The Unexpected Nature of it All: The Legacy of Lynching in America

Before relocating from Brooklyn to upstate New York, I read and studied lots about Sanford Biggers’ upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I read reviews about his works, and I explored interviews and videos about his methodologies, travels, and inspirations. Biggers’ exhibition was highly anticipated, and I must admit that I was disappointed to learn that I would not be around for its opening (nor would I be able to attend supplementary programs hosted by the museum). However, I am fortunate to share that I visited the city during the 2011 Thanksgiving holiday season, and I am proud to say that the first item on my agenda was to visit Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective. The exhibit was all that I’d imagined and more. However, one installation in particular left a burning impression in my mind. My mind will not let me forget Bittersweet the Fruit, 2002; and every now and then I find myself pondering on its implications and the magnitude of the design.

Most recently, I was prompted to read portions of W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and Langston Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks. During my exploration of these texts, I was compelled to think about Biggers’ exhibition and my distinct response to Bittersweet the Fruit. The thread that binds the works of DuBois, Wright, Hughes and Biggers is their exploration of lynchings. These works build upon DuBois’ notion of “double-consciousness.” [1] And, in the words of Wright, these intellectuals investigate the “dual role every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live.” [2]

Bittersweet the Fruit featured a tree branch with a screen embedded into its subdivision. The video included a naked, Black male situated at a piano. Two headphones were attached to the tree limb. A segment of the installation’s label read: “…Shot by the artist in the summer of 1998, its creation coincided with the brutal murder, by dragging, of James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper, Texas. Grieved by the event, which shocked the nation, Biggers regarded the video as a kind of memorial to Byrd: ‘Actually my hope was to reclaim nature and the African American male’s entitlement to be in nature without the fear of torture or death.’”

Guest viewing Sanford Biggers' Bittersweet the Fruit, 2002 (Credit: Ashley Bowden)

My friend and I approach Bittersweet the Fruit. Upon placing the headphones over my ears, and settling my eyes onto the screen, I realized that there was no sound coming from my earphones. At that time, I motioned to my friend to ask if she was experiencing the same problem. To my surprise, I turned to my friend only to discover that her headphones were attached to a rope that resembled a noose. I immediately removed my headphones at which time I also noticed a noose-like rope attached to my headphone.

I was shocked. It was surreal. Lots of ideas began to rush through my mind. I pondered on the arbitrary nature of lynchings, and the unexpected nature of the act on the bodies of “death-bound-subject[s]?” [3] Was this an example of the circumstances under which a lynching would take place? One minute you’re going about your business, the next minute your life is in jeopardy. I experienced a surge of discomfort—not because I did not want to think about historical legacies, but because I had not anticipated what I’d just experienced. I wasn’t prepared. But who was? Who is?

Reading the writings of DuBois, Wright, and Hughes took me back to my interaction with Bittersweet the Fruit. My experience with the installation caused me to engage the above works with a heightened sense of sensitivity. As I reflect on the sum of my experiences and studies, I can’t help but to think about how little life was valued by the mobs that lynched Black bodies for sport. At the same time, I am confronted with the realities innocent bystander faced—whose only fault was being born of African descent.

As museum professionals, what experiences do we want our audience to have? How do we interpret culturally sensitive material? How do we tell stories that encourage people to make connections within and outside a museum’s wall? How are organic experiences created? How can they resonate in the lives of visitors long after their visit?

 

[1] W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Group, 1989), 5.

[2] Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 12.

[3] Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.

Brutality on Display

Throughout my life, my mother has often said to me that she “won’t allow someone to cry alone in her presence.” With such a role model in my life, it’s no surprise that I grew up being a person who is acutely sensitive to the pain of those around him. It is very easy for me to see a person in pain and have an immediate and gut-wrenching reaction to it. This made reading Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright and The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes difficult for me, but a valuable experience. I had always thought of Jim Crow as a terrible thing, but I had trouble understanding how emotionally terrifying it truly was. The narratives of life in the Jim Crow South, living in fear of violence for the smallest slight or none at all, affected me very deeply.

Sarah in “Long Black Song” and her tragic tale affected me gravely.[1] In the story, Sarah is watching her child at home while her husband is in town selling cotton, when a traveling salesman visits her house and eventually rapes her. I had studied Jim Crow before, and I understood how rape was used by Whites in the South, both as a tool against African American women and as an excuse for killing African American men. I had never before been able to truly understand this, however, until Richard Wright’s story engendered an emotional connection within me. This story allowed me to feel true anger and outrage over what had been allowed to occur in the nation I call home.

Art from the "Hateful Things" traveling exhibit from the Jim Crow Museum

The only other time that I was confronted with the pain and terror of living in the Jim Crow South, was on a visit during my undergrad at Central Michigan University to the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. Professor David Pilgrim, Ph.D. founded the museum and curates it today. Dr. Pilgrim is an African American man who grew up in Mobile, Alabama and has collected racist memorabilia since he was a young man. Dr. Pilgrim explains in an essay on the museum’s website that he has collected racist memorabilia because of how deeply he hates it and he decided to found the Jim Crow Museum in an effort to “use objects of intolerance to teach tolerance.”[2] The collection at the Museum is extensive and often as troubling as the stories by Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.

One thing that I have never been able to understand, and most likely never will, is the desire to collect such objects. I have read Dr. Pilgrim’s essay and I can recite why he collects such hateful things, but I don’t think I will ever be able to see an object that elicits such negative emotions within me and desire to own them. I am just thankful that there are such people out there like Dr. Pilgrim, because using these objects to teach tolerance and assure such terrible things as Jim Crow never return is far more important than avoiding the pain of revisiting such topics.

 

[1] Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, (HarperCollins: Pymble, Australia) 2009

[2] Dr. David Pilgrim, “Why I Collect Racist Objects”, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/menu.htm

Information Overload

In 1998, when James Byrd, Jr. was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to his death, the press exploded. The American public was outraged, and rightfully so. His captors and killers, three men between the ages of 23 and 31, and two of the men were known to be associated with the Ku Klux Klan in their small Texan town.  Two of the men were ultimately sentenced to death, the third to life in prison.[1] The media explosion made me question the constant evolution of news and media, and how this plays a major role in people’s perceptions of hate crimes, and crimes against humanity in general.

Rewind about 100 years, maybe 150. Between Emancipation and the Depression in the United States, over 3,000 African Americans were lynched in the American South.[2] Instead of public outrage; however, people often rushed to the event, eager to watch and take part in the brutality.  Take, for example, Langston Hughes’s short story Father and Son, included in his book The Ways of White Folks. In this story, 20-year-old Bert, the son of a white plantation owner and his slave, is commanded to return home from boarding school, only to find that his father still treats him coldly and without any respect. Still, Bert pushes the patience of his father and the white people of the town when he doesn’t act “right” towards them. Eventually, Bert and his father argue, his father has a gun, and Bert strangles him in a moment of rage. Unwilling to let the mob kill him, Bert decides to use his last bullet to kill himself in his father’s house. Unsatisfied with lynching an already-dead man, the mob goes after Bert’s uninvolved brother Willie, also the child of the plantation owner and Bert’s mother, and lynches him as well. Hughes ends the story flatly, illustrating the racist and careless reporting:

Bert Lewis was lynched last night, and his brother, Willie Lewis, today. The sheriff of the county is unable to identify any members of the mob. Colonel Norwood’s funeral has not yet been held. The dead man left no heirs.[3]

Instead of the outrage that would be instantly voiced today, via Facebook, Twitter, or the general media, postcards depicting the grotesque act of lynching were sent around the country until about the 1940s. James Allen has collected many of these postcards, creating a book, film, and travelling exhibit around them. Rather than labeling these acts as terroristic and horrible, the postcards seem to trivialize the action. When people send postcards today, their purpose is usually to say “look where I’ve been, see what I saw”—so what does this say about the postcards?

This leads me to another question—consider the information overload that most people encounter everyday in 2011. While people are more aware than ever before of events happening internationally, there is so much information out there now that people have become almost numb to most of it. We’re so overloaded with images and stories, how can we even begin to feel like we’re helping or doing something about it?   Most of the time, when people don’t want to deal with a problem, they refuse to see it. Is that why there’s still no anti-lynching law in the United States?

---

[1] “Third Defendant Is Convicted in Dragging Death in Texas.” The New York Times (19 November 1999). http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/19/us/third-defendant-is-convicted-in-dragging-death-in-texas.html?ref=jamesjrbyrd (accessed March 11, 2011)

[2] “Lynchings, By State and Race, 1882-1968.” Charles Chestnutt Digital Archive (2001).http://faculty.berea.edu/browners/chesnutt/classroom/lynchings_table_state.html (accessed March 10, 2011).

[3] Langston Huges, Father and Son in The Ways of White Folks. (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 225.

“Strange Fruit” Four Ways

I’m always a bit ashamed to admit that my memory is quite terrible.  Whereas my siblings and friends all seem to remember the details of their childhood, I always have trouble recalling anything more than vague recollections.  There are some memories that have stuck with me though, and one of those is the first time I heard Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit.”  I don’t remember exactly how old I was (although I believe it must have been the late elementary or early middle school years) or where (I assume in school) or even why I listened to it (again, probably school related), but what I have never forgotten is the absolute feeling of horror as my young mind realized what Billie Holiday was singing about.  To this day I have a hard time even listening to the song, and I always have that initial feeling when I do. 

Museums Helping Change Happen

Our brief in-class discussion of Federal anti-lynching laws motivated me to do a little more research to find out if any anti-lynching laws were ever passed.  What I found was disappointing.  Anti-lynching laws were introduced and passed several times by the House of Representatives in the 1920s, 30s, 40s.  However, the filibustering efforts of several powerful Southern senators killed these bills, preventing any anti-lynching legislation ever being passed by the Federal government.[1]  The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the increased involvement of the Federal Government in racial issues essentially ended the push for official anti-lynching legislation.

However, on June 13, 2005 the United States Senate passed resolution 39 “apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation.”[2]  Sadly this resolution, considered by some to be a conciliatory act, was only signed by 89 Senate members.[3]

Yet while the signing of this resolution was perhaps too little, too late, its passage should inspire museums to create and sponsor challenging exhibits.  One reason given for the passage of this resolution was the publication of Hilton Als and James Allen’s book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America which “helped bring greater awareness and proper recognition of the victims of lynching” [4]  Without Sanctuary was published in 2000 but received national attention in 2002 as a traveling museum exhibit featuring the postcards and images collected by James Allen.  The willingness of museums to promote Allan’s work led to a public discussion of a painful subject and reinforces the role of the museum as a powerful change agent.

[1]Robert Siegel, “Anti-Lynching Law in U.S.” All Things Considered. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4701576

[2]S.Res.39.IS  http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.RES.39:

[3]ibid.

[4]ibid.

Safety in Numbers?

During this past week’s class, I asked if an overwhelming black population could dissuade whites from carrying out lynchings. Without being able to talk about any specific studies, we deferred to the age-old example of a powerful but numerically inferior elite exerting control over the masses.

I decided to look into spatial distributions of lynchings compared to population demographics.  Let’s just say the findings were not what I was hoping for. In Mississippi there was no protection in numbers. Instead, there seemed to be more targets for lynch mobs.

With 539 blacks lynched, Mississippi had the largest total number of any state from 1882-1968. Screen shot via "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" interactive maps.

Fear will keep them in line

The most tragic aspect of the Jim Crow era South has to be the heightened sense of fear that black men, women, and children lived with every day. The fear of making the wrong move, saying the wrong words, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This culture of fear was held in place by the Southern whites’ air of superiority toward their black neighbors. If African Americans talked and acted “right” they would be “free” in a subservient role to the white folks. But that kind of environment created the fear, anger, and inequities that resulted in clouded judgment and behavior that seemed necessary for survival.

One terroristic method used to keep African Americans at bay trumped all others.

As Texas goes, so goes the Nation?

Taken from Google Images

After reading the selections for this week’s class (Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” “Big Boy Leaves Home,” “Down by the Riverside,” and “Long Black Song” in Uncle Tom’s Children; Selections from Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks, “Home” and “Father and Son”; and, Gretchen Sorin and Mary Aimonovitch, Through the Eyes of Others.), I couldn’t help but think of the current media firestorm over the Texas State Board of Educations ruling on new social study standards pushing Texas textbooks in a more “right” direction.

Taken from Google Images

Regardless of your political views, going through the Texas Education Agency (TEA) Archive’s is a real treat.

After listening to several sections of meetings held over the last year, I was shocked by how far the Texas State Board of Education (TSBE) was willing to water-down American history. I was especially appalled by certain board member’s quests to eradicate representations of minorities.

In an April 22, 2009 meeting, a board member, Bill Ames, told the board that he felt that there was too much emphasis on America’s negative past and those groups who helped enforce that view.

His direct quote is: “…I contend that there is an overrepresentation of minority content. And that’s all TEKS driven. The specific TEKS say ‘the problems of women,’ ‘the problems of immigrants,’ ‘the problems of minorities.’ There is nothing in the current TEKS that talks about celebrating America’s positive successes.” [1]

Looking For a Way Out of Hard Times? Try Communism!

Of course people who are struggling financially want to find a solution to their problems.  Listen to this rosy picture that literary critic Edmund Wilson paints and see what you think:

“…unemployment has been wiped out, a gigantic reconstruction of industry to extend a … planned economy has been undertaken, and a cultural revolution of tremendous dimensions has been won on many fronts.  [They have] freed women from age-old social disabilities and discrimination, provided national and racial minorities with an opportunity to develop their own cultural life, broken down the barriers between city and country and adopted the most advanced system of social insurance in the world.” 

A few of those ideas sound like things we might like to see in our country today in the current economic climate, don’t they?  That was Soviet Russia under the Communist Party  in 1932, a time when America was in the midst of its Great Depression.

Writers such as Wilson, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright used both non-fiction and fiction to spread the word about what they saw as the answer to America’s problems during the 1930s.  Although slavery was legally a thing of the past, poor sharecroppers in the South were facing much the same social, economic, and political prejudices as their forebears.  In Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star” both portray the severity of Communism’s threat to white Americans.  While the lynch mobs that seem to always be a part of his writing (at least in Uncle Tom’s Children) are still present, it is fascinating to see the change in attitude of whites toward blacks when there are Reds involved.  

When trying to get information on party members or meeting locations, whites treat African Americans almost as equals, as if they are united in their fight against what they see as an extremely dangerous political group.  For instance, in “Fire and Cloud,” the mayor actually addresses Dan by name, rather than calling him “boy.”  However, when he and his friend are unable to obtain the information they want, as is the case with Sue and Johnny-Boy in “Bright and Morning Star,” African Americans return to their role as sub-human in the eyes of the white man.  While they still have no problem torturing and killing black men and women, their new enemy was the powerful Red, members and followers of the American Communist Party. 

Lynching and the New York Post Cartoon

Related to our discussion of lynching last time, I’m belatedly posting links to some conversations on the web about the controversial New York Post cartoon.

There are over 6,000 comments on The Huffington Post about it.  Check out the “Huffington Post bloggers,” but also be sure to scroll all the way down to find the reader comments.

Watch a segment on MSNBC about the cartoon controversy here.