Introduction

  • Evelyn M. Simien
Chapter

Abstract

The conventional approach to (or master narrative of) American civil rights history has focused almost exclusively on Black male victimhood during the era of lynching, encompassing nearly five decades from 1880–1930. Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of racial discrimination, however, such an approach often simplifies and distorts the more complex and devastating history of lynching in the United States.2 Indeed, both academic and popular discussions of lynching are dominated by a static, fixed understanding of deprivation that is principally racially based. Far less common is an association of the era with a richer, more nuanced understanding of deprivation that is critical of hierarchal relationships determined by interlocking systems of oppression—namely, racism and sexism.

Keywords

Black Woman African American Woman African American Male African American Student Hate Crime 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001): 28.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    The edited volume, Gender and Lynching, rounds out leading books on the subject of lynching—for example, it is more focused on gender and women’s history than Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002)—and offers an interdisciplinary perspective rather than the regional focus of books such as Lynching to Belong (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2004); A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Under Sentence to Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Columbia, SC: University of Illinois Press, 1995).Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    By virtue of being more focused on gender and female victims, as well as being more interdisciplinary, it also complements such discipline specific books as Amy Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in Black America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. 2.
    Sandra Gunning’s Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1870–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
  5. 2.
    While some books obviously take up single aspects of lynching, from theatrical plays to photographic images and literary expression—for example, Kathy Perkins and Judith Stephens’s Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
  6. 2.
    Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
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    James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Sante Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms, 2000).Google Scholar
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    Trudier Harris’s Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984)—this book features a series of chapters bound by a common theme aimed at advancing an interdisciplinary and cumulative research agenda that brings African American women to the fore. It does not qualify as a standard reference text or sourcebook like Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); or Lynching and Vigilantism in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 1997)—but, rather, a collection of original essays, developed by scholars in dialogue with one another across various disciplines.Google Scholar
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    Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009): 159.Google Scholar
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    Marisol Bello, “Jena Six Supporters Plan Rally After Verdict Vacated,” USA Today, September 17, 2007Google Scholar
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    Marisol Bello, “Civil ‘Jena 6’ Town Feels Time Warp: Huge Rally Over Hate-Crime Case Promises Hint of’60s,” USA Today, September 19, 2007Google Scholar
  13. 5.
    Gary Younge, “Jena is America,” The Nation, October 8, 2007.Google Scholar
  14. 6.
    Raquel Christi, “Double Whammy,” American Journalism Review, 30, no. 1 (2008): 16–25; Younge, “Jena is America,”.Google Scholar
  15. 7.
    Patricia Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); White, Rope and Faggot.Google Scholar
  16. 8.
    Fitzhugh W. Brundage, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997).Google Scholar
  17. 8.
    Patricia Hill Collins, On Lynchings: Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002); Litwack, Trouble in Mind; Schechter, Ida B. Wells-BarnettGoogle Scholar
  18. 8.
    Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995).Google Scholar
  19. 9.
    Angela P. Harris, “Gender, Violence, and Criminal Justice,” Stanford Law Review 52, no. 4 (2000): 777–807.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. 11.
    Anita Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan, Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
  21. 15.
    Darryl Fears, “Louisiana Appeals Court Throws Out Conviction in Racially Charged ‘Jena 6’ Case,” The Washington Post, September 15, 2007.Google Scholar
  22. 16.
    Kenneth Mack, “Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931–1941,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): 37–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. 19.
    Bello, “Jena Six Supporters”; Bello, “Civil ‘Jena Six’ Town Feels Like Time Warp; Fears,” Louisiana Appeals Court; DeWayne Wickman, “Jena Six Case Awakens Civil Rights Movement,” USA Today, September 18, 2007Google Scholar
  24. 19.
    Christi, “Double Whammy”; Mark Sorkin, “Justice after Jena,” The Nation, October 22, 2007; Younge, “Jena is America.”Google Scholar
  25. 20.
    Chappell, Kevin, “Black Woman in W. VA Enslaved, Tortured by White Captors: Police,” Jet, October 1, 2007, 11–12Google Scholar
  26. 20.
    Robert Gavin, “Rally Supports Nonwhite Women,” The Times Union, November 1, 2007Google Scholar
  27. 20.
    Francie LaTour, “Hell On Earth: The Wooded Hills of West Virginia and a Housing Complex in West Palm Beach, Florida, Where Two Black Women Experienced Unimaginable Horror, So Where is the Outrage?” Essence, November 2007, 210–216.Google Scholar
  28. 22.
    Jane Mansbridge and Katherine Tate, “Race Trumps Gender: Black Opinion on Thomas Nomination,” PS: Political Science and Politics 25, no. 3 (1992): 488–492; White, Rope and FaggotGoogle Scholar
  29. 22.
    Evelyn M. Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 2006).Google Scholar
  30. 23.
    Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

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© Evelyn M. Simien 2011

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  • Evelyn M. Simien

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