I'm going to start
playing a song.
This lecture is taking us from
the end of Reconstruction,
1877, canvassing an array of
events that actually go up
to the, well to the
present day in certain ways,
but in a recorded
way, in an official way,
until the 1960s. 
But we will--so from a
phenomenological standpoint,
we're talking about a large
period of time.  From
a literal standpoint,
for this lecture, we're
really talking about the
18--end of Reconstruction
to the end of the nineteenth
century.  And with that, I
want--I want to play a piece
of music that's actually
from the era of the Great
Depression, but it's in
reference to the time period
we're talking about right
now.  And if I can figure it
out while you're
listening to it,
I'll get the lyrics up
on the screen as well.
[Billie Holiday]  ♪And now
I'd like to sing a tune. ♪
♪ It was written
especially for me.  ♪
♪ It's titled Strange Fruit.
I really hope you like it. ♪
♪ Southern trees
bear strange fruit, ♪
♪ Blood on the leaves
and blood at the root, ♪
♪ Black bodies swinging
in the southern breeze, ♪
♪ Strange fruit hanging
from the poplar trees ♪
♪ Pastoral scene
of the gallant south, ♪
♪ The bulging eyes and
the twisted mouth, ♪
♪ Scent of magnolias,
sweet and fresh, ♪
♪ Then the sudden
smell of burning flesh. ♪
♪ Here is fruit for the
crows to pluck, ♪
♪ For the rain to gather,
for the wind to suck, ♪
♪ For the sun to rot,
for the tree to drop, ♪
♪ Here is a strange
and bitter crop. ♪
Many of you, some of
you, I don't know,
might recognize this as
one of Billie Holiday's,
the great blues
singer, one of her,
her most famous pieces,
wrote by--not by her,
but becomes one of her
signature pieces for much of
her career, Strange Fruit.
Well, I don't think it needs
elaboration in terms of
interpretative potential of
those lyrics.  It's a song
about lynching,
and violence,
and the
Southern nature of it,
the scent of
magnolia trees and such.
Now you'll recall from the
last lecture how I talked
about the massive cultural
shift that Southerners had
to endure under
Reconstruction governments. 
White Southerners'
very notions of freedom,
the very notions of
labor, who's to do the work,
and of politics, who's
running their states,
all these were turned upside
down in the most fundamental
ways.  You'll
remember as well,
at--nearing, nearing
the end of the 1870s,
the North is exhausted by
Southern intransigence.
South is digging--is
continuing digging--to keep
its heels dug in, and
a deal is brokered,
and a presidential dispute,
a presidential election,
that essentially
withdraws Northern troops,
Federal troops,
from the South,
ends Reconstruction,
and then gives the chance
to--for the South to
reorganize itself fully
within the Union. 
Historians refer to this
moment, this era that
begins at that moment,
as "the Rise of
Redemption."  So you have
Reconstruction
followed by Redemption.  Now
Redemption...this is a word
that needs to be understood,
understood as a fully
complicated and loaded
phrase.  Who's
feeling redeemed,
and redeemed on what terms? 
It's really important to
understand that when I'm
talking about Redemption,
when most people
talk about Redemption,
they're talking about the
white South rising up and
taking control of what was
rightfully theirs.  We're
talking about the
while male South as well,
and we're talking in
different ways about the
wealthy South and
the poor South,
the white poor
South, and I'll,
I'll map this out in the
course of today's lecture. 
We are not talking about
at all a constructive or
positive era as far as the
African American experience
is concerned.  Now
during Reconstruction,
as I hope I made clear
in previous lectures,
deep seated anxieties take
root among Southern whites
about economics,
about states' rights,
and this is a very important
couple of words here for
today's lecture and for this
week's reading as well. 
There's anxiety about
economics and states'
rights, but also about
manliness and civilization. 
Manliness and civilization,
really critical words.  So
much of
Redemption, this era,
is about reclaiming--about
whites trying to reclaim
that which they thought was
lost during Reconstruction
and that which they thought
was under attack.  A perfect
example of an attempt
by, or an articulation by,
Southern whites about how
they are going to redeem
themselves--redeem the
South--from the scourge of
the Northern presence, is
the fact that as soon as the
federal troops
leave, essentially,
the KKK, which had been
wiped out by the military,
Northern troops, soon
after it was established,
the KKK reemerges with a
vengeance.  But it's not the
only group being formed in
this moment of Redemption. 
There are other groups.  You
don't need to know the names
for your--for the
purposes of the class,
but just know there
were other organizations,
like the Knights of
the White Camelia,
the
Constitutional Union Guards,
the Pale Faces, the
White Brotherhood,
and the Council of Safety. 
The last name is kind of
interesting, because it's
not one of these sort of
grandiose,
mythical kind of names,
not Council of Safety. 
Who's feeling threatened? 
Under what terms?  How will
we establish safety?  So any
number of nativist and
racist hate groups that are
being formed in this
moment of cultural anxiety,
I guess is the most
polite way to put it,
cultural, economic, social
anxiety in the white South
and a determination to
reclaim it on its own
terms.  Now when Republican
government's faded,
once the
federal troops left,
when they faded in the wake
of a resurgent Democratic
party, which is a
Southern party,
this at the end
of Reconstruction,
a range of tactics start
being developed to guarantee
the return of white power. 
So it's not just that the
federal troops left, the
government's collapsed,
whites were all of a sudden
in control.  It wasn't that
quick and that easy.  It was
actually dirty and messy. 
Crops that were owned
and tilled by blacks were
destroyed.  Blacks' homes,
their barns--which is an
incredibly important part
of the infrastructure in the
South--their homes, their
barns and other property
were destroyed, were burned,
as well.  If blacks tried to
exercise the right
to vote, black men,
and go to the
election booth,
and if it is deemed by
someone--how is really
immaterial--but deemed
that they might be voting
Republican, which virtually
all blacks were going to do
anyway, you might find when
you walked up to a voting
booth--I might find if I
were walking to the voting
booth, someone standing
outside brandishing a whip,
making it very clear that if
I voted for anybody but the
Democrat, the whip would be
used.  So there is sort of a
scorched earth
policy by citizens,
white citizens of the South
to reclaim what was theirs,
to get blacks off the land,
to destroy their property. 
And the people doing this
dirty work are quite often
members of these local
militias like the Klan.  Now
the Klan's
[coughs], excuse me,
the Klan's
census, its numbers,
really hard to peg down
at any particular moment,
and its popularity ebbs and
flows.  We're at a moment,
it's just come back, it's
been destroyed for close to
a decade.  It's coming back,
it will be around for a
while, it will
fade out for a while,
and we'll see in a couple of
weeks how it comes back very
strongly again.  But it is
sort of always there at some
level as a manifestation of
cultural and psychological
anxiety.  Now remember
during Reconstruction,
blacks had a tremendous new
amount of voting power.  I
mean they weren't
winning all elected offices,
of course, but as they had
no representation prior to
Reconstruction, any change
was a welcome change.  When
Redemption begins, black
voting power is diluted very
quickly through a range of
tactics.  You certainly have
people at the polling
station with whips.  That's
a pretty effective way to
stop a black person from
voting, but you also
have gerrymandering,
the reconfiguration
of voting districts to
eliminate or to
mitigate the black vote.
Since housing
segregation was,
was the rule of the land,
if you cut a district in a
certain way, you can make
sure that you cut out black
voting numbers to make
any real change.  So
gerrymandering--which
is part of,
you know, a long tradition. 
It's not just a Southern
one, not just against
blacks.  Gerrymandering is
used.  Poll taxes are
developed.  Essentially you
need to come to the
poll, the registrar,
to prove that you had paid
taxes on land that you own
according to
certain guidelines,
you know, generation
or whatever.  Well,
blacks didn't own land,
and if it's about their
predecessors, their
predecessors didn't own
land.  Or, if
they had owned land,
or if it's just
about maybe just paying,
proof of paying taxes, they
didn't have the money to pay
it.  Very effective ways
to mitigate the black vote
during this era are
grandfather clauses.  It's
very simple: if your
grandfather voted,
you can vote.  Well,
basically no blacks'
grandfathers had voted. 
Wipes out the black voting
population.  And
then famously,
of course, literacy tests. 
They're adjudicated by a
registrar under the
most sort of random--well,
they weren't random at all,
but subjective--that's what
I was looking
for--subjective
circumstances.  So if you
could read this section of a
state constitution, or if
you could recite it from
memory, or if you could do
anything that suggested you
were literate, then
you could vote.  Well,
although one of the great
stories in world history of
literacy gain
happens during,
begins during this era, in
terms of blacks becoming a
literate population
within the course of two
generations--hadn't
ever happened before--they
weren't literate yet as a
group.  So literacy tests
would wipe it out.  So
you take gerrymandering,
you take poll taxes,
grandfather clauses,
literacy tests, and
literal violence,
or threat of violence,
you're wiping out the black
vote.  Now it's
important to realize,
you're also wiping out a
lot of the poor white vote. 
This is an unintended--well,
it depends on your
interpretation--unintended
or intended consequence of
those who held the reins of
power in the white South. 
What was certainly
unintended--bless you--is
that poor whites, and
there were a lot of them,
and blacks, who were almost,
almost by default poor
during this era--we're
talking into the 18--going
into the 1880s--start
realizing they actually had
a lot in common.  They were
all hungry.  They were all
essentially landless.
And that the
white poor farmer,
the poor white farmer had
more in common with the poor
black farmer than did the
white poor farmer did with
the white gentry, the
political elite.  And you
have, going into the
turn of the century,
into the twentieth century,
the rise of one of the many
different articulations
of the Populist Party,
rise of populism.  Now the
history of populism is much
more complicated than the
one minute I'm going to give
it right now.  But you have,
during the end of the 19th
century, a range of
different attempts to try to
gather some power for poor
agrarian classes.  And in
some places in the South,
a curious thing starts
happening, that white and
black farmers start aligning
themselves with each
other, start running
campaigns--joint tickets,
start fighting for the same
candidate.  Tom Watson,
a famous politician from
Georgia, actually
rises to power,
rises to a
level of influence,
on this notion of, you
know, working for agrarian
interests.  But a
funny thing happens,
is that it becomes--it
starts becoming successful,
and there's a realization
by the political elite: "My
god, if these poor whites
and poor blacks start really
working together,
we're in trouble,
  'cause the system is
not just about racial
domination, but it's also
about economic domination. 
As a result of the rise
in popularity of Populist
sentiment, the race card
gets played with increasing
ferocity.  Rhetoric, like
you saw in the 1868 campaign
poster from a
couple of lectures ago,
that this is a
white man's country,
becomes much more
commonplace.   That we may
have different incomes, we
may have different sort of
economic
security, but by God,
we're all white, and there's
prestige and value in it. 
And when you have a set of
rules or--not rules--a set
of social order being
bestowed upon the South by
the Klan, that's
preying upon racial anxiety,
as well as going
against Catholics and Jews,
but preying on
racial anxiety,
you start seeing fissures in
the Populist sentiment just
as quickly as they
appeared.  And Tom Watson
being someone who sort of
gathered up the energy of a
cross-racial alliance
quickly becomes a hardcore
racist and anti-Semite, so
this is a radical shift for
him.
But there's this
potential unifying moment,
based on class lines,
evaporates in the face of
racial demagoguery.  That's
what this era's about more
than anything else. 
All these other factors
certainly are around that
helps define who America is,
you know, class differences,
differences about
possibilities related to
your gender.  But race is
the driving factor for so
many issues relating to
quality of life and safety. 
Now getting back to the
vote, for example, blacks
were voting in new and
startling numbers during
Reconstruction.  Blacks were
holding office from the
local to the federal level,
but because of a series
of different mechanisms I
talked about, because the
rise of playing to racial
anxieties becomes
much more effective,
the black vote's wiped
out.  So just a couple of
statistics, just
to keep, you know,
as representative.  In
1896, we're talking in,
in Louisiana,
just as one example,
over one hundred and
thirty thousand blacks are
registered to
vote in Louisiana,
and they are the majority
in twenty-six parishes.
 Black voting
representation.  Four years
later, in just four years,
going from over one hundred
and thirty thousand
blacks, four years later,
there are fifty-three
hundred blacks on the
polls--on the voting rolls,
and there are no majority
black parishes anywhere. 
That is an elimination of a
voting class, overnight. 
In one election cycle,
or maybe two if it's a
two-year election cycle,
you go from a possibility of
black representation to zero
possibility.  In Alabama,
of one hundred and eighty
thousand black men of
voting age in 1900,
in the wake of all these
different kinds of ways of
eliminating the
black vote, in 1900,
of over one hundred and
eighty thousand possible
black men who'd be
eligible voters,
only three thousand are
registered to vote.  Now if
you know
anything about Alabama,
you'll know there is a
large black population in
Alabama.  There're real
opportunities to have black
voting representation if
people actually had access
to the ballot box.  There's
no access.  Three thousand
people--three thousand men
are registered to vote. 
Registering to vote,
you need to understand,
is not a matter of
filling out a card and just
disinterestedly
putting it in the mailbox,
something like that. 
No, registering to vote,
if you're a black man, is
a matter of life or death,
in certain--in many of these
places.  The possibility of
having your
home burned down,
of getting
whipped, getting beaten,
and, as we'll
see, getting shot,
is very real.  Now when
it comes to the vote,
you have all these forces
trying to wipe it out,
but it's important to take a
moment to try to understand
the psychology about why
it's so important to wipe it
out.  We can take a--an
example from a famous
politician, J.
K.
Vardaman of Mississippi.
Rabid racist.  And his
view of blacks' ability and
education related to
their--how civilized they
were--again,
there's that word.
I'll start unpacking it
later on in the lecture. 
That they did not
have--they were,
they were
uncivilized, uncivilized,
they were not
educated enough,
they didn't have the ability
to be responsible voters. 
And Vardaman says, another
one of these rather lovely
sentiments, "I am just as
opposed to Booker Washington
as a voter, with all his
Anglo-Saxon reinforcements,
as I am to the
coconut-headed,
chocolate-colored typical
little coon who blacks my
shoes every morning. 
Neither is fit to perform
the supreme
function of citizenship."
Booker T.
Washington, who we'll be
talking about next week.  By
the late nineteenth century,
the leader of the race;
there's no disputing
that fact.  Even he,
the most powerful black
person in the country,
according to Vardaman, does
not possess the ability to
be a responsible voter. 
Now when all this kinds
of--these kinds of
harassments fail,
if they weren't
successful, if they,
if they--if Vardaman
couldn't whip up enough
sentiment among
the registrars to,
like, just find ways to
eliminate the black vote. 
If you had somebody who
could pass the literacy
test, who
somehow could pass,
you know, pay a poll tax,
who could pass the bar as
established by the registrar
to prevent him from voting,
there was always the
ultimate form of what one
could only politely
call racial harassment,
and that's lynching.  The
statistics on lynching are
sketchy at best.  Historians
generally point to the early
1880s as the first moment
when reliable records of
lynchings first appear.  Now
it's important to recognize
the timing.  I made a
comment in a previous
lecture about the value of a
black body.  Lynching is not
a phenomenon you
see during an era,
during--prior to
the Civil War.  Yeah,
there's always a
sample here and there,
but as a phenomenon, it's
not there when it comes to
slaves, because if
you lynched a slave,
you lynched
somebody's property.  You
destroyed--you owed them a
lot of money.  In its own
grotesque way,
slavery afforded a level of
protection for blacks.  It
certainly wasn't there after
emancipation.  Of course,
that is not a defense of
slavery, but that is just
sort of an economic element
to consider in this
equation.  During the period
of federal
occupation of the South,
there was enough military
presence to mitigate
these--this form of
violence.  But when the
North is gone, when the
federal troops are gone,
during the era
of Redemption,
this is how--one of the ways
the South redeems itself. 
So reliable records about
lynching really point to the
early 1880s.  There were
certain lynchings before
then, but consistently, we
have records pointing to the
1880s.  So
between 1882 and 1901,
you have recorded more than
a hundred lynchings a year
throughout the nation. 
Between 1882 and 1968,
when, quote "traditional"
forms of lynching
essentially
disappeared--although they
are not gone from us,
don't kid yourself about
that--over four thou--excuse
me over five thousand people
died in recorded lynchings. 
Easily three quarters of
them or more were African
American.  Lynching was not
only--Blacks were not the
only victims of lynchings. 
Overwhelmingly, they were
the victims of lynchings. 
But the most important thing
to know about these numbers
is that these represent
recorded lynchings. 
Historians presume quite
safely that numbers were
much higher.  Now lynchings
were not just about
stringing somebody up. 
There were many different
types of lynchings, and this
is why it's easy for us to
presume that
there are, you know,
ones that are very
public and recorded,
and those that just happened
very quietly.  No one really
knows about it.  So you
have the most obvious,
straightforward form of this
kind of violence.  Someone
is captured,
they're strung up,
and either a chair kicked
out from underneath of them,
a horse run off, whatever.
They die by strangulation,
by hanging.  But you also
have lynchings, it
wasn't the majority of them,
but they were certainly
important to understand the
phenomenon of
lynching, festival
lynches--lynchings.  You
would have lynchings that
are advertised in
the local paper,
in advance, you know
that on Saturday night,
we're lynching Joe Smith in
Natchez.  Enough time for
rail companies to
sell excursion tickets,
advertised in the papers, so
you could have a grotesque
festival around this--this
actual moment of murder. 
Lynchings may not have just
been--weren't just getting
strung up, but it could be,
involve being nailed to a
post or a tree and being lit
on fire.  It might involve
being physically--in
fact, often involved being
physically assaulted and
mutilated while you're
conscious, before you're
strung up to a post to be
burned, or before you're
actually strung up by a
tree.  When the
lynching was over,
especially for the
festival lynchings,
the abuse to the body
wouldn't end.  The body
might be chopped down. 
As you remember from,
in my second lecture, the
young Irish butcher dragging
a black victim through the
streets of New York by his
genitals, as a way of
sort of declaring his
citizenship, I
was arguing.  Well,
body parts were chopped off
after lynchings: fingers,
toes, genitals, ears are
cut off.  They are kept as
souvenirs, and they are
sold as souvenirs.  Have a
festival lynching in
Natchez and you might find,
three or four days later,
in a storefront window,
somebody's knee.  W.
E.
B.
DuBois, who we'll be
talking about next week,
has this exact experience,
of walking by a window and
discovering he's
looking at a body part,
and realizing that a
lynching he'd heard about a
week earlier, that was part
of that person's body.  Now
I mentioned before,
over five thousand people
lynched.  The great majority
of whom were black.  But who
were the victims?--aside
from being black men and
white men, also some women,
but very few in number,
but also some
women.  Overwhelmingly,
the narrative says, these
were black men accused of
rape.  Bless you.  That was
a very cute sneeze by the
way.  We have black men
accused of rape.  That's the
received narrative,
that's the received wisdom,
and so the presumption is
that there was some justice
being exercised here; that
this black man raped this
white woman,
whoever that might be,
and therefore deserves to be
murdered.  He has violated
the sanctity of the South. 
Much of the language of
lynching during this
era was on such terms;
that it was a manly act to
protect white womanhood by
avenging the rape; that
black brutes who were
rapists were demonstrating
how uncivilized they were. 
And so again, lynch mobs
were being civilized. 
They're protecting the
bastions of being civilized,
of civilized behavior, and
protecting their women. 
Manliness and civilization. 
People though,
as it turns out, were
lynched for a variety of
reasons, not just for the
accusation of rape.  You can
sense--you can hear some of
these reasons--you can also
hear rape, by the
way--with a quote from a
woman--woman's
rights activist,
a very prominent one, named
Rebecca Latimer Felton.
Once a slave owner--in a
family of slave owners.  And
actually, in a strange
way, as such an advocate for
women's rights, she's
actually also advocating for
protection of black women,
which was unusual.  But she
was quite convinced that
black men were rapists,
and they deserved their
punishment.  Rebecca Felton
says here, "When there is
not enough religion in the
pulpit to organize a
crusade against sin;
nor in justice in the court
house--nor justice in the
court house to
promptly punish crime;
nor manhood enough in the
nation to put a sheltering
arm about
innocence and virtue,
it is lynching--it is
lynching to protect woman's
dearest possession from the
ravening human beasts--if it
is lynching to protect
woman's dearest possession
from the
ravening human beasts,
then I say lynch.  Lynch a
thousand times a week if
necessary."
Felton is talking about
moral order: if there's not
enough religion in the
pulpit to organize a crusade
against sin.  Talking about
legal justice: if we can't
have our criminals be
brought to court and tried. 
And she's talking about
manhood again: if we cannot
as a nation
protect our women,
and if lynching is
the way to do it,
then by God, lynch a
thousand times a week.  Now
I said that lynching
is the--seen as the,
the answer for rapists,
especially for black male
rapists, and that is
the received wisdom.  But
really, what was it?  Ida B.
Wells, black
woman journalist,
becomes an incredible
civil rights pioneer,
one of the
founders of the NAACP,
not yet organized.  Ida B.
Wells lives in
Memphis, Tennessee,
and of course she hears
about the scourge of the
black male attacking white
womanhood and raping women
and children.  And then she
has a horrific experience. 
One of her friends, a guy
named Thomas Moses--Moss,
opens up a store, "The
People's Grocery."  He's a
black man.  And he creates
economic competition for a
store owned by whites
very close by.  And that
white-owned store was the
store that catered to that
whole area, white and black
customers.  And Thomas Moss
said, "This is
an opportunity.
I want to open a store as
well."  And the owners of
the other store threatened
him.  "Do not do this.  If
you do this, you will
pay."  And Moss says,
"I'm just opening, you know,
opening a store."  Well,
he paid with his life.  He
was lynched for opening up
the store.  He did not lynch
anybody.  He did not steal
from anybody.  I guess he
stole potential customers,
I suppose, but he was
lynched.  Wells writes
editorials,
organizes a boycott,
and then in short order had
to flee Memphis to save her
life, because she was trying
to pull back the cover of
this lie about the
connection between rape and
lynching.  She would not
return to Memphis for fear
of her life until the very
end of her life.  Decades go
by.  She's convinced she
will be killed if she steps
foot back in the city.  At
that moment when her friend
was murdered for
opening a store,
Ida B.
Wells sets out to
demonstrate that lynching,
claimed as being a way to
keep uncivilized blacks
down, was actually the
perfect manifestation of
uncivilized
white male behavior,
and she starts saying
this publicly.  She starts
writing consistently in ways
where she's deemed--she's
deemed a threat to
Southern manhood.
And because she also claimed
that white women often
desired the interracial
dalliances where they--where
they actually did exist, she
had crossed the final line
of taboo, that white women
might actually desire black
men.  She asked, "If the
South is so against rape,
why aren't white men
lynched?"  There's a long
history of certainly white
slave owners raping their
slaves, having children.
And certainly
after Emancipation,
you know, rape knew no color
line really.  "So why aren't
white men being lynched?"
she wonders.  And then she
goes off to England on a
speaking tour, again on this
anti-lynching crusade.  And
this is where she really
becomes a persona non grata
in the South.  Southern
US at the time had a very
strong connection to
the notions of British
civilizationist hierarchies;
that the British were the
height of civilized society
in the world at that point
in time, and the South,
with their aristocratic
traditions, wanted to be
very much like the English
model in that way.  Ida B.
Wells goes over and starts
talking about lynching,
starts investigating.  She
goes on these investigations
and reports the
investigations.  And it
turns out, as you'll see in
the reading for next week,
the accusation of rape isn't
even there in most of the
lynchings.  So there's the
popular idea that rape leads
to lynching, but that's
not even the case in the
majority of the
situations.  Theft,
rude behavior,
assault, certainly,
all of these things lead to
people being lynched.  And
Ida B.
Wells tells this
to her audiences,
women's audiences and
men's audiences in England,
starts talking about the
way that Southern white men
actually epitomize
uncivilized behavior.  And
you have society in England
start sending investigatory
groups over to the South,
profoundly humiliating to
Southern--Southern cities
and towns where these groups
might appear.  The
South is enraged at Ida B.
Wells and her inappropriate
behavior.  Now this is an
era--and I'll speak a little
bit more about this next
week--an era where the
notion of who is the most
civilized is really quite
important.  It may sound
kind of strange today,
but this was one of the
important organizing themes
of cultures and societies:
having good manners, acting
in proper ways.  These
become dividing lines
between who can have access
to economic opportunities
and who can't.  Who's
civilized?  Who's manly? 
For many Southerners,
it seemed like it
wasn't even a question,
it's beyond debate. 
Ida B.  Wells says,
"Not so fast."  Now we'll
work through a little bit
more this notion of
civilization and manliness,
well, in section I hope,
but certainly in next week's
reading.  But with all
this talk about lynching and
anti-lynching crusades,
it was--there's really an
important piece of the
puzzle that's missing. 
Because the conversations
about this can actually seem
a little bit
antiseptic.  Lynching was,
and remains, a horribly
violent and grotesque act. 
Ten years
ago--in fact, gosh,
exactly ten years ago--small
gallery in New York City,
the Roth Horowitz Gallery,
assembles an exhibit called
"Witness: Photographs
of Lynchings from the
Collection of James Allen,"
a white man who collected
photographs and postcards of
lynching scenes.  This is a
curious
phenomenon, by the way.
I mean, I use "curious" in a
fully complicated way.  At
these festival
lynchings especially,
you would have photographers
present who would take
pictures, not for
the historical record,
but to sell next to the
kneecaps and genitals in the
storefront window.  Studio
photography of lynchings. 
Lynchings would
appear--Lynching scenes
would appear on postcards
and would go through the
mail till the postmaster
general prohibited it in the
1920s, I believe.  Anyway,
the collector named James
Allen gathered up a fair
amount of these photographs
and postcards, and the
owners of the Roth Horowitz
Gallery's would put it
together.  They're very
nervous about it, but
they wanted to do it,
not from the
standpoint of spectacle,
which is what their concern
was.  They didn't want to
spectacularize this
violence all over again,
but to talk about the
historical record.  These
are-these are
horrific images,
and the fact that they were
carried in the mail openly,
the fact that they
were sold in the windows,
is an important part of our
national story that we need
to know.  Very
controversial exhibit,
very small gallery.  They
moved it soon to the New
York State--the
New York, excuse me,
the New York Historical
Society in Manhattan,
where there were
lines around the block,
who were very conflicted
about this exhibit,
but they still went
in.  Some people said,
"You can't, you can't show
these things because they're
so horrific."  Others said,
"That's exactly why you have
to show them."  Black and
white on both sides of that
debate, by the way.  I want
to share with you some of
these images.  I do not do
it to spectacularize these
very awful, awful images,
but to help you all to bear
witness in a way
to the violence,
and atrocities, and
inhumanity--in a clinical
sense, the denial of due
process for black victims in
the era of Southern
Redemption.  Now the images
you're going to see
cover, chronologically,
a broader period of time. 
We're not just talking the
1860s, 1870s, eighties
here, nineties.  But,
I think you will understand
what's going on.  Now I'm
going to show this, this
slideshow.  It runs on its
own, and at the end
of the slideshow,
the screen goes black, class
is dismissed.  And I'll have
side comments to where
the handwriting might be a
little bit illegible. 
There were before and after
images.  Same
man you just saw,
his head impaled,
his burned head,
impaled on the stake.  The
handwriting would be put
there by the photographer,
so it could be identified
when he sold it in
the store.  Litchfield,
Kentucky. 
September Twenty-Six,
1913, in what would
appear to be sort of a town
center.  Studio shots.  And
you would have individuals,
as you'll see, in the
background.  You can see
them [gestures up] directly
above my hand.  This is
actually a series of images
you're going to see here. 
And you'll see the physical
assault on the body prior to
the actual terminal event.
Body's been whipped.
 He's been whipped.  His
back has been gouged and
speared.  And one very
curious thing about the
studio photography is
that They would cover up the
victim's genitals,
despite showing all of this,
to be proper.  This is the
same studio from another
image.  Several
images--several slides ago. 
She was lynched next to
her son.  It's the back of a
postcard.
"The answer of the
Anglo-Saxon race to black
brutes who would attack the
womanhood of the South." 
Here's the answer.
That's the front of
the postcard.  Another
postcard.  "This is the
barbecue we had last night. 
My picture is to the left
with the cross over it.
Your son, Joe."
  Again, for
propriety's sake,
a cloth around the
midsection.  Festival
lynching, you
can--people brought dates,
they brought their
children.  You can tell by
the apparel, this is
of more recent vintage,
not back in 1911 or '12. 
Lynchings were of course
being burned at the stake. 
And they're still fairly
contemporary. 
And class is dismissed.
