Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930

by Koritha Mitchell

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynch victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of household being torn from model domestic units by white violence.

In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens.

Genres: History

272 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

I grew up near Houston, Texas but went to college near Columbus, Ohio. I went to graduate school near Washington, D.C., and enjoyed being in that area. So, when my first job was in Ohio, I began wondering what was up with me and Ohio. :-)

Reading has been good to me. It has literally made my life what it is.

Reviews

[Chloë Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

i think this was an incredibly astitute evaluation of lynching plays and performance across a multitude of decades, backgrounds, and experiences. mitchell invokes incredibly interesting lycnhing plays and does quite an alright job of incorporating plays from a multitude of authors, particularly because lynching plays are so often dominated by just Georgia Douglas Johnson. despite this, though, i did have some qualms with the book. particularly, the reliance on other secondary scholarship pieces and frequent invocation of the archive and the repertoire made it incredibly difficult for me to assert mitchell's individual conclusion about the lynching plays and their function . the split of the book into part one and part two felt unbalance and disparate, given that part one was so short and part two was so incredibly long. it felt in many ways like an extended close read of lynching plays and an opportunity to expose audiences to those plays as opposed to an analysis of those plays' function in black theatre, black studies, etc. i struggled with finding the scholarly conclusion that Mitchell was coming to. i also struggled with the conclusion of the text, which felt like it went into an entirely new direction as opposed to encapsulating part or all of the work of parts one or two. in these ways, i feel like the book could have done a bit more. nonetheless, though, i feel struck by Mitchell's incredibly thorough deep dive into lynchihng plays and their function for black community, the archetypes the plays represented, and more. because of that, this was a solid 3 star read for me.

[Karen Jean Martinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mitchell offers excellent analysis that helps to more precisely define what black theatre is and how it might be approached before it engages in a very important analysis of lynching plays. She tracks how lynching plays functioned to sustain black community by offering accurate depictions of loving family life that flourished despite the attempts by the dominant culture to prohibit, mask, and destroy that love. If lynching parties and photographs are a master/piece theatre that reduces blackness to criminal objecthood and asserts that blacks have no right to citizenship because they cannot maintain loving homes of upright goodness, lynching plays show that it was exactly the loving homes of the upright citizens that lynch mobs targeted - charges of criminal behavior, particularly rape, were used as cover by white mobs to justify their torture and murder of innocent men and women. As Mitchell writes elsewhere, "Racial violence is often a response to success."

The book offers an excellent analysis of many plays, exploring different character tropes found within the canon: the black soldier, the black lawyer, the mother/sister, and the pimp and the coward. Though the plays date from the early part of the 20th Century, her analysis reveals how important this work continues to be.

[Elizabeth Higginbotham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing investigation of lynching plays and their place in African Americans quest for citizenship. This was a history I knew little about, so the learning was significant. I love how she connected many of the issues that African Americans faced in the early part of the 20th century.

[Shalisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome read! More!

[Isadora Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for book review.