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Legacies Of Lynching: Racial Violence And Memory
Even during the years when lynching rates were at their peak, 1880-1930, says Markovitz (sociology, U. of California-San Diego), lynchings were never entirely confined to the physical realm, and were instead always intended to be seen as a metaphor for race relations more broadly defined. He also considers Clarence Thomas' claim that the investigat
264 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2004
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June 30, 2011
FROM Tennessee Historical Quarterly 66.3 (Fall 2007): 309.
Since early 2000, the museum exhibition and book of photography Without Sanctuary has made nearly 100 gruesome images of lynch victims readily available. Scholars have long worked to understand lynching, but Without Sanctuary has widened the audience interested in their findings. As studies of racial violence proliferate, Jonathan Markovitz’s Legacies of Lynching will continue to stand as a model for balancing scholarly rigor with accessibility, historical specificity with a keen understanding of contemporary culture. It is a gift to our nation as we struggle to deal with the painful truths that the photographs encourage us to face.
Markovitz argues that lynching was never simply physical; it was “always intended to be seen as a metaphor for race relations”—a way of communicating “particular understandings of the nature of the racial order.” Antilynching activists therefore believed that ending the violence would require challenging interpretations of it. Throughout Chapter 1, Markovitz highlights the rhetorical strategies that antilynching crusaders used to alter the meanings attached to mob violence. Without their efforts, which spanned the 1890s through the 1950s, mobs would still be seen as heroic protectors of society, not as murderers.
In Chapter 2, Markovitz turns his attention to modern movies, demonstrating that they both reflect and shape collective memories of racial violence. He suggests that an awareness of lynching creates dramatic tension in Hollywood films such as Just Cause (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), while films like Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) and Rosewood (1997) operate under the assumption that working toward justice in the present requires understanding the nation’s bloody past. In Chapter 3, Markovitz argues that Americans interpret racially inflected current events based on how they choose to remember mob violence, and he offers four recent scandals as case studies. For instance, he compares reactions to Tawana Brawley, the 15-year-old black girl who said she was raped by white men in 1987, with responses to Susan Smith, the white woman who killed her children in 1994 but sparked a nation-wide manhunt by claiming that a black man kidnapped them. Markovitz brilliantly identifies the questions that Americans ask—and refuse to ask—about such events.
Chapter 4 yields myriad insights while analyzing the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill case. For example, Markovitz demonstrates that, because the antilynching movement necessarily focused on countering the black rapist myth, it did not leave a legacy for recognizing black women’s victimization. Markovitz shows that this was one of the reasons that Thomas could manipulate the lynching metaphor to portray himself as a victim in the senate hearings. If we take heed, Markovitz’s work equips us to avoid being deceived by strategically limited uses of lynching history. The study concludes with a brief discussion of the Without Sanctuary photographs, calling attention to the ways in which they are now shaping collective memory.
Legacies of Lynching is a valuable contribution to southern history because lynching has so frequently been remembered as a southern phenomenon, but Markovitz shows how it has shaped national discourse, both past and present. Markovitz equips readers to recognize when memories of racial violence are mined for contemporary purposes. Just as importantly, he offers tools for assessing the validity of the invocations.
Since early 2000, the museum exhibition and book of photography Without Sanctuary has made nearly 100 gruesome images of lynch victims readily available. Scholars have long worked to understand lynching, but Without Sanctuary has widened the audience interested in their findings. As studies of racial violence proliferate, Jonathan Markovitz’s Legacies of Lynching will continue to stand as a model for balancing scholarly rigor with accessibility, historical specificity with a keen understanding of contemporary culture. It is a gift to our nation as we struggle to deal with the painful truths that the photographs encourage us to face.
Markovitz argues that lynching was never simply physical; it was “always intended to be seen as a metaphor for race relations”—a way of communicating “particular understandings of the nature of the racial order.” Antilynching activists therefore believed that ending the violence would require challenging interpretations of it. Throughout Chapter 1, Markovitz highlights the rhetorical strategies that antilynching crusaders used to alter the meanings attached to mob violence. Without their efforts, which spanned the 1890s through the 1950s, mobs would still be seen as heroic protectors of society, not as murderers.
In Chapter 2, Markovitz turns his attention to modern movies, demonstrating that they both reflect and shape collective memories of racial violence. He suggests that an awareness of lynching creates dramatic tension in Hollywood films such as Just Cause (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), while films like Ghosts of Mississippi (1996) and Rosewood (1997) operate under the assumption that working toward justice in the present requires understanding the nation’s bloody past. In Chapter 3, Markovitz argues that Americans interpret racially inflected current events based on how they choose to remember mob violence, and he offers four recent scandals as case studies. For instance, he compares reactions to Tawana Brawley, the 15-year-old black girl who said she was raped by white men in 1987, with responses to Susan Smith, the white woman who killed her children in 1994 but sparked a nation-wide manhunt by claiming that a black man kidnapped them. Markovitz brilliantly identifies the questions that Americans ask—and refuse to ask—about such events.
Chapter 4 yields myriad insights while analyzing the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill case. For example, Markovitz demonstrates that, because the antilynching movement necessarily focused on countering the black rapist myth, it did not leave a legacy for recognizing black women’s victimization. Markovitz shows that this was one of the reasons that Thomas could manipulate the lynching metaphor to portray himself as a victim in the senate hearings. If we take heed, Markovitz’s work equips us to avoid being deceived by strategically limited uses of lynching history. The study concludes with a brief discussion of the Without Sanctuary photographs, calling attention to the ways in which they are now shaping collective memory.
Legacies of Lynching is a valuable contribution to southern history because lynching has so frequently been remembered as a southern phenomenon, but Markovitz shows how it has shaped national discourse, both past and present. Markovitz equips readers to recognize when memories of racial violence are mined for contemporary purposes. Just as importantly, he offers tools for assessing the validity of the invocations.
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