Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X

MELVIN EDWARDS' LYNCH FRAGMENTS: NEGRITUDE AND THE BATTLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA

Hamid Irbouh

The title of the [Lynch Fragments] Series, is in a sense, a metaphor for the whole struggle, and the point that I took it has a lot to do with the fact that the level of struggle necessary to make things just had to be up to the level that it was unjust. My effort in sculpture had to be as intense as injustice.
-- Melvin Edwards1

Introduction

Found objects become powerful metaphors for cultural identification in Melvin Edwards' Lynch Fragments sculptures. Hammers, spades, and chains are assembled, welded into formally elegant totems; identification is drawn from the shackles and tools of oppression. Beyond the masterful organic forms and the formal configurations, there is in the Lynch Fragments a catharsis and a condemnation that simultaneously acknowledges oppression of African American identity and implicates white America's collective amnesia. Edwards' Lynch Fragments seek comparison with Projections Series by Romare Bearden who, similarly, collaged bits and pieces of photographs and colored paper as visual records of African American history and as an alternative to the distorted history of white America. Bearden's Projections Series exalt the representation of the African American in a powerful realism. In a similar way, Edwards' Fragments endow found objects with the power and legitimacy of historical testimonies. I shall argue in this essay that Edwards' Lynch Fragments must be considered within the paradigm of Negritude and the American Civil Rights Movement and that, though small in actual size, they represent a significant response to the history of hate and bigotry that has plagued the Unites States and targeted African Americans.

Edwards and the Civil Rights Movement

The African American movement for emancipation began long before the 1960s. In fact, it took root among the first Africans herded onto the shores and into the plantations of the New World. It was in the sweat of slaves who made America what it is today; in the blood of the runaways; in the tears of mothers who saw their children taken away and lent to other slave masters; in the shame of daughters who were raped; in the broken hopes of the free slaves who migrated north for a better future; and in the dreams of African American soldiers who fought in the Civil War and the two World Wars. The history of the Civil Rights Movements developed out of a series of complex and intertwined movements.

Before the 1960s, the Civil Rights Commission, established in the 1940s, achieved some legal victories though segregation persisted to be the driving force in American society. For example, interstate travel continued to be illegal and literacy tests for voting and segregation of classrooms in higher education lasted for another decade or two. Yet, it was the defiant act of one woman on December 1st, 1955 that has come to symbolize the emergence of the Movement. Drawing from a long tradition of civil strife, Rosa Parks, a young African American woman, overstepped Montgomery City law and refused to yield her bus seat to a white man. Vincent Harding, rightly, argues that the Sixties had its origins, not with the demonstrations of white students against the Vietnam War or the dissolute administration of their campuses, but with Black students who called on America to redeem itself (Vincent Harding 1985, 25). Earlier, a new African American generation that emerged in the 1950s, defied the white hegemony, and began the struggle for their civil rights.

The Civil Right movement climaxed with the Washington March led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28th, 1963. Though the March mobilized more than 300,000 African Americans and a large number of white sympathizers, it is remembered as having transformed the Movement from a Southern into a national cause. King's speech in Washington laid bare the US politics toward African American as two-faced (Ibid. 46).

African Americans fought for their civil rights on the cultural and artistic fronts as well. While the March was being held, Romare Bearden co-founded the Spiral Group in New York with Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff. Spiral included fourteen African American artists, Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Reginald Gammon, Calvin Douglas, Felrath Hines, Avin Hollingsworth, Perry Ferguson, Merton Simpson, James Yeargans, William Majors, and Earl Miller, followed later by Richard Mayhew. The group's members were all too aware of the legal challenges brought against educational segregation (Brown Vs. Board of Education), including Rosa Park's defiance, the Freedom Rides in the 1960s, and the death of NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers in Mississippi. In an initial meeting, Spiral members discussed the role of African American artists and expressed a concern about the loss of African American cultural and social tradition in the Unites States and, accordingly, sought to find a new role for art (Jeanne Siegel, 1966). However, Bearden failed to convince the Spiral group to engage in assembling a collage as a shared vision, for the members' ideas and artistic philosophies were too diversified. It was during this period that Bearden began his Projections Series, consisting of small collages that were mechanically enlarged.

After working for the Works Projects Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, Bearden emerged well versed in the Western art tradition, from Social Realism, through Cubism, to Abstract Expressionism. As a Social Realist painter, he emphasized the experiences of African Americans. In Folk Musicians (1941-42), the massive forms and the delineated contours sharply contrast with the three African American rural musicians. Though depicted as if on a street corner with a barren landscape stretching out behind, a device Bearden used to heighten the psychological drama, the viewer is held captive by the musicians' strong gazes. Stoic and untiring, not idealized or sentimentalized, they force the viewer to look at their social condition, not just listen to their music.

A similar drama and human apprehension reverberates in Bearden's Projections Series. In Untitled (c. 1965-70), form is geometricized throughout the small 9" x 4" collage, and the boy's meager meal, a sardine and a slice of pie, mirrors the skeletal house pet, whose legs are transformed into the table's supports. Due to ambiguous spatial relations, the head behind the boy's left side could be read either as the boy's grandmother standing behind him, or as a photograph of her hanging on the wall. This, coupled with the boy's look directed at the spectator, conflates with the flat shapes back into a deep space. The grandmother's presence is an important signifying element in Bearden's collages (as well as in Edwards' series of "Rockers" as I shall discuss later), for she denotes women's roles in the African American family as both a provider and a guardian.

In contrast, the private space of Untitled (c. 1965-70), The Street (1975) - a reminiscent of an earlier piece, The Block (1971) - represents a microcosm of an urban African American community. The street of the title vibrates with African American figures from different walks of life including a musician, a boy, and an old lady. In the middle ground, figures climb a staircase leading into a hallway. The window of the parallel facade opens on a number of contrasting interiors. In the center, a mother cradles her child in a Madonna-and-Child- like posture, connoting the religiosity of African Americans. Above them is a man and a woman copulating and, as if aware of the viewer's voyeurism, the woman returns the gaze. To their left, a figure makes its ways up the staircase with effort. Joints and beer bottles signify the ravages of the evil of alcohol and drugs in this community. A distant view of Manhattan to the right, locates this urban conglomeration to the north as a disenfranchized social class, far from all the riches to its south. In the lower right, a close-up face with a magnified eye questions our reading and seems to jump out of the picture frame into our private space.

The Projections Series illustrate Bearden's literal patching together of past memories, a visual rewrite of his life and a re-recall of African American history, culture and social predicament. Edwards recognized Bearden as "the first African American who practiced art from the Negritude paradigm."2 In The Prevalence of Ritual: Conjure Woman (1964), for example, Bearden depicted a woman's face as an African mask as if to declare his pride in his African heritage. And in Patchwork Quilt (1970), though lying on the bed, the female figure assumes an Egyptian profile.

It was during the turbulent sociopolitical upheavals of the sixties that Melvin Edwards, too, emerged as a sculptor in Los Angeles following his relocation in 1955 from Houston. He attended the City College and the Los Angeles County Art Institute, graduating with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in 1965. As a student in art school, he remembers that, because no books were available on African American art, he had to rely on representations on the back covers of jazz records. Edwards was always dissatisfied with the art establishment, especially the art history courses he attended. He recalls that while the names of Julio Gonzalez, David Smith, and Anthony Caro were known to almost everyone in the art world, contemporary African American artists were totally absent. While attending the University of Southern California, one of his art history teachers claimed that it was the Europeans who made Africa what it was. When Edwards challenged him, he received a "D" grade for the course. His first attempt at welding coincided, precisely, with David Smith's 1960 solo exhibition at the Everett Ellin Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1963, Edwards secured a job with a film animation company, allowing him to purchase his first tools for welding.

Though devoid of any specific ideological affiliation, his early works foreshadowed the intense unease of the period, especially the Watts riots, the assassination of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., both prominent civil right leaders. As Mary Smith Campbell observed, this initial series epitomized a collection of personal and collective memories and histories "codified in steel" (1978, 6). Though Edwards defines art as an abstract invention and a manifestation of both the mind and the hand, and though he insists that the only time we make a real thing is when we bear children (Josephine Gear 1993, 87), he, nevertheless, denounces the apolitical enterprise of Western art making. Most important for Edwards is the coalescence of formalistic problem solving and social content.

As it is well known, Los Angeles in the early sixties lived in social turmoil. In late July 1962, ten African American Muslims were sentenced to jail for participating in the riot that resulted in the death of Ronald T. Stokes, on April 28 of the same year. Edwards followed closely these events, and in that year he read in Freedomways magazine a long list of lynching dating back to the nineteenth century, and compiled by the Tuskegee Institute.3 These occurrences convinced him that the Civil Rights Movement underscored the fact that African American history was in the process of being rewritten and encouraged him to participate in a number of marches including the Norwal and Downey marches that protested the refusal to sell houses to African Americans. After the publication of Ralph Ginsburg's book 100 Years of Lynching (1962), a book that laid bare the criminal justice against African Americans, Edwards embarked on the Lynch Fragments.

Recalling Lynching

The Lynch Fragments series not only address the lynching phenomenon, but reconfigures it as visual texts. In the post-Civil War era, lynching prevailed as a "Southern Justice,"4 a crucial expression of white supremacy, a means to keep the lines of segregation well defined.5 During the 1880s and the 1890s, southern populism joined blacks and whites in the Farmers' Alliance, which threatened white supremacy organizations. Class struggle set off by the commercialization of agriculture brought poor whites and white landowners into confrontation and enticed both to disenfranchize African Americans further, forcing them to accommodate the Jim Crow laws or face death.

In the southern United States, lynching of African Americans took precedence over law, causing it to become a metaphor for the "wild West" where the "good guys" won against the "bad guys"(Smead 1986, ix). It was only after the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in Alabama by a mob of over a thousand, that this began to change significantly. To justify these murderous act, many white lynchers claimed that they carried out lynching to stop African American men from sexually assaulting white women, the bodies of whom were transformed, as it were, into an inviolate holy terrain on which African Americans were murdered.6 Lynching also drew support from high officials. As a case in point, Cole Blease, a former governor and senator from South Carolina, emphasized that "whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, I say `the hell with the constitution'" (Smead 1986, xi )!

Lynching was the punishment for both real and imagined crimes. Hanging, burning at the stake, and dismemberment became synonymous with lynching. The Claude Neal case, mentioned above, involved castration and self-cannibalism before hanging. Castration of the African American victim, which was not unusual, endowed this ritual with symbolic meanings. As Phillis R. Klotman explains, white America forbade the African Americans the passage from boyhood to manhood in that an African American male passed directly from a "boy" to docile "uncle." White supremacists claimed that lynching was both "the white woman's guarantee against rape by niggers," and society's protection against "black brutes" (Crabb 1990: 30)

The lynching ritual was, on the other hand, an initiation of the white lyncher into manhood,7 whereas the blood of the African American victim symbolized the price he and his race had to pay for being what they were. Lynching, nevertheless, was not an isolated phenomenon in the history of the United States; it represented a small drop in a globalized system of repression and segregation. As Howard Smead argues American society at large should be held accountable for such a repressive system. In his view, this criminal phenomenon should not be regarded as spontaneous, but instead as premeditated murders (Smead 1986, xiii). While lynching mostly singled out African Americans in the rural south, urban violence targeted African Americans who migrated to the industrial northern states.

Lynching found its way into the work of a number of African American intellectuals, writers and artists, from W. E. B. DuBois to James Baldwin to Melvin Edwards, among others. Jacob Lawrence, for example, treated the lynching theme in his Another Cause was Lynching from his Migration Series (1940-41). In the 1960s, Norman Lewis, similarly, underscored his political awareness and his protest against the Klan in works such as America the Beautiful, a painting with hooded figures. In circumscribing the lynching phenomenon, Edwards, on the hand, evoked the Foucauldian paradigm, defining lynching as a disciplinary mechanism which the white supremacists employed not necessary against a particular victim but to set an example for others in order to monitor and normalize their behaviour.8

The Lynch Fragments and Negritude

Edwards worked on the Fragments in three discontinuous periods, from 1963 to 1976, in 1973, and from 1978 to the present; though after 1988, the Lynch Fragments grew larger and more complex. During the first period, which ended when Edwards moved to New York, the Lynch Fragments seem to expand from the inside out, as if based on a symmetrical composition. In 1973, he returned to the Lynch Fragments again as a means that allowed him to respond to racial tensions that plagued New York. In SoHo where he lived at the time, a number of African Americans were attacked and in Queens, African Americans held demonstrations against poor housing conditions, events that were similar to those he had previously experienced in Los Angeles. From 1978 onward, the edges of the Lynch Fragments extended inwards, resulting in more complicated configurations as if pointing to the social strife. Michael Brenson has pointed out that the Lynch Fragments were Edwards' contribution to "multiculturalism" as well as his call to "people to understand people they do not understand" (Brenson 1993: 29). In the Lynch Fragments Edwards re-records the African American predicament and expresses his belief that the struggle was global, as a gesture through which he, like Bearden, aligns himself to Leopold Sedar Senghor's concept of Negritude.

Sylvia Washington Bà noted that the seed of Negritude, a concept that defines "black" civilization as the equal of European civilization, can be traced to 1922, when Senghor was a colonial student at the College Libermann in Dakar, Senegal (Bà 1973, 8). Though Senghor identified with the principles of French "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité," he was critical of his missionary teacher, Father Lalouse, who "denied the existence of a valid African civilization," and called Africans "savages" (Ibid. 8). While living at the Foundation Deutsche de la Méruthe of the Cité Universitaire in Paris, Senghor met Aimé Césaire of the Martinique who coined the word Negritude. Senghor also met Alain Locke and Dr. Price-Mars, Claude MacKay, who exhibited a self-esteem in his African heritage, and René Maran, whose novel Batouala championed not only the right of the "black" man but the right of "universal man" (Ibid. 10). In Paris, Césaire introduced Senghor to the "Negro-American" poetry, and the American writers of the "Negro Renaissance" of the twenties, including Countee Cullen, Langson Hughes, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Sterling Brown, and Frank Marshal David. Subsequently, Senghor became aware of a number of publications, in addition to the National Urban League, Opportunity, The Crisis, Journal of Negro History, and New Negro; the latter of which was edited by Alain Locke.

Senghor and Césaire reflected on their experience in Paris as colonized "black" Africans in the world of the "White Colonizer. Negritude offered them the possibility to free themselves of colonial cultural and intellectual assimilation, and to assert their own self. To achieve this, they expounded that Negritude stood for the spirit of "blackness" as a cultural and civilizational identity, and they rejected blackness as a colour denominator. In other words, they held that Negritude could allow the "black" to "assimilate [white civilization] without letting himself be assimilated," that the two cultures could coexist and complement each other. 9 At the Sorbonne in 1931, Senghor studied African history and civilization by frequenting the Paris Ethnographic Museum (today's Musée de l'Homme), and read the works of ethnologists who were unbiased toward African civilization.10 He recalled that "it was my friends Aimé Césaire and Louis Achille from the Antilles who helped me return to the sources of Negritude" (Barend v. D. Van Niekerk 1970, 27). Indeed, Césaire and Achille introduced him to the American Negro poetry, but Senghor was bound to expand Negritude to encompass "black" peoples everywhere.

In Paris this group of "black" intellectuals, writers, and artists glorified the artistic achievement and cultural values of the African and the "Negro," and they called on "colored peoples" to free themselves from the conjuration of white civilization, a project which they channeled to the press. In fact, in 1932 under the leadership of the Martiniquan poet, Etienne Lero, a small group of students from the French Antille published the first and only issue of Légitime Défence, distributing it among students from the French West Indies. Légitime Défence embraced surrealism and communism as weapons to achieve political freedom of "third world" countries, a stepping stone toward cultural decolonization. Similarly, two years later, assisted by Césaire and Léon Damas, Senghor published the newspaper L'Etudiant Noir, intended to all "black" students in Paris, and in which he defined politics as a manifestation and an aspect of culture.

Though a professional politician and later the president of his homeland Senegal, Senghor insisted that poetry was his main contribution to the African culture, not politics. Identifying "civilization" with "culture," he regarded poetry as the medium through which he could diffuse his message to the world at large, and contribute to building the "Civilization of the Universal."11 In his poem Exile in Nigeria Senghor declared that

No matter,
no Regret;
the God of Africa
my Mother
will know her friends and persecutors, civilize the world
and teach them the riddle of living and dying.
Meantime,
let them leave my heart alone! (Ibid. 41).

To temper their message, Negritude authors were, like the Surrealists, interested in "les êtres fabuleux par-delà les choses," (the extraordinary beings from the beyond). However, such shared concerns jeopardized Negritude as being unoriginal. Negritude members, nevertheless, explored the depths of their ancestors' heritage which they deemed was contaminated by its contact with the West. In an attempt to pinpoint the originality of Negritude as a legitimate "black" cultural expression, Senghor, in his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, (A notebook of the return to the homeland), defined its philosophy not in terms of Surrealism but as a conscious choice, drawing at once from French languages and literary sources, from African traditional culture, and from the Negro African poetry (Ibid. 27). He further explained that Negritude writers "accept Surrealism as a means, not as an end in itself, as an ally and not as a master [canon]. Surrealism inspires us because it helps us locate the Negro-African parole" (Ibid. 33). Senghor also saw in Negritude the cultural foundation on which a modern African society could be built with its particular culture, fine arts, and literature. He argued that the sources of Negritude reside within the "African," in his "feelings...myth and the images that expressed them, indeed [in] the thoughts of all black people who are segregated, hungry, humiliated, yet with an inextinguishable cry demanding their human dignity" (Bà 1973, v).

However, Negritude did not claim total cultural authenticity. Its authors, in fact, sought a complementary relation between civilizations. In defense of their appropriation and reliance on French language, they explained that Negritude allowed them to clone the French literary model, while preserving and enriching the episteme of their local language and, at the same time, infusing the French language with their metaphors and expressions. Negritude authors acknowledged that the African as an "exotic" subject was deeply rooted in the French and the Western psyche, and went at least as far back as Baudelaire and Rimbaud. However, through Negritude, the "black," the "African," and the colonized "savage," could appropriate the colonizers' languages, and assume the unmediated position from which they could represent and defend themselves. That is, Western languages, once used by the colonizing West to pacify the mind of the Africans and the "blacks," hence, become in the hands of the latter tools with which they could dismantle the hierarchies between the West and its Others, ushering the end of conquest and the beginning of political emancipation and cultural decolonization (Manthia Diawara 1990: 87).

Edwards infuses his sculptures, which in part rely as built objects on strategies of modernist sculptures, with African imageries and visual connotations in a manner that recalls the Negritude itinerary. He mollifies the conventional Western art language, transforming it into a textual vehicle through which images and themes of a number of African cultures are channeled. Though his sculptures have been linked to the tradition of David Smith, the founder of modernist welded sculpture, and Julio Gonzalez, the forerunner of assemblage sculpture, he does not defamiliarize the materiality of the found object but, rather, preserves both their physicality and weight, allowing his pieces to convey a sense of suspension, unease, and a concern with social content. In fact, he views his links with the above two sculptors, primarily, in the social meaning of their work such as in Gonzalez' series of mother and child from 1936-37, and Smith's Medallion (1939-1940) which denounced fascism.

African American artists from Edwards' generation confronted the issue of whether to put emphasis on stylistic and formalist components, or to display their political and spiritual awareness; whether to draw from western art sources and make and art that belongs to the world at large, or to limit their art production to racial difference. Those among the African American artists who worked within the "black art" paradigm, were judged by the Western Art Institutions as producing "exotic" and "self-stereotypical" art. Despite the fact that Western artists' appropriation of African sculpture was welcomed by Western art establishments as injecting a breath of life in modernist art, African American artists who followed this very modernist agenda, were called imitators of "white art" and were undercut from participating in the development of a "universal" art.12 Edwards' Lynch Fragments reconfigure art conventions "to signify something different to someone who grew up in Watts rather than signify only in the meanings" of say Marcel Duchamps or David Smith (Frank Bowling 1971: 55). He repositions "black" and "third world" cultures into Western art not as "primitive" or stylistic elements but as complex cultural entities that have the power to record specific historical and social events.

The first fragment, Some Bright Morning (1963), for example, retells the story of a Florida African American family who refused to be intimidated and took arms against the white supremacists who said "that some bright morning they were coming to get them." The "militant" family proved a match and spread guerrilla warfare.13 In the Lynch Fragments Edwards transforms railroad spikes, hammers, chains, nails, and locks into material testimonies of both injustice and resistance. Hollander Cotter, fittingly, describes the Fragments as "images as tightly packed with controlled, concentrated anger as danger as a clenched fist" (Cotter 1990, 170), a description which in many ways recalls Senghor's lines

Yes we shall take the Conqueror's arms from them as we have always done
We shall hold them firmly in our hands, we shall make sumptuous signs of them:
A green-gold star on a wheel of steel (Bà 1973, 4).

Other Lynch Fragments are allegorical. As a case in point, Edwards titled Mamba dating from 1965, the year Malcolm X was assassinated, after a poisonous African snake, a nominal sign that links Africa with Texas, a southern state also known for its lethal snakes. There is a political metaphor here in that Edwards seems to warn mainstream America that if pushed to extremes, African Americans could become just as deadly (Brenson 1993: 24-28).

The identification of the Lynch Fragments with heads (in general, the Fragments are 12" in height, the average size of a head), African masks, talismans, and numerous ritual appendages results from Edwards' wish to make these sculptures content specific as well as viewer bound in a close connection, provided they are installed in a particular space. Edwards indicates that the Lynch Fragments would be better beheld visually in a circular space, a concept he came across back in the sixties in a book on visual art and optics and which stated that traditional people living in circular houses did not suffer from optical illusion (Ibid. 23). Additionally, the pieces should be thirty-six inches apart (Edward's arms span) with the top of each fragments at six feet from the ground (Edwards' eye level). In Edward's view, the ideal number of pieces to be exhibited at each time should be a multiple of 16.

Edwards always believed that he could make something African in America (Ibid. 24). Both he and Bearden shared the same interest in their grandmothers' quilts. Bearden's collages bring to mind the quilt in that they are constructed from patches. Edwards sculpture, similarly, are assemblages of bits of materials. And like Bearden's, his grandmother was a strong and independent woman. He recalls that as a child he was once hurt while playing around his grandmother's rocking chair (Gear, 87), an incident he would later exploit in a number of projects. The chains in Homage to Coco (1970), one of a series of Rockers dedicated to the matriarch, have a double connotation. They refer to the physical bondage of slavery, as well as, to the African blacksmith who made chains, the symbol of connection and continuing tradition. In Homage to Coco, symbols conflate. Just as his grandmother was independent, so are the rockers; on the other hand, the chains of the rockers seem to call on African American to break the shackles of social injustice that keep them yoked to their dire circumstances. The Rockers alternate in size, and the imagined movement of rocking is an important component of both content and form. Though their meanings remains partially ambiguous they, nevertheless, filter the concept of comforting. They are a form of poetry that renders a personal homage and expresses Edwards' strong family ties.

After Edwards met the poet Jayne Cortez in 1969, whom he would marry in 1975, and his first trip to Africa, the syntax of the Lynch Fragments began to resemble that of language. Edwards first travelled to Africa in July and August 1970, visited Nigeria, Ghana, Dahomey (today's Benin), and met prominent African artists such as the Asante sculptor Nana Osei Bonsu, and the Nigerian artists Demas Nwoko and Ben Osawe. From Chief Omoregbe Inneh, head of the bronze casters in Benin he learned bronze casting. (For Edwards, Benin remains a place of great African bronze sculpture). Upon his return, he began identifying his works with African names. Koyo (1973), for example, takes its name from a Benin word that means greeting; and Ngangula (1983), is the word for blacksmith in the African Kikongo language. The physical labor in shaping metal has a long tradition not only in Africa, but also in Edwards' lineage, for his mother's great-great- grandfather was a blacksmith brought from Africa, probably from Nigeria, though Edwards cannot confirm this. In addition to making objects, African blacksmith also minted currency, hence the detailed and seeming engraved surface of some of the Lynch Fragments.

Unlike the titles of the Lynch Fragments from the first two periods, those of the third period are crucial, if meaning is to be correctly construed. For Makina Kameya (1988), for example, is a homage to the late Angolan stone carver Makina Kameya, the senior artist within the Tenegenenge village, whom Edwards met in Zimbabwe and respected deeply. Kwazisana (1991), is an autobiographical visual account, which in the Shona language of Zimbabwe means, "After we met and got to know each other, we found we were related."14 At Crossroads (1984), refers to a South African town of squatters that was bulldozed by the apartheid government (Brenson 1993: 32).

In addition to Edwards' interest in conventional and stylistic issues, the Lynch Fragments draw from African metaphors and symbolism. The ax, considered a magical tool throughout Africa, is inherited with pride for it symbolized the continuity of the struggle from generation to generation. Railroad spikes are common to both, West Africa and the United States. Antelope headdresses from Mali have similar spike shapes. The chains, a recurring element in both the Lynch Fragments and in the large scale and site specific sculptures, recall the ever present legacy of slavery, and hint to the chains slinging from the Mao mask of the Ivory Coast. On the other hand, the eye, an opening in the middle of many pieces, endows the Lynch Fragments with a human presence. The projecting phallic and the vagina-shaped openings, signify the tight connection between genitalia and politics.

While the genitals - both male and female - symbolize the "creativity and continuity" for Africans, in the context of the Lynch Fragments, they connote the undeclared genocide against African American (Ibid. 24). Edwards' Lynch Fragments accounts for events in American history that "fail" to find their way into official history. Though they belong to the tradition of architecturally assembled sculpture, they are visual data. Their baroque and concentrated energy mirror the raging times they chronicled, and the sculptors' challenge to history, as well as his willingness to borrow and acknowledges different cultures. Addressing his fellow artists of his generation, Edwards explained that

We must make [art] works that use our lives and feelings as their basis for existence... We must search for our own processes and symbols, if we can't find them in our individual selves then we must find them in our families and friends, in our cities (Harlem or Watts or South Sides of 5th Wards) in our rural Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Carolina, Ohio, Nebraska, Arizona, California, Utah. We must take ideas from Guyana, Brazil, Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. From the Philippines, New Guinea, India, Ghana, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Congo, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, etc. They are all ours (Melvin Edwards 1978, 20-21).

Conclusion

Different cultural genealogies fuse in Edwards' work. Conflicts and confusion are born out of choosing one culture over another, but for Edwards, like the Negritude proponents, Africa and the "third world" remain the central axis around which a multitude of histories and cultural heritages evolve. In this sense, multiculturalism is a revisionist process that allows other voices to be heard and appear not only as "exotic" or complementary elements to mainstream culture; true multiculturalism allows minority and "transatlantic" elements to fuse with mainstream practices and, most importantly, to stand on their own as valuable cultural entities. In Edwards' sculptures, chains and spades lay stress on the threshold between two cultures, two worlds, and force us to recall the African American Diaspora. These found objects and urban detritus, signify a disciplinary mechanism employed to subjectify African Americans, and recall a historical chapter which remained excluded from official history and, at the same time, acknowledge the African art practices that lingered for too long on the margin of mainstream Western art.

* I wish to thank Nkiru Nzegwu and Gary Sherman for their suggestions and help.

References

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Strategies of Narration: Mel Edwards, Faith Ringgold, Juan Sanchez, Michelle Stuart, Kay Walkingstick. A Cultural Presentation of the United States of America, Catalogue exhibition. [Egypt, Cairo Fifth Biennale, 1994], (New York: The Printmaking Workshop, 1994).

Bà, Sylvia Washington. The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973).

Bowling, Frank "It's not Enough to Say `Black is Beautiful'" ArtNews (April, 1971), 55.

Brenson, Michael. "Lynch Fragments," Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, 1963-1993, exhibition catalogue, (Neuberger Museum of Art, 1993).

Campbell, Mary Smith. Melvin Edwards: Sculptor, exhibition catalogue, Studio Museum in Harlem (February 26-March 26, 1978).

Carby, Hazel V. "`On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory," Critical Inquiry 12/1 (Autumn 1985), 262-277.

Cotter, Hollander. "Black Artists: Three Shows," Art in America (March 1990), 171.

Crabb, Beth. "May 1930: White Man's Justice for a Black Man's Crime," The Journal of Negro History LXXV/1-2 (Winter- Spring, 1990).

Delafosse, Maurice. Les Noirs de l'Afrique (1922), Civilisations negro-africaines (1925), Les Nègres (1927), and L'Ame Nègre (1927).

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© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center

Citation Format

Irbouh, Hamid. (2000). MELVIN EDWARDS' LYNCH FRAGMENTS: NEGRITUDE AND THE BATTLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN AMERICA. Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 1 , 2.

Table of Contents

** Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Edwards and the Civil Rights Movement
3. Recalling Lynching
4. The lynch Fragments and Negritude
5. Conclusion
6. References