Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond

by Anne P. Rice (Editor)

Witnessing American Writers Respond is the first anthology to gather poetry, essays, drama, and fiction from the height of the lynching era (1889–1935). During this time, the torture of a black person drew thousands of local onlookers and was replayed throughout the nation in lurid newspaper reports. The selections gathered here represent the courageous efforts of American writers to witness the trauma of lynching and to expose the truth about this uniquely American atrocity. Included are well-known authors and activists such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ida B. Wells, and Theodore Dreiser, as well as many others. These writers respond to lynching in many different ways, using literature to protest and educate, to create a space of mourning in which to commemorate and rehumanize the dead, and as a cathartic release for personal and collective trauma. Their words provide today’s reader with a chance to witness lynching and better understand the current state of race relations in America.

An introduction by Anne P. Rice offers a broad historical and thematic framework to ground the selections.

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2003

Reviews

[Mike Maher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This compilation by Anne Rice is about the authors who wrote poems, plays, fiction and actual accounts of lynching in America from the end of the 19th century to just before WWII. Quite a few of the authors were some of the best known of their era. Many also wrote about women suffrage and some were early leaders of the NAACP. Some of the excerpts of their stories were quite gripping and compelling. I was shocked that one lynching was more gruesome than the next which the authors did quite purposefully to bring attention to this heinous issue. Some even brought their works to Europe and Russia to try to put world pressure on the US to take steps to annihilate this practice. One poem entitled “Brothers” by James Weldon Johnson was particularly inciteful against this brutal act. He himself had almost been lynched when a mob had mistaken his very light skinned companion to be a white woman. Another contribution, a work of fiction, is quite haunting as the main character, a doctor, is very good friends with a black man who nurtures him back to health when the doctor became deathly sick but then ends up lynching the black friend when he mistakenly believes that the friend murdered the woman that he loves. These stories show how lynchings not only affected the victim, but his family, the lynch mob, witnesses to the lynching and the community at large. In the Forward of the book, written by Michele Wallace, she states: “If I am a sane person, I could never do such a thing (lynch someone). I could never experience such a thing being done to me. Since to me, as to most of us, black and white, the insane are inhuman, no one who ever participated in such an event - the victim, the spectators, the perpetrators – was ever fully human in the sense that I am or that others I know are. Yet, I suspect it is very important to understand the mistake of this kind of thinking, because without so doing, not only will we never be able to grasp our particular historical legacy as Americans, as actors in the narrative of race, but also we will never be able to grasp our responsibility as global citizens in the present. Such events – albeit not stemming from precisely the same circumstances – are going on right now.” That is the message that we should take from this book.

[Koritha Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classroom-friendly collection of literary works by U.S. authors that address lynching. A longer review available here.