a deep voice with a perfect Texas accent I had never before heard issue from his little mouth. "Brave men fought and died!" he intoned. Welcome to Texas. [End Page 110] I tell this story to suggest that Americans—Texans included—have always been a diverse and complex lot. We care about our nation's history. But in the wake of the violence perpetrated by Donald Trump and his followers on the far right, this time feels different, though not unprecedented. Battles over American history have always mattered, and occasionally (as in the era of the Civil War) grown vicious, even violent. In recent months, local school boards have been overrun by threatening White mobs, incited and organized on Facebook. Red-faced activists howl about "critical race theory," a shorthand term for teaching anything that acknowledges our systematically racist past, present, and potentially, future. Reactionary governors like Texas's Greg Abbott rail against the New York Times's 1619 Project and stoke cultural fires. State legislatures (including Texas's) are passing laws mandating social studies standards so byzantine that principals and teachers cannot be faulted for simply wanting to…give up. Why teach history when everyone is so angry, when every lesson presents a political minefield, when "parents' rights" are used to justify open season on educators? Never have historians had to be more courageous, more measured, or more deft in approaching subjects we thought were settled matters. The bravest among us would argue that this is precisely the time to step up and communicate the truth of our history to as big an audience as possible. Such interventions might stir opposition, but then again, they might just make a difference. Enter Annette Gordon-Reed, MacArthur fellow, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gordon-Reed, the most prominent Jefferson scholar in the world today, has been recognized for her deep and illuminating scholarship on the entwined histories of the Jefferson and Hemings families. That body of work, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) drew on her skills as an attorney and law professor to...

Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson

Reviewed by: Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson Robert Whitaker (bio) damaged heritage: the elaine race massacre and a story of reconciliation J. Chester Johnson Pegasus Books http://pegasusbooks.com/books/damaged-heritage-9781643134666-hardcover 400 pages; Cloth, $27.95 As the 1619 Project reminds us, our nation's damaged heritage stretches back more than four centuries, to the moment that the first Africans were brought to the New World to labor under the yoke of slavery, and here we are today, still in need of protests that proclaim, "Black Lives Matter," and still hearing of resistance to teaching this history in our schools. Readers of J. Chester Johnson's aptly titled book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Riot and a Story of Reconciliation, will recognize that although his story is autobiographical, he serves as an Everyman, telling of a need for us all to confront this past, which so infects our present. His deep friendship with Sheila Walker serves a model for moving forward with a shared understanding of history. This is a book about escaping from the talons of our damaged heritage, so infused with racism, violence, and a societal narrative that turns a blind eye to such facts. Johnson has a particular heritage that haunts him. After his father died when he was not yet two, he spent his preschool years in Little Rock with his grandparents. His grandfather Lonnie doted on him, and some of his earliest memories are of sitting in Lonnie's lap. Yet, years later, he would come to understand that Lonnie had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, donning the white sheet on many nights, and that he had been a member of the mob that killed Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919. In an imaginary letter to Lonnie, Johnson writes: [End Page 85] While I have unreservedly written here and accepted that you are part of me, you cannot be in fact and in sum, for consciously and unabashedly, I abhor that part of you who pursued a massacre of blacks, you who could mortify, terrorize, burn, or lynch, and then claim the rightness of it all with an allegiance to the proposition of superiority for a white coterie. Although it is always difficult to know why one person retains the values of the culture they grew up in while another breaks from those values, there was an early experience in Johnson's life that prepared him for the latter course. In 1949, when his mother moved their family to Monticello, his backyard was adjacent to a field that, on the opposite side, was home to Black families. There, in this no-man's land, they played pick-up games of baseball with young Chester, the only white child, and yet everyone also knew the rules: his Black friends would never be invited into his home, and the opposite was true too. Those friendships proved fleeting once Chester developed new friends at the all-white elementary school, and that remained true for the rest of his youth. However, upheaval to Arkansas's Jim Crow world came in 1957, when nine Black students integrated the Little Rock High School, with white mobs hurling insults and threats as they entered the school under the protection of federal troops. Johnson's early friendship with Black children prompted him to begin to separate himself—at least in his mind—from those who would countenance such hate. Chester went off to Harvard, but after the Summer of 1964, when Freedom Riders went to Mississippi to register Black voters, he dropped out and returned to Arkansas. He traveled widely, occasionally sleeping in his car, intent on better understanding the South and its residents. At the end of that journey, he often spoke with an older Black man who lived in the woods outside Monticello, the two of them drinking whiskey together. After earning a degree from the University of Arkansas, he spent the turbulent year of 1969 teaching at a Black school in Monticello and running for mayor. He knocked on every door in town during that effort, which, when accompanied by a Black...

A Stained Glass Menagerie

A Stained Glass Menagerie Matthieu Chapman (bio) Winter 2012. La Jolla, California. I make my way across the University of California at San Diego campus to the La Jolla Playhouse to see our department's production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Usually, Tennessee Williams is not my preferred fare, but my Black roommate was playing the role of Jim, Laura's gentleman caller. I had yet to see my roommate perform in person, and I was excited to see his work. The production ripped the excitement from my chest and replaced it with a cold discomfort. I don't know if the director engaged in color-blind, colorconscious, or some other form of racially focused casting or not. But I do know that Jim was the only character played by a Black actor. Seeing this Black man pursue this white woman in 1940s Saint Louis asked countless questions that the performance did not attempt to answer. I could not help but think of Cleo Wright, a Black man accused of making an advance on a white woman in nearby Sikeston, Missouri. On January 25, 1942, a white mob invaded the city jail and lynched Wright. I could not help but think of the 1917 East Saint Louis race massacre, where the white citizens of East Saint Louis murdered between fifty and two hundred and fifty Black residents and left more than six thousand homeless. Segregation, lynching, secession—Missouri's history is rife with anti-Black violence. Representation matters, both for better and for worse. Seeing Black bodies in diverse roles on stage and screen is a small but meaningful part of addressing centuries of oppression and violence. However, the American stage has long been a perpetrator of the violent erasure of Black bodies, Black voices, and Black thought. The modern American theatrical canon—the "classics" that theatres use to bolster subscription revenues and structure seasons—is a collection of early American greats such as Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon, [End Page 30] Golden Age musicals including Oklahoma! and The Music Man, and European imports ranging from William Shakespeare to Henrik Ibsen. With these giants still a fundamental part of the theatrical zeitgeist, theatre history is our theatre present. But not all history is created equal. From the Great White Way to the stage floors of the ivory tower, American theatre is the product of a nation built on anti-Black violence. Each of the examples given above, with or without explicit racism from the playwright, is a product of a world positioned in history alongside Jim Crow, Civil Rights, lynchings, and slavery. When we place plays from historical periods in which Black bodies were three-fifths of the way along the continuum that began with Blacks as nothing and still today has not reached full subject, we must be careful that our desire for representation doesn't reproduce false narratives of history that do damage to Black actors and audiences in the present. If we are not careful with our handling of America's and the world's histories of anti-Black violence, we risk our staging creating an irreconcilable antagonism in which our showing that "representation matters" proves that Black lives don't. If historiography is the study of the social, cultural, and political circumstances and biases that influence the creation of the historical record, we perform a historiographical exercise every time we stage a historical play. In our directing choices, we choose whose history, which version of history, and how to present that history to a contemporary audience. We are rewriting the history of that play in the present. At the same time, we are giving value to specific historical precedents. Casting, then, becomes an integral part of the historiographical process of the stage. We must strive to engage with difficult questions not only of the historical document but also of those whose histories escape the Eurocentric standards of historical documentation. Too often in our quest for inclusion and diversity in our productions, we create representations that damage the very lives we seek to include. How much of that history did the actor playing Jim have to ignore to "play the truth of the scene?" What...

The January 6 Insurrection: Historical and Global Contexts

The 6 January 2021, Trumpist insurrection is in continuity with centuries of white mob violence in the United States, going back to the thwarted 1861 attempt to attack the Capitol in order to overturn Lincoln’s election. At the same, time Trumpism as a modern phenomenon also exhibits links and affinities to contemporary global neofascist and rightwing populist movements. Although small towns and rural areas were heavily represented among the participants on 6 January, analysts need—in the spirit of Marx—to avoid the Lassallean trap of writing off rural populations as uniformly conservative. In this sense, we need to grasp the pervasive racism at the root of Trumpism and its analogues without falling into a view of rural areas as monolithic.

“Nothing Less than Full Freedom” Radical Immigrant Newspapers Champion Black Civil Rights

Dissent from white ethnic hostility to blacks, as well as American segregation, was expressed in the pages of left-wing newspapers. Slovak Rovnosť ľudu and Polish Głos Ludowy (“People’s Voice”) demanded “nothing less than full freedom” for blacks, urging readers to embrace anti-lynching campaigns and the FEPC. Anti-integration housing riots were, to Głos Ludowy, manifestations of American fascism. The paper argued anti-black rioters were given “a skull-dugging support from certain sections of the Polish press.” The Communist Slovak paper, Rovnosť ľudu (“People’s Equality”) likewise condemned white mobs attacking black war workers seeking to enter Detroit’s Sojourner Truth Housing Project, and as early as 1937 letter writers to the paper “Condemned Prejudice Against Black Workers.” The same year the paper denounced discriminatory lending practices at the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a prescient exposé of the racially skewed provision of social benefits. After the war both papers declared lynching of black veterans and racial segregation were American-style Hitlerism. Both papers’ commitment to the wartime interracial Popular Front dissented from the more dominant embrace of whiteness. Głos Ludowy long continued its advocacy of racial equality. Extensive coverage was granted to civil-rights campaigns, while every white terrorist attack on activists was unequivocally denounced. The paper called the murder of Florida’s NAACP leader “a shame and blot upon America” that had “the earmarks of genocide.” “A burning concept of equality for the colored races” was articulated.

“Black Artillery”: Herman Melville and the Unthinkability of White Mob Violence in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866)

“Black Artillery”: Herman Melville and the Unthinkability of White Mob Violence in <i>Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War</i> (1866)

We carry history within us: Anti-Black racism and the legacy of lynchings on life expectancy in the U.S. South.

The United States lags in life expectancy compared to most of the world's similarly wealthy nations, driven by pronounced regional disparities particularly between the South and the rest of the country. The U.S. South has a violent history of lynchings of Black Americans by White mobs after the ending of slavery and up to the Civil Rights Era. Building on critical race scholarship, the objective of this study was to determine whether there exists an association between historical lynchings and overall life expectancies in the U.S. South. We created a cross-sectional county-level data set with 1221 data points utilizing data from the Equal Justice Initiative and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Country Health Rankings. The average life expectancy for 2019-2020 was 76.1 years, ranging from 68.2 years to 90.2 years. Overall life expectancy was found to be highest (76.6) in counties with no recorded lynchings, and lowest (75.5) in counties with the most lynchings (p<.001). In the spatially enabled regression model, the history of lynching along with other covariates explained 57.1% of the variance in life expectancies across the study area. Counties with a history of lynchings also score lower compared to the reference group in various socioeconomic indicators, including median household incomes and high school graduation rates. The findings suggest that lynchings were pivotal in creating the social and physical environment affecting health outcomes in the U.S. South today. We call for further public health research which acknowledges and explores this form of violent and institutional anti-Black racism as foundational to the nation's regional health disparities.

Alternatives

Whiteness was abundantly in evidence during the 2020 election in the United States and subsequently when a white mob stormed the Capitol to protest what they regarded as a stolen election. I suggest that we locate the confluence of “God, guns, and country” on that day on a settler-colonial and imperial landscape, tracing how a territorial white subject comes to feel racial entitlement and aggrievement through Christianity, an affect that is evident when we consider Muslims in the white imaginary.