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Lynching and the Making of Modern America

Lynching and its legacy have resurfaced as important themes in contemporary race relations. In 2000, James Allen, an Atlanta-based collector, exhibited in art galleries across New York City several dozen lynching postcards, which were viewed by more than 50,000 patrons. In 2005, the United States Senate officially apologized for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation. In 2008, Congress approved the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, empowering the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute unsolved murders and acts of racial violence during the civil rights era. Since 2007, DiversityInc, an online news publication, has documented over seventy-eight instances in which lynching nooses have been discovered at American colleges, universities, work sites, and other public spaces. Taken together, these developments have raised vexing questions about lynching and racial reconciliation, the appropriateness and utility of publicly displaying racist material culture, and its impact on contemporary struggles against racism. In recent years, historians have weighed in on these issues, resulting in several groundbreaking studies of women and the anti-lynching movement and of lynching and visual culture, focusing on the ways that photography and film shaped the history of lynching and the anti-lynching movement.1 Amy Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle and Crystal Feimster’s Southern Horrors are recent examples of this trend. Both books examine the history of Southern lynch-mob violence and early twentieth-century anti-lynching campaigns, yet they do so from radically different vantage points. Lynching and Spectacle brings into clear focus the ubiquitousness of lynching imagery in American culture and Americans’ profound fascination with lynching. Feimster’s Southern Horrors sheds light on the racial and sexual politics of lynching by highlighting