RE-LIVING MEMORIES: PICTURING DEATH

Throughout the twentieth century, lynching and violent deaths appear as recurring representational themes in work produced by artists of African descent in the United States. The theme of lynching is the most disturbing to view and the most painful to discuss of all the themes to emerge in the work of Black artists. Despite the sensitivity of the subject, or possibly because it is so challenging, Black women artists, as Sandra Rowe has observed, frequently explore the expressive possibilities of lynching. As an artistic theme, lynching and violent death has a tenacious hold on the expressive imaginations of African American women. Consequently, these horrific images surface in the work of each new generation of artists and appear in the art of women working in a broad range of mediums.

Clearly, Black women are not the only visual artists to use these themes in their work. However, as a group they employ the theme more consistently than Black men and non-Black counterparts. Moreover, the manner in which these women engage the subject of lynching is qualitatively different from other groups of visual artists.[2] Works such as Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob) (1919) (figure 1), Lois Mailou Jones’ Mob Victim (Meditation) (1944) (figure 2); Elizabeth Catlett’s And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones (1946) (figure 3); Betye Saar’s Sambo’s Banjo (1969) (figure 4); Adrian Piper’s Free #2 (1989) (figure 5), Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis’ Homage to Ida B. Wells (1985); Sandra Rowe’s Legacy of a Survivor (1992) (figure 6) and Pat Ward Williams’ Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (1986) (figure 7); are intimate visual offerings revealing a collective concern deeply lodged in the hearts, minds and souls of Black women.

“Re-living memories” is a useful conceptual tool for studying this “strange fruit” harvested from the fields of representation. As a subject of visual art, lynching forces the contemporary viewer to encounter, personally, an ugly chapter in U.S. social-political history that many consider closed. Yet, the ritual-like use of the subject matter in these artists’ visual works reveals our American legacy of lynching and anti-Black violence as more than a tragic chapter of a past historical moment haunting the collective memories of African Americans.[3] Rather, the specter of violent death, bred by hatred, fear and an institutionalized disdain for “Blackness” is an ever-present reality that diminishes the material, physical and spiritual life for people of African ancestry in contemporary U.S. society.[4]

Black women artists’ preoccupation with the theme of lynching, should not be understood as hierarchizing concerns with issues of race over the issues of gender. This is a false dichotomy which assumes that the artists can temporarily bracket off an aspect of their being; one moment being only “women” another moment being only Black. These artists summarily reject the “either/or” framework that pits racial concerns against those of gender. They produce art works that consistently interrogate the complex ways in which social constructions of race, gender, sexuality and class operate as interlocking systems of domination. Necessarily, lynching is a feminist issue, because strategies of violence are integral to the maintenance racism, sexism, and classism which all affect the quality of Black women’s lived experiences.[5] The “artistic” images of lynching presented here are not a full catalog. Rather, they are representative of diverse aesthetic concerns and formal issues that the artists address through the subject of lynching.

The “Strange Fruit” As Metaphor

Artworks that use representations of lynching or evoke the cultural memory of lynching possess the ability to challenge, simultaneously, viewers’ aesthetic, moral, and historical sensibilities. Standpoint and perspective can play a key role in conditioning an individual viewer’s response to works picturing horrific death. Frequently, art of this genre elicits dramatically different responses from viewers whose individual racial, ethnic, gender and class interests inform their disparate responses. Pain, guilt, sadness, anger, relief, shame, validation, and disgust are but a few of the emotional and mental states that the works engender. In a culture where ideas about art and aesthetics are frequently linked to notions of beauty, uplift, the pleasure of looking at pretty pictures, the artistic supremacy of form over content, the intellectual superiority of abstract concepts over concrete encounters, the preference for pleasure and affirmation over discomfort and dislocation, and the universality of the viewing experience, images of lynching are very “strange fruit” hanging in our galleries.[6] These works are the product of the artistic imaginations of Black artists as well as the product of American social and visual culture.

For over half a century, “strange fruit” has been the most frequently embraced aesthetic metaphor describing the displayed bodies resulting from lynch mob violence. The legendary jazz stylist, Billie Holiday gave the metaphor its broadest audience through her hauntingly somber rendering of a ballad titled Strange Fruit. The metaphor and the song lyrics combine to conjure up graphic mental images of Black mutilated bodies hanging grotesquely from trees.

Strange Fruit was a controversial song, and Ms. Holiday struggled to incorporate it into her nightclub performances beginning in the late 1930s and was unable to record it until the early 1940s. Of the more than 350 songs that made up her repertoire over the years, Strange Fruit held the privileged position as Ms. Holiday’s “personal protest” song. As a young, Black, female, musician Billie Holiday consciously constructed herself as an entertainment figure who could also make a profound social statement through her art.[8]

In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday tells us that when she first saw Lewis Allen’s 1936 poem Strange Fruit, “I dug it right off. It seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop.” Ms. Holiday recalls “working like the devil” for three weeks with Allan, her accompanist Sonny White and arranger Danny Mendelsohn to turn Allan’s poem into the now legendary song.[9] Strange Fruit became a permanent fixture in Holiday’s repertoire, yet she also wrote that “the song depresses me every time I sing it. . . . But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South.[10] Philosopher-activist Angela Davis, in her thoughtful essay, “Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’: Music and Social Consciousness,” maintains that:

Holiday, like many Black women artists before and after her, drew upon personal biography and the experience of being Black and female to form of their aesthetic expressions. While Strange Fruit graphically describes the tragic loss of Black lives, the song also refers to the lingering effects of the widespread practice of lynching upon Black people.

Blues songs are much more than descriptive narratives. “The Blues” are musical meditations upon a “state of being.” And “[f]rom Billie Holiday’s perspective, to sing Strange Fruit was to release a passionate cry of protest against the racism which had killed her father.”[12] Similarly, we might consider art works dealing with lynching as visual expressions of “The Blues,” passionate protestations against the experience of living with the daily assault of racism and the legacy of socially sanctioned anti-Black activism.[13] The visual arts are a complement to a century-and-a-half long litany of songs, poems, dramas, short stories, novels, essays, sociological, psychological and historical studies exposing the horrors of lynching as form of domestic terrorism specifically targeted toward Black citizens. These art works not only act as a barometer of the racial tensions and moods that permeate American society at different historical moments, but also reveal creative experimentation with the expressive potential of diverse media.[14]

The Language and History of Lynching

Language is a primary form of representation in the human community and it is worth noting that the United States of America gave birth to the term “lynching” and the race-specific form of ritualized execution that the term now signifies.[15] Torture and mass murder have occurred and do occur around the globe, from antiquity to the present. Yet, lynching in its unique American form is not just a perversion of justice by people of a questionable morality; lynching is also a very specific outgrowth of culturally sanctioned “juridical” practices established in the Revolutionary Era. During the early eighteenth century, transgressions--whether real or perceived--that did not fall under the jurisdiction of common or civil law were classified, judged, and punished under the somewhat oxymoronic rubric of “summary justice.” The important distinction between common law and summary law is that the latter fell outside the jurisdiction of the primitive court system of colonial America. Summary law and summary punishment allowed early colonial communities to take the law into their own hands. Local custom and individual preference, rather than formal laws and judicial precedent, were the basis of determining what was a violation and who was an undesirable resident.

Colonial communities administered summary punishments to loyalists, Tories, Native Americans and anyone deemed undesirable. Initially, summary punishment was painful, humiliating and ostracizing, but it was seldom fatal. Generally, the outcome was banishment rather than death. The form of summary justice and punishment that mutated into the institution we now refer to as lynching, the verb to lynch, the eponymous Judge Lynch, and the vigilantism that we now refer to as lynch-law, draw their names from a Virginia Quaker named Charles Lynch.[17]

At the outbreak of the War of Independence Charles Lynch, a member of the Society of Friends, resisted induction into the army based on his Quaker beliefs. On the home front, however, Lynch played a leading role in local mobilization of troops and supplies. By 1778 he had sufficiently “stifled his Quaker scruples” to accept a commission as a colonel in the Militia and to organize a local regiment. This, in affect, made him the commanding officer of his home-guard regiment. Lynch assumed the role and duties of “Squire Birch”--” the man who laid on the lash, who applied the tar and feathers, or who ordained that the victim be carried on a rail; and he began holding court in his home.”[18] Lynch dispensed a brand of summary punishment that included tar and feathering, whipping and suspending the alleged villain by the thumbs until he shouted out “Liberty”. After the war, the Virginia legislature passed an act which held the self-appointed “Judge” Lynch blameless for his wartime prosecutions. This piece of Virginia legislation exonerating Lynch for his “war crimes,” and became Lynch’s Law in the vernacular.[19]

Written records indicate that the term “Lynch Law” remained a Virginia colloquialism until around 1817 or 1818. As these extralegal practices shifted into the ever-expanding western territories, the expressions used to describe them followed. “By 1850, ‘Lynch Law’ had disgraced every one of the slave-holding states and many of the free states; the fruit of ‘Judge’ Lynch’s decisions hung from many trees.”[20] And while “Lynch Law” was used by vigilantes in the west to hang horse thieves, Southern proponents of slavery continually used it to hang hundreds of white Abolitionists. In 1856, William Lloyd Garrison editorialized in The Liberator:

Ironically, enslavement spared many African people from the mob’s law, because white mobs respected and preserved the slaveholder’s financial interests as the owner of legal “property” and or human “assets.” Frequently, the state or the community reimbursed a slaveholder for his economic “loss, following the summary punishment of an enslaved African.”[22]

In the aftermath of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, however, lynching came to mean gruesome mob attacks against newly liberated Black people. Thomas Nast’s matter-of-fact cartoon from 1874, Harper’s Weekly (figure 8) unapologetically speaks to the terrorist tactics characteristic of the Redemption Era socio-political climate. The Era witnessed the Compromise of 1877 which effectively turned over Black people to the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan and the state, using the so-called “Black Codes” institutionalized racial segregation based on white supremacy, unofficially enforced it by both terrorist “nightrides” and officially through the reversal of civil rights legislation passed during Reconstruction.[23]

There were a vast array of reasons given for the mob executions and torture of Black people: from “perceived” infractions of “cultural etiquette,” such as wearing clothing that whites deemed too fine to accusations of murder. Lynching escalated so dramatically in the late nineteenth century, that in 1892 alone, 161 Black people and 69 white people were lynched. The period between 1880 and 1930 earned the title of the “Lynching Era.”[25] From 1892 until 1925, the annual death rate for Black people by lynching ranged from 50 to more than a hundred. For the years, 1882 to 1968 there were 3,445 recorded lynchings of Black people in the United States.[26]

These statistics are overwhelming, but they mask two important facts: (a) 1882 is the first year that the records were kept so there are no accurate statistics for lynching and mob murders before that period, and (b) records only indicate deaths recorded as reported to or verified by local law enforcement. In other words, persons who “suspiciously disappeared” or whom officials disregarded are not included in the averages cited above. One can only imagine how many deaths have gone unreported or undocumented. A clue to the magnitude of the statistical undercount is provided by oral histories collected following the most widely publicized lynching in living memory, the August 1955 murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. When Till’s bloated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river one southern man reportedly dismissed the finding as insignificant by simply shrugging his shoulders and gloating: “So? That river’s full of niggras.”[27] Much like Atlantic Slave Trade mortality, scholars and African American history speculate that the statistics on lynching only account for a small fraction of lives lost.

Today, there are varieties of legal and popular definitions for the crime of lynching. Each state has always had the liberty to develop a state specific definition for executions and murders committed without the due process of law. Historically, the term lynching has meant “one thing in Kentucky and North Carolina and another in Virginia or Minnesota.” For example, “the state of Minnesota clearly defines [lynching] as the killing of a human being by the act or procurement of a mob.” Thus, if only two people were involved in the hanging of another person, there was no lynching. “In Kentucky and North Carolina the lynch-victim must have been in the hands of the law, or there was no lynching.”[28] Some states never developed legal distinctions between lynching and murder. A cartoon from the NAACP’s January, 1935 Crisis (figure 9) with the leafleter boldly handing out an announcement of a “Lynching Party. Everybody Invited,” to the sheriff, the police chief and a state official speaks to the widespread belief that in many instances “The Law,” actively and at other times passively colluded with lynch mobs. Whatever the definitions, lynching existed on a mass scale for as long as it did because it was socially sanctioned in American society through silence, indifference and acquiescence.

In popular parlance, the terms “to lynch” and “to hang” signify as synonymous. However, the word lynch refers to a broad set of acts used to kill and torture another human being. Lynch mobs have invented innumerable rituals to inflict pain, torment, and death upon their victims. Black men, women, and children have been burned, blowtorched, shot, strangled, gouged, drowned, dragged behind vehicles, castrated, penises chopped off, and bodies hacked into pieces. Lynch parties forced others to eat their own body parts--including genitalia and digits.[29] Frequently, the hanging from trees and doorways of the lifeless, disfigured corpse was the last act a mob performed to announce and display its freedom to savage, dehumanize, and terrorize people of African descent. Lynch parties did not routinely mutilate the bodies of non-Black victims; they reserved this ritual Black people. The added tragedy of this unparalleled American heritage is that neither local, state, nor federal laws protected Black people from mob violence. Moreover, the judicial system and the formal courts of law exonerated perpetrators, thereby sanctioning the practice and marking the legal system as complicit in devaluing Black lives. Thus, the reality of life in the United States was that whites could lynch--accuse, judge and punish--Black people with impunity and the summary justice of lynch mobs was the only law governing life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of Africans in the Americas.[30]

This study defines lynching as the execution--frequently accompanied by torture, disfigurement or dismemberment--of Black people by a white mob, group or individual who engage in a personal or collective ritual that dehumanizes, punishes, overpowers or slaughters the bodies, minds and spirits of Black men, women and children. Another frightening characteristic of lynching customs is that the self-appointed individuals or groups extinguish a Black life in a social ritual, confident that “their community “will not penalize, but praise them. The cultivation of lynching rituals across the country owe a debt to photography and photographers. The camera was used to create a permanent visual chronicle of the exploits of lynch mobs and the agony of their victims. Books, magazines, archives, attics and family albums are full of sickening photos taken in the aftermath of frenzied mob action. In many instances, a young Black male body--or bodies--hangs lifeless from the proverbial dogwood tree. In others, white mob members stand like hunters proudly displaying a mutilated Black body as though it were a trophy. Photographs were popular souvenirs for those who had witnessed a torture--murder; although not as treasured as toes, fingers or bits of flesh.

In the opening pages of the profoundly illuminating study, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michele Foucault assaults the reader with a horrifyingly graphic description of a man being “drawn and quartered” as a form of public execution in Paris of 1757; and then he theorizes about the role of public executions in the cementing of social hierarchies.

When viewing the art on the subject of lynching, it is critical to understand lynch mob mentality and lynch mob culture--the ceremonies, the rituals--are played out to intimidate Black people and to galvanize whites, either willingly or by coercion, into a set of social relations that gives social and political status to people with so-called white skin.

The practice of lynching brings about the physical death of an individual. Yet, the practice of lynching as an instrument of political and economic terrorism, social control and personal intimidation also has a dramatic impact in the hearts and minds of survivors. While there is a qualitative difference, conceptually, the practice of lynching--and its implied threat to the peace and safety of those who survive--has its corollary: “psychic lynching.” “Psychic lynching” attempts to assault or kill the spirit of the individual and the collective community. “Psychic lynching” can live in the individual and collective memory. When the theme of lynching emerges from the living memory of Black artists and surfaces in their work, we are encountering both the physical and psychological affects of lynching.

Black Women Challenging The Mob

No discussion or analysis regarding the history of lynching, the construction of antilynching arguments, the evolution of anti-lynching activism or the theme of lynching in visual arts is complete without consideration and study of the groundbreaking theories and praxis of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Wells-Barnett conducted statistical research, collected oral histories and constructed a comprehensive and radical analysis identifying the race, gender and economic agendas underlying the rise of mob violence and terrorism against Black Americans following the Civil War.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett published three controversial, illustrated pamphlets exposing lynching as a tragically perverse American custom specifically directed towards Black people: On Lynching: Southern Horrors (1892), A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894 (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900).[32] In her written work Wells-Barnett critiques lynch-law and mob rule from a standpoint that positions the experiences and concerns of Black women as central rather than marginal to the debate. Necessarily, she claimed anti-lynching organizing and activism as a fundamental weapon in the battle against the gender oppression of Black women and children as well as adult men. Wells-Barnett’s analyses and prescriptions are as thoughtful and precise today as they were over 100 years ago.

In order to draw upon the power of images and representations, Wells illustrates On Lynching: Southern Horrors and Red Record with a gruesome photograph (figure 10) containing a lifeless, mutilated Black male corpse hanging from a tall tree in Clanton Alabama (1891). Red Record stands as Wells’ most controversial publication, but the title page bears the following brief, yet humble dedication from the author: “respectfully submitted to the Nineteenth Century civilization in ‘the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’” [33] In the photo, mob members, primarily white men and boys, pose around a dangling Black corpse to create this “souvenir document” of a community ritual. The use of the graphic photo to augment the statistical charts and oral histories is a brilliant strategy that turns the evidence of dominance into evidence of barbarity by changing the context of its use and the viewing audience. Moreover, it is an early example of a Black woman questioning the uses and highlighting the abuses of the photographic medium. Wells’. Red Record challenges the reader-viewer to ask: In the land where “primitive” summary punishments are the order of the day, who is free? Who is really brave? Barnett recognized the power of visual images, the significance of breaking silences and the importance of defying custom to bring about social change.

Wells-Barnett’s “Crusade for Justice” laid the foundation for succeeding generations of feminists’, intellectuals’, activists’ and artists’ condemnation of lynching as a gendered crime horrifically affecting Black women and men. Most importantly, Wells-Barnett recognized that politics of Western re-presentational rhetoric--in science, history, popular culture, fine arts, public discourse and especially in the imaginations of the those defining themselves as white--produce disinformation and reproduce myths about the sexual nature and sexuality of Black women and girls which leaves them open to assault and unprotected by the law.[34]

The lynch-murder of three highly respected Memphis, Tennessee businessmen in May of 1892, was the event that transformed Ida B. Wells into an ardent anti-lynching crusader of unparalleled historical significance. In 1892 lynchings were nearly a daily occurrence in American society. Tragically, more U.S. citizens fell victim to mob rule in 1892 than any other year in the countries recorded history. Wells-Barnett was outraged when in less than one week across the South, eight Black men were hanged till dead, and their lifeless bodies filled with bullets. In no instance were legal actions taken against any white person or persons involved in the men’s deaths. Although the justification “excusing” five of the mob executions was what Wells called “the new alarm about raping white women,” the three businessmen were killed by the mob for daring to own, operate and protect a prosperous cooperative grocery in competition with a nearby white-owned store.[35] The murders of the Memphis grocers caused Wells to critically reexamine and challenge not only vigilante violence, but the rhetoric used to defend lynch-law as well.

As editor of a militant Black weekly, the Memphis Free Speech and Highlight, Ida B. Wells published a searing editorial condemning mob violence and the widespread white acquiescence that served to sanction mob rule. Wells’ editorial dismisses white, southerners’ self-righteous defense of vigilantism and suggests that the psychology motivating mob violence is white men’s desire to control white women’s sexuality rather than widespread fear of Black male sexuality. The editorial is scathing, relentlessly incriminating and challenges the white supremacist rhetoric casting Black peoples’ sexuality as loose, wanton and uncontrollable:

In the Free Speech editorial Wells first presents her bold argument that the rationales for the lynching of Black men by white mobs were in most instances hoaxes, “threadbare lies,” conjured up to excuse the terrorism and murder of Black men, women and children. Lynching had been an acknowledged blemish on the national character, and an obvious instrument of intimidation and terror used against free people of African descent since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern proponents of lynch-law had successfully propagated the mythology that lynching was a necessary measure for restraining Black men’s lust for white women and white children. Ironically, for hundreds of years when the loss of a Black life was a monetary loss for the slave holders, there was no need for a Black rapist mythology.[37] Rather, the non-economic defense for the wholesale enslavement of African people rested upon the racist ideology that Black people were naturally suited for the role of slaves because they had strong physical bodies and childlike and docile minds. During the Reconstruction and Redemption Eras, however, the mythology was turned on its head and the myth of the “Black Rapist” became deeply engrained in the public imagination of white America. Even anti-lynching arguments framed the debate in a manner that defined lynch mob members as lawless, moral degenerates whose legal offense was that they failed to provide a Black “criminal type” with the due process of law. No noteworthy challenge to this justification was presented until Ida B. Wells published her landmark Free Speech editorial of 1892.

As a women’s rights activist, Wells also recognized and acknowledged that lynch-law affected the lives of women of African descent differently than it affected Black men. Wells maintained that “lynching and rape, two race/gender-specific forms of sexual violence, merged with their ideological justifications of the rapist and the prostitute in order to provide an effective system of social control over African-Americans.”[38]

Wells-Barnett asserted that lynching and its justification myth allowed a violent, unchecked white male sexuality to masquerade behind a protectionist rhetoric. This, in turn, created a socio-political environment that encouraged and sanctioned the assault and rape of Black women and girls by white men. Wells-Barnett criticized the Southern culture and American justice system that neither arrested nor prosecuted anyone in the numerous incidents in which white men were known to have viciously attacked Black women and young Black girls.[40]

White citizens were furious with Wells’ Free Speech editorial and her representation of the social order as tacitly supporting the existence of lynch mobs. The city of Memphis erupted. The white-owned, daily papers published editorials castigating not only the “black scoundrel” who authored such “loathsome and repulsive” ideas but anyone tolerating such impudence.[41] The Evening Scimitar advised that, “it will be the duty of those whom he [sic] has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Street, brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.”[42] Fortunately, Wells was enroute to an out-of-town conference when her editorial appeared. Letters and telegrams from friends warned her not to return to Memphis if she treasured her life. Threatening messages from others invited her to return and meet the Judge Lynch’s noose. Wells’ business partner at the Free Speech was forced to flee the city, and within a few days a “committee” of indignant citizens had taken possession of the Free Speech office and confiscated its contents.[43] The opposition and threats only strengthened Wells’ resolve to “agitate, agitate” “agitate”.[44]

As an “Exile” re-living mob hatred in New York City, Wells began lecturing and continued publishing her trenchant attacks on lynch-law and Southern whites’ customary acquiescence to a corrupt mob morality:

Wells claimed that she presented facts contradicting the common contention that the growing number of lynchings was directly related to a growing licentiousness among Black men. Even Frederick Douglass acknowledged “that for lack of contrary evidence, he had been inclined to believe the rape myth.”[46]

Wells-Barnett became a living target of mob hatred because she recognized the power dynamics of representational politics and dared to use them to her advantage. She understood that people who tell the story and people who create the images have power to control the recording and interpretation of facts and opinions. In addition to the numerical data promised by the title of . Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, 1892-1893-1894, Wells also narrates story after story in which white women who are secretly, yet voluntarily, involved with Black men claim or are forced to charge rape when other white people find out about the relationship. More importantly, Wells demonstrates that contrary to the widespread myths, only a third of Lynch Law victims were even accused of rape--the alleged crime that gave lynching its strongest justification. Wells published her study to specifically undermined Southern representations of Black sexuality as wanton, lascivious and dangerous, and to turn the critical gaze upon representations of the sexuality of white men as blameless and that of white women as vulnerable to the entire “race” of Black men.

When Wells appropriates a lynch mob souvenir photograph and situates it within the pages of her textual representations of “lynch law truth,” the white mob shows the real life face of wanton, lawlessness. The revised context transforms the souvenir photo into a piece of incriminating evidence that sharpens the effect of her critique. Wells-Barnett’s written and visual records altered the rising tide of mob violence, shaped the discourse and debates and brought the visual horrors of lynching to the forefront of the American imagination.[47]

Black Women as Victims of the Mob

Meta Warrick Fuller’s small, painted-plaster sculpture, Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob) of 1919, stands as the earliest sculptural statement by an African American artist to specifically address the savagery of lynch-law. It also commemorates Wells-Barnett and other Black Americans’ organized campaigns to resist this long established institution and contextualizes their struggles. The subject and title of Fuller’s sculpture refer to the 1916 lynching of Hayes Turner and his pregnant wife Mary in Valdosta, Georgia. An account of the horrors inflicted upon the Turners appears in Walter White’s shocking study of lynching and mob violence, titled Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch.[48] White graphically narrates the events leading up to, during, and in the aftermath of white mob executions of Black men, women and children throughout the South.

The ethnographic details expose and stress the ritualistic savagery that was characteristic of frenzied white mob actions. Walter White’s passage on the Turners is particularly unnerving:

The lynch/murders of the Turner family were representative of the pattern of aggressive mob outrages that increased dramatically during and after World War I. The NAACP organized and led the most successful and extended campaign against lynching. The organization’s goal was to educate the public to the evils of lynching and to garner widespread public support to designate lynching as a federal crime.

On July 28, 1917, a predominately Black crowd of 10,000 people, turned out for a “Silent Protest Against the Mob” in New York City. W.E.B. Du Bois led the hushed and orderly crowd in a march down 5th Street to the “tap, tap, tap of a drum corps.”[50] Fuller’s sculpture, Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob), commemorates the Turners’ tragic deaths, and the organized social protest intended to prevent the reoccurrence of such crimes. Thematically, the subject of lynching invokes and relates itself to a whole history in Western art of images which “raise unheralded victims of war and religious persecutions to the celebrated status of “martyrs” and saints.

Stylistically, Warrick Fuller retreats from the idealized naturalism characteristic of turn-of-the-century public and private sculpture. The sculpture’s roughly modeled surface reveals the influence of Fuller’s three years of study in Paris where she encountered and was influenced by the modernist aesthetics of artists such as Auguste Rodin--whose sculptures retain and celebrate the sculptor’s process of creation. Moreover, Rodin reportedly advised and inspired Fuller by telling her “Mademoiselle, you are a sculptor; you have sense of form.”[51] While in Paris, Fuller also met the scholar-activist, W.E.B. Du Bois, who later became one of the co-founders of the NAACP. Du Bois and Fuller formed a friendship and political alliance that was to last for many years. In a letter home, Fuller noted that Du Bois admired her work and had suggested “that I should make a specialty of Negro types--I told him I did not believe I could so specialize but I considered the advice well meant”[52] Despite this early disclaimer, Black people are the subject of all of Fuller’s extant works.[53] With Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob), we see that Fuller manipulates her sculptural materials as well as the new formal language of modernism to make a statement about the modern social condition.

Fuller’s Mary Turner (A Silent Protest Against the Mob) is a roughly modeled work in which a slim female figure rises from a complicated and tangled mass. An occasional hand, arm or face emerges from the expressionistically rendered plaster mass engulfing the lower portion of her form. The amorphous mass leads to a ambiguous and conflicting readings. To some viewers the main figure seems to twist and rise away from a consuming “mob,” while another reading sees the figure as topping a pile of lynch mob victims. There is no portrait likeness. The viewer is not forced to observe graphic or explicit visual details narrating the horrible circumstances of Mary Turner’s death. Rather, Fuller adopts and manipulates the indistinct language of Rodinesque sculptural modernism for the purposes of memorializing not just the individual victim, Mary Turner, but to raising the spectacle of violence engulfing a supposed democratic society to the level of artistic and intellectual contemplation. Fuller presents a symbolic “ascension” of the martyred mother from the torments of our earthly plane. Fuller placed the small sculptural unit on a graduated wooden base nearly one third its size. The base is reminiscent of the platforms used to physically and symbolically elevate life-size and monumental public sculpture. The base front bears a hand-shaped, faux-bronze plaque into which the artist has carved the words: IN MEMORY OF MARY TURNER AS A SILENT PROTEST AGAINST MOB VIOLENCE. Through the text, Fuller clearly announces that she modeled this miniature, commemorative sculpture as a visual protest against lynch-law.

Fuller’s decision to memorialize Mary Turner has significance on a variety of artistic and historic levels. The murder of Mary Turner and the savage stomping of her unborn child must have struck a terrifying cord in the heart and mind of the artist, who was, herself, the devoted mother of three young boys born during the tumultuous years of 1915, 1916 and 1917. Although Fuller always employed the human form in her art, she once described her aesthetic concerns by emphasizing, “My work is of the soul, rather than the figure.” [54] While this is the language of early modernist artists, it is also the tone of the discourse at the turn of the century.

In Du Bois’ now classic 1903 text, the Souls of Black Folks, the author, himself the father of a deceased infant, spoke of the spiritual “strivings” of a people “whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of human opportunity.”[55] MARY TURNER (A SILENT PROTEST AGAINST THE MOB) is the aesthetic product of an artist committed to early modernism’s romantic belief in the expressive and symbolic potential of form. Mary Turner urges the viewer to contemplate the ways that Black women and children were also recipients of the virulent hatred of lynch mobs. Mary Turner’s death was not an isolated incident. Lynching records, faulty as they are, indicate that between 1880 and 1939 more than 80 women we killed at hands of lynch mobs. Thus, to be against lynching was to be against an institution that threatened the sanctity of life for women and children as well as men.[56]

In contrast to the “gallant” effort of the Black women symbolized or suggested by the May 1916 Crisis cartoon “Woman to the Rescue,” (figure 11), Mary Turner, speaks to those who did not survive, invoking sympathy, empathy and disgust. Moreover, at the height of the eugenics era, using a Black woman as the symbol of lynching in art undermines the ideology and protectionist rhetoric which claimed that lynching was a necessary measure to safeguard the “virtue” of white womanhood from Black men. It raises, instead the issue of the genocidal ideologies, policies and practices that people of color face as they struggle with what Du Bois described as “the problem of the twentieth century...the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in Asia and Africa, in America and in the islands of the sea.”[57]

Black Women and the Aftermath of the Mob

For nearly sixty years, Elizabeth Catlett’s sculptures and prints have addressed social and political issues of specific concern to people of African descent. Catlett is a prolific artist who has used abstracted figuration in her works. Some, like And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones and Civil Rights Congress (figure 12) make strikingly bold aesthetic and political statements. Throughout her career, Catlett has employed art as a vehicle for addressing and expressing what she knows best--the aesthetic concerns and social experiences of Black women.[58]

In 1945 and 1946, Catlett received Rosenwald Fellowships that allowed her to work on a series of prints exploring the lives of Black women. Inspired by the Mexican tradition of didactic public-oriented art, Catlett decided to work on her The Negro Woman in America (renamed The Black Woman in America) prints series while living in Mexico. [59] The prints in the series celebrate highly esteemed contributions of historic Black women such as Phillis Wheatley or Harriet Tubman as well as acknowledge the contributions of millions of unnamed Black women. The titles themselves are illuminating: I’m Sojourner Truth. I Fought for the Rights of Women as well as Negroes; I’m Phyllis [sic] Wheatley. I Proved Intellectual Equality in the Midst of Slavery; I’m Harriet Tubman. I Helped Hundreds to Freedom and My Role Has Been Important in the Struggle to Organize the Unorganized. The titles are not just descriptions of the image but also explain the historical significance of each subject represented. Additionally, the prints reveal Catlett’s deep concern for documenting the oppressive social conditions encountered by Black people in the United States during the 1940s, and for expressing her aestheticized response as a Black woman.[60]

Catlett retains an unrelenting concern to represent and express what she knows bestl; Black women’s experiences. The subject matter alone does not make Catlett’s work feminist. Rather, Elizabeth Catlett’s art emerges as a Black feminist intervention in the rhetorical, political and artistic traditions that interpret Black political thought, the Black political agenda and history by subsuming Black women under the all familiar rubric of “the Black man.” Her sculptures and prints consistently challenge the lack of gender specificity in theory and practice. They consistently recognize the specific concerns and contributions of Black women.

The Black Woman in America series, address an array of racial injustices which Black people stoically endure. On the surface, these prints barely suggest that any active resistance to these ills should or is taking place. Yet on a deeper level, the prints are powerful social and political critiques that examine the intersectionality of race, gender and class oppression in the lives of women of African descent here in the United States. For example, And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones refers to the ever present fear with which Black mothers, wives, daughters and friends must live as a result of decades of the random lynching of Black people by white mobs. Lest we think Catlett is referring to the perils of Black life in a previous era, we only need to recall that in July 1946, two Black men--one who had just been discharged from five years of military duty--along with their newlywed wives were pulled from a car by a mob of twenty unmasked white men in Georgia. In response to shouts of “get those damned women, too,” all four were murdered in a ghastly multiple lynching.[61]

In And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones, a contorted corpse, noose still around the neck, sprawls before us. Three sets of tell-tale feet stretch across the top of the print. One set of feet actually stands on the rope, evoking (or inverting) a tradition symbol of freedom in which feet step out of or step on broken chains or manacles (figure 3). Visually, the feet allude to such expressions as “the boot of oppression” or “being under the heel of the oppressor.” That these feet are both booted and bare subtly points to the multi-class composition of lynch mobs. Moreover, these feet symbolically recall the hundreds of photographs (figs. 14 & 15) documenting anti-Black lynching. In these gruesome “souvenir” photographs lynch mob members proudly pose with the mutilated bodies of their slain victims. The box in figure 13 contains the charred remains of Zachariah Walker. A lynch mob burned him while still alive in Coatesville Pennsylvania in August of 1911.[62] The photographic genre that stands in sharp contrast to the prints expressive of Black men’s victimization and women’s dread.

Frequently, vigilantes publicized scheduled lynching in advance in local papers and could draw crowds numbering into the thousands. It was not unusual for one or two hundred witnesses to congregate. Oral histories describe the ways in which crowds of men, women and children would chant and scream for acts of torture and death. All too frequently, we think of lynch mobs as adult white males, yet the photos continually record the faces of white wives, white mothers and white sisters. These pictures remind us that sometimes lynchings were family “adventures,” where children were taught to hate Black people, conditioned to disrespect Black lives, and trained to completely disregard the civil and human rights of Black Americans.

Black women and mothers, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, were foremost leaders in the U.S. anti-lynching campaign from its beginnings in the 1800s. In the mid 1930s, Catlett herself stood in front of the Supreme Court with a hangman’s noose around her neck as part of an organized protest against lynching.[63] After World War II, the crusade intensified. Black women from around the country participated in the September, 1946 demonstrations in front of the White House in Washington, DC, protesting brutal lynchings in Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Demonstration leaders sought President Tremens’ support for a federal anti-lynching bill. Truman never endorsed such a bill; however, Catlett’s Civil Rights Congress reminds us that by December 1946 Truman was pressured into establishing the first President’s Committee on Civil Rights.[64] Catlett’s print addresses the terror of lynching during this post war era. In this instance, however, the symbol of death appears in a white hooded gown--the now classic emblem of the Ku Klux Klan’s white supremacist terrorism. These hooded figures target a young boy as their next victim. By portraying a youngster, Catlett reminds the viewer that Black children and teens were never exempt from the intimidation and violence of white vigilantes. Of the thousands of twentieth-century lynch-mob victims, no case stands out in the memories of Black America as well as that of the young Emmett Till (Figure 15).

The long-standing lynching problem shook the nation in 1955, following the murder of 14 year old Chicagoan during his trip to visit relatives in Mississippi. In Coming of Age in Mississippi: An Autobiography (1968), Anne Moody recalls some of the affects of growing up as a Black child during the lynching era.

Although Catlett’s Civil Rights Congress reads as an uncanny foreshadowing of Emmett Till’s tragic death, it actuality captures an ever present danger and lived reality for Black men, women and children.

Moody’s testimony is also instructive in understanding the various ways in which the culture of lynching and its ritualized disregard of Black humanity can shape a youthful personality and affect gender and intergenerational relations among Black people.

By addressing her perceived and experienced sense of “powerlessness,” Moody provides a few clues that may begin to explain why Black men explored the painful subject of lynching less frequently than women. Even when presented as a stoic martyr, as in Lois Mailou Jones’ 1944 painting entitled Mob Victim (Meditation), use of “The Black Male” as the primary icon of mob violence becomes, for some, an icon of victimization and emasculation.

The man portrayed in Jones’ painting has yet to encounter the full wrath of the mob. He is still alive and calmly stands before us hands bound, wide-open eyes cast upward toward the heavens. Compared to the anonymity of the lynched man in Catlett’s’ And . Special Fear for My Loved Ones, Jones’ portrait likeness gives the thousands of unnamed victims a face. This places more emphasis on the victims--their feelings, their thoughts, their lives, their families--of mob violence, rather than the perpetrators. The advanced age of Jones’ Mob Victim accentuates the dignity of his carriage, but lacks any suggestion of youthful and virile resistance. Rather, juxtaposed to the tiny church with steeple, nestled in the distant landscape, the old man in Mob Victim awaits his fate with the courage and resignation traditionally attributed to Christian martyrs. Jones’ use of thick, vivid, multi-color brush work is the only element that is disrupting the somber and silent inevitability.

The fear of losing a loved one to violent death caused by anti-Black hatred surfaces as a subject in the art of Black women throughout the century and will probably continue to appear as long as the socio-economic conditions that create the environment of jeopardy continue to exist. In the 1992 print To Marry (figure 16), Catlett juxtaposes a lynching image similar to that in her print And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones with the image of a Black bride and groom. Catlett includes the reference to And a Special Fear for My Loved Ones--which was emblematic of re-presentations of lynching from a period when lynching was an everyday threat for Black Americans--in a work from a historical moment that rhetorically speaks of lynching as part of the past. By doing so, Catlett speaks to the continued impact and threat of lynching--a re-living memory--in the lives and imaginations of contemporary Black women. Moreover, she connects her work to a generation of artists who use the theme of lynching as a way of commenting on not only social relations, but the politics of representation as well.

Sambo’s Banjo, Betye Saar’s 1971-72, mixed-media construction, is a work that explicitly targets the interdependent relationship between the culture of lynching in the USA and the scientific theories, histories, literary representations and visual images created by people of European descent. To expose the interconnected nature of these traditions, Saar combines three key elements: the signifying power of the name “Sambo,” the visual clichés of “the banjo” and “the watermelon”--two attributes routinely associated with Black men in the American culture--and images of men hanging from nooses. A wooden banjo case serves as the controlling visual element.[67] The case’s exterior cover carries a painted grotesque caricature of a Black man, and the words that give the piece its title.

Saar lined the interior with a bright red-and-yellow-print fabric and divided the case into compartments to display the figurative elements. To make the “case” against anti-Black stereotypes and lynching rituals, Saar presents a visual play on the vernacular expression “skeletons in the closet.” A tiny skeleton hangs in one closet-like compartment, and copies of souvenir lynching photographs hang on the open closet door. A grinning, caricatured puppet of the mythical “Sambo” stereotype hangs suspended in the central section of the banjo case. A three-dimensional form in the shape of a watermelon slice accompanies the banjo case, making reference to the seemingly innocent fruit that US culture transformed into a symbol used to demean people of African descent and devalue Black lives.

Black Women and the Legacy of Mob Violence

Sandra Rowe’s Legacy of a Survivor (figure 6) is an installation work that dominates a 20’ x 30’ gallery wall.[68] As a backdrop for her constructions, Rowe painted a sky blue silhouette of a tall, expansive tree directly on the gallery wall. Six, eight-foot tall triangular structures, stained in deep blood red, are aggressively projected into the gallery space. Stiff rope, tied into six perfectly tied nooses, hangs from each gallow-like structure. Rowe juxtaposes the tree--a basic symbol of lynch-law--with the gallows--an important symbol of judicially sanctioned capital punishment. The Legacy of a Survivor installation critiques the federal, state and local government’s failure to protect citizens of African descent from lynching and reminds us that this historic lack of protection is woven into the very fiber of American Society’s through state executions. Rowe’s visual juxtaposition of the primary symbol of hanging with the fundamental symbol of lynching underscores the ways in which the American legal system has worked, directly and indirectly, in complicity with the so-called lawless. Rowe’s chilling visual indictment of American judicial and law enforcement practices forces the viewer to visit a mock crime scene.

Standing before the “strange fruit” of America’s cultural legacy, a viewer involuntarily assumes the place of lynching crowd participant. Or, one might involuntarily stand before the Rowe’s artistic product as the family, friend or general members of Black communities across the country stood in shock, mourning, or fear. It is not only that the mourners are without legal recourse, but also our culture of violence. Summary punishment is state sanctioned execution and state perpetuated execution. Since, historically, the judicial and penal systems have served the interests of white Americans over Black Americans, advantaged men rather women and privileged the rich instead of the poor, state sanctioned executions are a socially accepted form of the ritualized lynching of Black people.

Once again, Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish is instructive. At this juncture, his analysis reveals sharp contradictions between the critical history he charts out and the lived reality of African people in the USA. Foucault describes the historical period (1760-1840) as the “age of sobriety,” because it supposedly sees the death of old laws and ancient forms of punishment. This period is forever marked by three key shifts: The gradual “disappearance of torture as a public spectacle . . . and . . . [p]hysical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty . . . moreover . . . the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment.”[69] Foucault notes that it is a slow transformation expressing itself differently from nation to nation. However, when ones tries to map Foucault’s grand historical narrative over the specific history of American domestic terrorism targeted against African peoples, his theory does not hold. During the very period when Europe and the United States were supposedly moving away from public spectacle as punishment to penal incarceration, white America preserved the ancient rituals of public torture as a ceremony of white supremacy whose living legacy is with us today.

Rowe’s installation goes beyond the mere re-membering of ritualized dismemberment. If and when viewers move in close to inspect the details of the troubling forms, they come to see that Rowe prods each viewer to think beyond the obvious and literal references to lynching. Inside each noose, suspended with nylon cord, are rectangular magnifying surfaces with text. Each of the six texts presents what Rowe highlights as the Legacy of a Survivor. For her they are: “Killing,” “Others killing ourselves,” “Ourselves not knowing about ourselves,” “Killing ourselves by killing ourselves and others,” “Knowing the others while freeing ourselves,” and finally, “Freeing ourselves by knowing ourselves and others.”[70] Rowe addresses internalized oppression, the affects of African people living in a white supremacist, male-centered, capitalist society, that celebrates violence, domination and economic exploitation when expressed by the wealthy, often by whites, and usually by males. Lynching is only one expression of a culture-wide devaluation of Black humanity, potential and contributions especially in the visual vocabularies.

Clearly, Rowe’s Legacy of a Survivor addresses a Black viewer. It would be too limiting, however, to assume that the “ourselves” speaks only to Black viewers. The legacy of enforced white supremacy has robbed Black people of a history and heritage---and it has stripped people of Asian, Latino, Native American Indian and yes, European descent of their histories. The monumentality of Legacy of a Survivor helps to etch the “temporary” installation into our collective memories. Discussing the symbolic nature of her work, Rowe notes:

Rowe created Legacy as a site specific installation for the No Justice No Peace exhibition organized by the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles in response to the upheaval following the first Rodney King jury verdict. Rowe maintains that “[i]f we, the United States, fail to take the problems facing people of color seriously, we will have a continuing history of rioting and looting” as a form of protest.[72]

The reflective, yet confrontational, work of Black women artists meets with varied reception. In an art market where appeal is all too often everything, it is risky for artists to choose subjects that many would rather forget. However, like Catlett and Rowe, many artists ignore the criticism of those who feel that it is not “polite” or “artistic” to continue to air certain historical memories. They choose instead to engage the theme of lynching not only as a means of challenging the prevailing social-political order, but as a self-conscious strategy to re-vision the ways they see themselves and the world around them. These Black women artists create works that challenge viewers to question their relationship to and their stand against the legacies of lynch mob violence left to all citizens. Do we individually or as a collectively, willingly or unwillingly participate in the violence of the “little lynching”--the ritualized obliteration of value and respect through visual re-presentational language, that speaks so loudly against all things Black, and all things African?

Black Women as Critics of the Mob

Adrian Piper’s 1989 Free #2 is an especially chilling view of the American landscape. Free #2 consists of the reproduction of two disturbing black and white photographs. Piper appropriated both from mass media publications, enlarged to near life size, individually framed and installed side by side on the gallery wall. The photograph on the left is of the lifeless corpse of a young Black man hanging from a tree. The photo on the right captures another Black man being mauled by a police dog while two uniformed police officers hold him down. Although the images themselves shock and disturb, the dramatic impact of Piper’s work comes from the way she fuses text and image. She superimposed the words “land of the free” in bright red ink over the image on the left, and “home of the brave” appears across the image on the right. In Free #2, Piper creates a powerful image linking the photo-memory of lynching with American rhetoric memorized as a youth. Free #2 visually re-articulates the pronouncement that Ida B. Wells made one hundred years earlier, “the land of the free and the home of the brave means a land of lawlessness, murder and outrage.” It could be called two forms of lynching: the old way and the new way. In the view of social critics as well as social historians, it is in the same old way, in new uniforms, that law-enforcement agents have terrorized Black people in America--literally kneeling on the necks of Black people/males while the dogs of America run rampant.

Any American who has attended an elementary school assembly, a professional sports match, or a political event immediately recognizes the text of Free #2 as the climactic lyrics from the U.S. national anthem.[73] For many Americans The Star Spangled Banner lyrics are the ultimate expression of the collective American character; forged by a heroic resistance to tyranny and a fierce commitment to individual rights. The words, “O’er the land of the free and home of the brave,” are also essential components of the rhetorical apparatus that forms and informs what many embrace as an American identity. “O’er the land of the free and home of the brave” are symbolic of the promises--the guarantees--of the American social-political order. “O’er the land of the free and home of the brave” are sacred words that buttress many people’s faith in the notion that they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. “Land of the free,” and “home of the brave” are words that make millions of “Americans’” chests swell with pride, millions of red, white and blue hearts beat with expectation and fill millions of eyes with hope. Yet, when mapped over the violent images of a Black man’s death and another man’s domination, the lyrics rapidly drained of their inspirational nature.

Piper draws parallels between our experiences of the musical and visual arts while discussing her concerns as an artist in a 1990 interview:

Free #2, assaults the viewer’s senses. It is a work that draws upon widely circulated images and cherished Americanism “to make trouble.”[75] Viewers of Free #2 become the spectator-participants in the aftermath of a lynching. It is a discomforting position that one should not try to escape too quickly. Piper’s work is intentionally interactive in the sense that it asks the viewer not only “to look” at art, but to see or examine “something” about themselves. That “something” may be sadness, pain, anger, indifference, or guilt. Whatever the experience, it is not merely an aesthetic one, and the response reveals as much about the viewer as it does about the art. One hopes it is not an immobilizing experience, but rather it serves as the “catalyst to work against racism” and the violence perpetrated in its name. With Free #2, Piper allows the spirit of theoretical or practical resistance to begin with the experience of encountering the horrors of uncontrolled (although some may assumed justified) white rage juxtaposed to the experience of encountering the image of the “legitimate” exercise (presumably authorized, if not justified) of “white” power subduing The Black Male--the contemporary icon of fear, violence and crime.[76] In an Artforum essay Kobena Mercer speaks of the representational language associated with Black men,

American representational rhetoric plays a pivotal role in shaping the beliefs and values that inform our aesthetic responses and our artistic evaluations. Ironically, if “the subject” “engenders” no empathy at the social level, “the subject” invokes little aesthetic or artistic empathy. More importantly, lynching violence is an overdetermined “representation,” a symbolic representation in that it is not merely about exterminating life, but obliterating the body, torturing the flesh, killing the symbolic victim over and over and over and then using the body or body parts to represent the power to torture the deceased and terrorize the living. Culturally, it functions as a “popular” penal system. Trudier Harris defines anti-black lynching as a ritual “exorcising” of Blackness from the white-collective imagination, from their psychic fears and from their experienced anxieties.[78]

Initially, Free #2 appears as no more than two juxtaposed photos resurrected from old lynching photo archives and the files of photos documenting the experience of Civil Rights activists. It also represents the many ways in which local law enforcement agents disrupted and repressed sit-ins, pray-ins, and other forms of organized civil disobedience. Yet, these are not aged mementos of some bygone era. The photo on the left captures the lifeless form of nineteen year old Michael Donald. While walking to the store, Donald was forced at gun point into the car of James “Tiger” Knowles and Henry Francis Hays, members of the Klavern 900 United Klan of American in Mobile, Alabama. This was not in the Mobile of the late Nineteenth century, 1930s or 1960s. Rather, the lynching of Michael Donald occurred March 21, 1981. Despite the possible narrative that may rush in to “justify” such horrific treatment, “Michael’s only crime was that of being an African-American male who had the misfortune to be alone. . .”[79] The contemporary “all American” clothing--jeans, gym shoes, windbreaker--testify to the recent date of the crime. On the morning Michael Donald’s body was found, the Titan of the United Klan’ was quoted as saying, “It’s a pretty sight. That’s gonna look good on the news. Gonna look good for the Klan.”[80] The photo of Donald was widely circulated in newspapers and magazines across the country. Michael Donald’s death and the photograph capturing it serve to remind us of a number of things. Foremost among them is that white supremacist groups are still alive, recruiting and growing.[81] A dramatic increase in what we now call “hate groups emerged during the 1980s.” As a culture, we have experienced a rise in the beatings, burnings and murders--we now call hate crimes--committed by individuals and groups from Howard Beach in New York to the streets of Portland Oregon.

In Free #2, Piper appropriates the mass media images and re-contextualizes them to highlight the interconnected histories of summary punishment, lynching, photography and art. It “does not make nice,” in ways that some Renaissance paintings of Christian martyrs, such as the arrow-pierced-body of Saint Sebastian, do not make nice. Alternatively, the relatively new institutional monument the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC does not sanitize the systematic murder of millions of Jews and war prisoners.

In her 1990 Pretend series, Piper again incorporated the photo of Michael Donald into her work. Pretend #4 expands and sharpens Piper’s critique by juxtaposing Michael Donald’s image with images of the leisure class and another law enforcement photo. She also recasts the photo from Free #2 in an ensemble of photos called Pretend #3, again, we observe uniformed police subduing a young Black man. This time, however, the photographed man is a young Reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. It is a photo taken during King’s arrest in Montgomery, Alabama for organizing the city-wide bus boycott that gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement. Flanking the King pictures are pictures of two Black men. On the right a young boy, laying in his own blood, killed by police fire in the sixties. On the right a photo of the late Arthur McDuffy who died from injuries inflicted by the police. Piper’s addition of the triple-monkey motif challenges the viewer to remove the veil of “see no evil”, “hear no evil”, and “speak no evil.” For Piper, to “Pretend not to know what you know” is to participate in “the circus” that denies the history of racism in America or its continuing effects.[82] Piper capitalizes on the authority engendered by documentary photography to enhance the visual impact of her critique. She uses the photographic record to challenge the wide-spread denial that “living with racism” and re-living racism are realities of daily life in the United States.

In photo after photo participant/spectators boldly, sometimes gleefully, encounter the camera’s lens. Many photos were turned into postcards and mailed to friends and family across the country (figs. 19). They are graphic reminders that the laws governing “the land of the free,” did not protect thousands of Black people from murder. They remind us that the judicial system in the “home of the brave” did not punish white criminals when their victims were Black citizens. In lynching pictures, Black men’s bodies give silent testimony there is no justice in “summary law.” It is important to note that in many instances, lynch-mob victims had been in the custody of local law enforcement officers before their deaths. Although the visual evidence is abundant and testifies to the specific individuals’ participation in mob-action, the judicial system never successfully convicted or punished any white participant-spectator for lynching until the eighth decade of the twentieth century.[83]

Additionally, Piper heightens a somewhat obvious, yet frequently unacknowledged contradiction surrounding the personal and collective cowardice underlying mob mentality and embedded in mob violence. By extension, Free #2 confronts the aesthetic pretense that fails to acknowledge that these photographs are a part of the American visual heritage. For the most part, retired from their public role as unifying and solidifying a sense of community among whites, most of these photos rest in the dusty corners of private boxes and public storerooms, with sporadic appearances in photographic anthologies.[84] It is a pictorial genre that captures a social, political, legal and cultural history that far too many would like to politely forget--or pretend that it never existed. Conversely, the visual records are engrained in the collective memories, and oral histories of African Americans. Although the “old” form of lynchings have become rare, the “old” style of lynching and its ability to intimidate and control have not been laid to rest, and the contemporary manifestations are as big a problem as ever, at least for the masses of Black people in the USA. Piper’s Free #2 recognizes this contradiction and works against any desires the viewers’ may have to retreat into self-imposed silence, culturally reinforced amnesia, and historically prescribed forgetfulness, boldly asserting that we will continue to re-live this past unless we make dramatic changes.

In his essay “Uses of Photography,” art critic and cultural historian John Berger maintains that

Black women artists appropriate these “traces” of the past, these instruments that chronicle a history of physical and psychic lynchings, and transform the incriminating evidence into weapons of indictment and testimony. Their visual records contribute to a set of works that acknowledge living memory and the constantly re-lived memory in a “collective consciousness. As a re-presentational language, these works are as much about the broader society as they are about the victims. And in many ways, it is the self-reflexive nature of the works that viewers resent but rationalize away as an inappropriate subject of art.

A/Parting Autobiographical Analogy

The viewers’ resistance--often angry, usually annoyed, sometimes suppressed rage exhibited as disinterest--reminds me of my own rage when I first read the opening pages of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. I was furious: with Foucault, and with the professor who assigned the text. Having been assigned the book for an architecture class, I did not expect to read an excruciatingly graphic three-page description of a man’s body being, burned, pinched, hacked and ultimately ripped apart by six horses (drawn and quartered).[86] It made me nauseous. It was the kind of imagery that I so carefully eliminate from my literary, cinematic, or television viewing. I “felt” tricked by the professor and seduced by my previous theoretical encounters with Foucault’s less dramatic textual imagery. I read on, however, because I had a review essay to write and submit. Of course, I could have exercised my liberal prerogative to not read, but I did not want to be penalized with a lower grade. Therefore, I continued to read Foucault’s description that relies on the eighteenth-century “eye-witness” accounts taken from the bowels of old public document archives. Then, in the next two pages, Foucault shifts course, and relays a dry, somewhat boring, account of a prison guard’s log entries. With the juxtaposition of these two dramatically different accounts of the “penal style,” he points to a revolution in western thought and culture. Stylistically, the practices are unlike, but still tied to a system that “values penal repression.”[87]

In studying the theme of lynching in the art of Black women in the United States and Adrian Piper’s Free #2 in particular, Foucault is particularly useful. First, he so aptly points out that we may see a dramatic changing of the guard, with the modern agents replacing ancient manifestations, but without seeing an attendant change in the repressive nature of societal practices or institutions. Second, Foucault, helps the reader “see.” If one suffers through disturbing imagery, Foucault’s analysis offers unparalleled conceptual and historical insights about hierarchies of power about the art of architecture that. Likewise, viewing art is not always pleasant nor do our emotional responses have to prevent us from expanding our intellectual or historical horizons. The viewers, critics and art historians, who are resistant to the theme of lynching or to the aesthetic or intellectual “appropriateness” or artists’ appropriation of terribly tortuous imagery, might find Discipline and Punish instructive. Black women artists cannot inflict a punishment on those who refuse to read the multi-layered complexities or aesthetic significance of their work. Then, again, in the broader sense, everyone pays, when we choose not to look, choose to ignore our collective historical legacies, because conditions prevail or worsen.

Pat Ward William’s’ 1986 Accused, Blowtorch, Padlock, is a work that, again, appropriates a lynch mob photo. Although originally published in Life Magazine, Williams first encountered the picture in and ripped it out of the book The Best of Life, a compilation of photos by many different photographers (figure 20).[88] To physically re-frame the photo along with three blown up details, Williams uses an old four-pane window frame--possibly suggestive of the Italian Renaissance notion that two dimensional art, when placed in “proper” perspective, reads like a window unto the world. This formal element also suggests, a metaphoric reframing, a rethinking of the issues generally addressed by the re-presentation of the victims of mob “discipline” and vigilante “punishment.” Williams surrounds the reframed photographs with a tar-papered backdrop on which a barrage of handwritten questions directly speak to the viewer. Interestingly, the black paper is simultaneously suggestive of tarring and feathering, a tarpaper shack as well as a classroom blackboard. As Williams schools the viewer, she does not disguise the horror or anguish that her encounter with the photo initially invoked.

The hand written text narrates her process of coming to understand the multi-faceted implications of the photo’s existence and continued reproduction and “celebration. In an interview with bell hooks, Williams’ spoke about the significance of the piece.

Although Williams’ empathy with the nameless man chained to the tree, causes her to wonder...”WHO took this picture?” It also raises the question of how much LIFE Magazine paid this witness to a murder--or was it “just donated.” It is an unanswerable conundrum, but Williams asks some penetrating questions about not only the role of photography, the role of the photographer and publishers. None are neutral or objective, although both can and do objectify. Picturing the aftermath of lynch mob violence is a dramatic frame onto an emotion-filled landscape. Should we ask similar questions about the complicity of photography or re-presentations, particularly when the subjects are less apparently tragic and what constitutes the differences? Pat Ward Williams reminds us that the seductions of documentary photography, of illustrated journalism, of American re-presentational language stand accused and are suspect.

In Elizabeth Alexander’s essay, “Can You Be Black and Look at This?: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” she raises a series of questions about the Black gaze; about the experience of seeing and the aesthetics of horror and anti-Black aesthetic permeating levels of society and cultural production. “What do a people do with their history of horror? What does it mean to bear witness in the act of watching a retelling? What does it mean to carry cultural memory on the flesh?”[90] Is there only one way to express it, only one way to examine it? One of many possible answers, is found in the art works discussed in this chapter. These artists exploit the possibilities of various media to intervene and provide alternative visions to the hegemonic re-presentational discourse that denies the very pain it inflicts.

Black Women Commemorating Victims of the Mob

Artists who employ the theme of lynching in the development of a commemorative project use their creative energies to conceptualize a work that recognizes the significance of death while simultaneously investigating non-life-threatening aesthetic concerns. Thus, works that address the legacy of lynching have a historical, documentary and educational character while simultaneously exploring conceptual dilemmas, disparate formal questions, and the expressive properties of a wide range of media. Around the globe, artists from Africa to the Americas have created paintings, sculptures, prints, texts, photographs, coins, and textiles that memorialize those who gave the ultimate “gift” in historic struggles against hatred, fear and all forms of oppression. More specifically, artistic commemorations dedicated to those who gave their lives--knowingly and by the perverse accidents of historic conscription--are a central component of the visual vocabulary used to articulate the American identity. In the United States, however, there are no major public memorials dedicated to the memories of those who died in the wave of anti-Black lynchings.

Recognizing the importance of the memorial project, in 1990 Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis created her commanding, mixed media installation Homage to Ida B. Wells. The work was intended to commemorate a phenomenal social activist whose passion for justice gave birth to organized resistance against lynch-mob violence. A full-length, painted portrait of the legendary Ida B. Wells dominates the back wall of Tesfagiorgis’ 7’ x 8’ Homage to Ida B. Wells. Tesfagiorgis pays homage to a woman who is historically and symbolically larger than life. Any work honoring Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her life-long struggle to secure human rights, legal protections and social justice, simultaneously memorializes the thousands of martyred men, women and children who have died in the struggle against the oppression(s) of African people in the “New World.”

To make this explicit, two scroll-like “hangings” are suspended so that they flank the portrait containing a text that lists the names of lynch-mob victims. By juxtaposing the portrait of the activist with the names of the victims, Tesfagiorgis expands the commemorative nature of her work and imbues the installation with layers of meaning. Two slender, leafless tree trunks rise from the floor. A thin cord snakes around each tree, creating a striking visual symbol of white mob violence. These literal and metaphorical pillars of “Lynch Law” frame the installation, highlighting the physical, mental and emotional constraints of constantly living under the threat of lynch-law and without the protection of the American legal system.

In addition to acknowledging Wells-Barnett’s contributions as a social activists, Tesfagiorgis’ Homage to Ida B. Wells also commemorates Wells’ gifts as a shaper of images. Wells-Barnett’s “red records” continue to inform, not only the subject of Black women’s art works on lynching, but the contexts in which they appear. Wells-Barnett is an enduring historical figure, and it is somewhat ironic that an art work celebrating fearless activism and articulating her intellectual critic is a temporary installation rather than a full-scale public monument.[91]

By exploring the issues surrounding lynching, Black women artists like Fuller, Catlett, Jones, Saar, Piper and Ward-Williams, respond to a communal call to commemorate slain martyrs in the battle for human rights. These artist transform the raw materials of their “craft” into visual meditations that commemorate the spirits of millions of African men, women and children who survived the Middle Passage; the institution of American slavery; white supremacist terrorism of Redemption Era nightriders and Jim Crow segregationists. It also commemorates all those who continue to survive the ongoing economic violence that undermines the quality of life in Black neighborhoods throughout America. To date, most encounters with the subject of lynching in art are based on individual responses to individual and collective concerns of people of African descent re-living the American experience. These are the material and conceptual concerns. However, these works by Black women artists ask us to consider might happen if a full-scale public art project to commemorate the struggles of Black people was recognized and addressed, rather than denied and ignored, by the collective American agenda?

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Notes

2. See Marlene Park, “Lynching and Anti-lynching: Art and Politics in the 1930’s,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, 18:311-365. During the 1930’s, anti-lynching activists and supporters organized two exhibitions featuring art works that addressed the moral and social ills of mob violence. The exhibitions were landmark events on a number of fronts. The most obvious and well recognized significance rests on the nature of the subject matter of the exhibited art works, and the overtly moralizing character of both shows. Although the majority of the artist were white, Black artists also participated in these two shows at a historical moment when mixed race shows were not common. As a theme in the art of twentieth-century white artists, the anti-lynching works created for and displayed in these two exhibitions represent a critical mass; For a study of lynching as a theme in African American short stories, novels and essays, see Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). For an analyses of lynching as one of the four main themes appearing in African American women’s drama see, Judith L. Stephens, “Anti-Lynch Plays by African American Women: Race, Gender, and Social Protest in American Drama,” African American Review 26, no. 2 (1992): 329-339 and Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (New York: Praeger, 1988), 5-9, 60-61; For texts of the protest plays, see Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, ed., Wines in the Wilderness: Plays By African American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (New York: Praeger, 1990). For the most influential early studies on the lynching of African people in the United States, see Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892; repr. in Henry Louis Gates, series ed., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, compiled by Trudier Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

4. See Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). Also see Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living with Racism: The Black Middle-Class Experience (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); For discussions which retreat from the aforementioned analyses and argue that Black America’s self-limiting beliefs and behaviors are the primary source of the social problems Black Americans encounter, see William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Black and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University Press, 1978) and Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

5. For a thorough discussions of Black feminist theory and practice see, bell hooks, Feminist Theory From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1985); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); and Stanlie M. James and Abena P. A. Busia, eds., Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (New York: Routledge, 1993). For analyses of the representation of Black women in popular culture see, Michele Wallace, “Negative Images: Towards a Black Feminist Cultural Criticism” in Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 1990): 241-255; K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images & the Shaping of US Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993).

8. Billie Holiday with William Duffy, Lady Sings the Blues, (New York: Avon, 1976), 84. As a testament to the enduring social relevance of this profoundly moving song, nearly 20 other artists/groups released renditions of Strange Fruit. Those currently available on compact disc: Gene Ammons, Tori Amos, Sidney Bechet, Terence Blanchard, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Stan Campbell, Bob Dylan, Miki Howard, Ranee Lee, 101 String Orchestra, Abbey Lincoln, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, Sounds of Blackness, UB40, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Webster Young. For a discussion of Strange Fruit as marking a dramatic turning point in Ms. Holiday’s career, see Angela Davis “Billie Holiday’s ’Strange Fruit’: Music and Social Consciousness” in Gerald Early, ed., Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and It’s Cultural Content, from Polemics to Pulpit vol 2. (Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1993), 33-43.

9. Holiday, 84; It is worth noting that Lewis Allan, author of the poignant poem Strange Fruit, was a white writer. Holiday’s “Pop,” jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, had died in March of 1937 while on tour in Texas. Due to the Jim Crow segregation of Texas’ hospitals, Clarence Holiday was unable to receive emergency medical attention for a chronic lung affliction that he had developed as a result of inhaling poisonous gas during battle in World War I.

15. The etymology of the word lynch is very sketchy. It does not appear in Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1902). Murray’s Oxford Dictionary (1903) states that “the term was originally used in the United States...[which stand as]...conclusive evidence that the origin of “lynch-law” is not to be sought in England.” James E. Cutler, “Origin of the Term Lynch Law,” in Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 13-40.

22. Shay, 61. Those slaves caught were charged with conspiring to revolt or participating in an insurrection were summarily executed and their bodies left on public display. Nat Turner was one of the most famous leaders of a slave revolt; to intimidate those who remained enslaved and might consider insurrection, the news was spread that after Turner’s “hanging,” his skin was tanned for leather and his body rendered to grease.

23. For a fictionalized account of the birth and rise of the KKK or the “Invisible Empire,” see Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905; repr., Ridgewood NJ: The Gregg Press, 1967). Although fiction, Dixon’s novel is often read and understood as the first history of the KKK. The novelist paints a picture of an oppressed southern Aryan race, rising up against white Northern Reconstructionists’ strategies to “Africanize” the South and “establish white slavery under Negro masters!” The narrative climax comes when members of the secret KKK association kill a Black soldier who has conveniently “confessed” to assaulting two white women. Following the “brute’s” summary execution, the KKK leaves the corpse in a public place with a note attached warning other Black citizens that the KKK plans to restore the Aryan race to power and protect the virtue of white womanhood. They also have their first cross

IJELE: ART EJOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN WORLD

ISSN: 1525-447X

Issue 5 (2002)