Lynching's legacy in American culture.

Lynching's legacy in American culture. IN THE SUMMER OF 1901 MARK TWAIN WROTE AN ESSAY RESPONDING TO ANoutbreak of racial violence in Missouri, beginning with a lynching andending with the expulsion of some thirty black families from theirhomes. It was not until 1923, however, long after Twain's death,that the essay was first published, after being considerably abridgedand softened by Albert Bigelow Paine Albert Bigelow Paine (10 July 1861 – 9 April 1937) was an American author and biographer best known for his work with Mark Twain. Paine was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee and wrote in several genres, including fiction, humour, and verse. (Oggel 116). "The UnitedStates United States,officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. of Lyncherdom" evoked some of Twain's strongeststatements on American racism and colonialism--and also some of his mostpronounced hesitations about speaking publicly on the racial violencedefining turn-of-the-century American culture. As Terry Oggel has noted,Twain even considered writing a multi-volume history of lynching inAmerica, but the anticipation of a hostile white public reaction gavehim pause, as it did when it came to publishing the original essay,which he finally decided to withhold from publishing altogether. Whenthe essay appeared in print two decades later, its deletions andsilences, largely imposed by Paine, reflected all too accurately whitereluctance to engage issues of racial violence, and especially lynching,in print. As Jean M. Lutes argues in a recent American Literary Historyessay, "Print culture in the United States has a long tradition ofsuppressing the news of racial violence" (460). That suppression inturn has been responsible in part for many of the suffocating silencesabout lynching that have shaped the nation's public memory as itemerged throughout the course of the twentieth century. In the past nine years, though, public interest in the topic oflynching has intensified to an unprecedented degree. In 2000, antiquedealer antique dealern → anticuario/aantique dealern → antiquaire m/fantique dealerantique n → James Allen James Allen is the name of: James Allen (artist), a Northern Irish artist James Allen (author) (1864–1912) James Allen (footballer), former professional footballer James Allen (Formula One commentator) (born 1966) released Without Sanctuary, an extraordinarycollection of lynching photographs he had collected from flea marketsand private sellers over the course of many years, to much media andpopular attention. Over the next few years, exhibitions of the samecollection in New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Chicago, and on line,drew hundreds of visitors. In 2005, the US Senate, with eighty senatorsin support, approved a resolution that apologized to lynching victims,survivors, and their descendants for its failure to pass any of thenumerous anti-lynching bills put before it in the first hall of thetwentieth century. Finally, a number of local organizations in towns andcities across the country have initiated efforts to construct publicmemorials or exhibitions to commemorate the victims of lynching in theircommunities, including Rosewood, Florida; Monroe, Georgia; Waco, Texas For the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, see .For other uses of "Waco", see Waco (disambiguation).Waco (pronounced: /ˈweɪkoʊ/) is the county seat of McLennan County, Texas. ;and Duluth, Minnesota. These public efforts to remember lynching have been paralleled inthe academic community. Indeed, in this same period, scholarship onlynching has seen a remarkable recrudescence recrudescence/re��cru��des��cence/ (re?kroo-des��ens) recurrence of symptoms after temporary abatement.recrudes��cent re��cru��des��cencen. . In the thirty yearsfollowing World War II, no major academic work on lynching appeared,even as many scholars were paying close attention at this time to theways in which slavery and Jim Crow Jim CrowNegro stereotype popularized by 19th-century minstrel shows. [Am. Hist.: Van Doren, 138]See : Bigotry segregation had constructed andshaped American race relations race relationsNoun, plthe relations between members of two or more races within a single communityrace relationsnpl → relaciones fpl raciales . It was not until the early 1980s thatscholars such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Trudier Harris, and JoelWilliamson broke open the topic of lynching as its own field of study,marking it as essential to any understanding of American ideas aboutrace, violence, sex, justice, and law. Although this work was followedby several significant studies in the 1990s, this output pales incomparison to the scholarly attention lynching has received in the pastnine years. Since 2000, no fewer than twelve new books have appeared onthe topic of lynching, as well as numerous articles and dissertations;several more books are due out in the next few years. In 2002, inconjunction with the exhibition of Without Sanctuary at the MartinLuther King, Jr., National Historic Site, Emory University Emory University(ĕm`ərē), near Atlanta, Ga.; coeducational; United Methodist; chartered as Emory College 1836, opened 1837 at Oxford. It became Emory Univ. in 1915 and in 1919 moved to Atlanta. hosted aconference on lynching that brought together over three hundredscholars, a gathering that, as one noted historian has said, would havebeen "inconceivable" fifteen or twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. earlier(Brundage, "Conclusion" 401). This present volume, bringingtogether scholars from a range of disciplines, both reflects andcontributes to this burgeoning new field of lynching studies. All of this recent work on lynching, both public and scholarly,represents a larger effort to activate social memory about lynching, tocreate a new kind of popular consciousness about America's racistand violent past in the face of what has been a profound mis-rememberingof lynching. But while there might be general agreement that this newconsciousness is a good thing, it does raise a number of vexingquestions. Why was lynching so understudied or mis-remembered beforenow? And why the seemingly sudden interest now, at this moment inhistory? Finally, what problems or difficulties do these attempts tomemorialize me��mo��ri��al��ize?tr.v. me��mo��ri��al��ized, me��mo��ri��al��iz��ing, me��mo��ri��al��iz��es1. To provide a memorial for; commemorate.2. To present a memorial to; petition. lynching, to represent it, to construct histories of it,inevitably produce? That is, in order for any clear social memory onlynching to exist, the terrible and messy trauma of it all must be madesomehow coherent and legible. How is that possible? These are questions that parallel to a striking degree those raisedby Holocaust scholarship over the past three decades--the curiousdynamic between remembering and forgetting, of giving voice to anddisavowing past wounds that seem to defy both comprehension andarticulation, and in particular the ethics of responding to andarticulating scenes of devastation and pain without succumbing to thelures of sensationalism sensationalism,in philosophy, the theory that there are no innate ideas and that knowledge is derived solely from the sense data of experience. The idea was discussed by Greek philosophers and is shown variously in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George and objectification. How does one go abouttrying to represent what initially appears beyond description, and howdoes one do so without reimposing upon those victims of past atrocitiesthe utter debasement Debasement1. To lower the value, quality or status of something or someone.2. To lower the value (of a coin) by adding metal of inferior value.Notes:In other words, debasement is the degrading of the value of something or character of someone. and abjection they experienced in ritualistic rit��u��al��is��tic?adj.1. Relating to ritual or ritualism.2. Advocating or practicing ritual.rit actsof violence and murder? Who has the right to tell their stories, and howshould one respond to them? How are such stories, in the words of ToniMorrison Noun 1. Toni Morrison - United States writer whose novels describe the lives of African-Americans (born in 1931)Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison , to "be passed on," and how will those storiesreadjust our sense of the past, community, and our very sense ofselfhood? To raise such questions, Moise Postone and Eric Santner Eric L. Santner (b. 1955) is an American scholar. He is Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, and Chair, in the Department of Germanic Studies,Harriet and at the University of Chicago, where he has been since 1996. arguein their introduction to Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and theTwentieth Century, is to probe what they call "the nature of theafterlife of historical trauma" and in particular "questionsof history, memory, identity, agency, and victimhood" (10). Trauma theory has helped scholars like Postone and Santnerarticulate some of those questions, and theorists like Dominick LaCapra Dominick LaCapra is a well-renowned Intellectual Historian and the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Cornell and his Ph. D. from Harvard. have led the way in trying to provide answers to many of the mosttroubling questions awaiting those who would breach silences aboutcultural wounds and seemingly unimaginable atrocities. Confronting thosetroubling pasts often precipitates, Postone and Santner argue, somethinglike a crisis of representation, "what we might call paradigmshifts," they note, "or breakthroughs in modes ofrepresentation and response" (10). Indeed, if one defines culturaltrauma, as Ron Eyerman does, as a "massive disruption"representing "a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear inthe social fabric," healing that wound necessitates a struggle overhow to render comprehensible the story of that wounding--the pain thatis inflicted, its impact upon the victim, and the allocation ofresponsibility (3). Charting such struggles, LaCapra argues, requires acertain distancing in coming to terms with a wounded past andassimilating it into the narrative of memory--but also a sensitivity tothe dangers of that distancing. To undertake a narrative of a traumadefying comprehension and narrative assimilation is to risk replicatingacts of victimizauon and dehumanization de��hu��man��ize?tr.v. de��hu��man��ized, de��hu��man��iz��ing, de��hu��man��iz��es1. To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, compassion, or civility: accompanying and defining thattrauma. It is all too easy, LaCapra warns--and here he is joined by manyof the contributors to this issue--to overlook our own faint butunmistakable complicity, through distancing and objectification, in ourconsumption of Holocaust stories, in our scrutiny of graphic lynchingphotographs, of even in our pronounced tendency to tender sufferingtrivial with narratives designed to achieve harmony or redemptionthrough "the suffering of others" (218). The essays in this volume all reflect upon these questions andcontribute answers to them. This volume draws together scholars andwriters who are primarily interested in the ways in which lynching--itsrituals and performance, its violence and terror, its impact andaftermath--came to be expressed and represented in American academic,religious, literary, media, and visual life. They also consider all thetangled implications and consequences when various Americans have triedto make sense of lynching or willfully willfullyadv. referring to doing something intentionally, purposefully and stubbornly. Examples: "He drove the car willfully into the crowd on the sidewalk." "She willfully left the dangerous substances on the property." (See: willful) ignored it, when they havememorialized it or mis-remembered it. Here we use the term "mis-remember" deliberately, ratherthan "forget," despite the fact that, before this recentonslaught of interest, there appears to have been a profound socialamnesia about lynching in this country. Most of the college students wehave taught come to class with a foundational understanding of thehistory of slavery The history of slavery covers many different forms of human exploitation across many cultures and throughout human history. Slavery, generally defined, refers to the systematic exploitation of labor for work and services without consent and/or the possession of other persons as and a passing knowledge of the Civil Rights Movementbut remain sadly ignorant of lynching or even the breadth and intensityof Jim Crow segregation and its effects. Moreover, after witnessingWithout Sanctuary, all too many viewers expressed on line, at publicforums, and in visitor books a deep sense of shock and surprise thatAmericans had perpetuated such gross and horrific acts of racistviolence with impunity, as if they had no prior awareness of lynching atall. Nevertheless, as Jonathon Markowitz has recently posited, lynchinghas long served as a primary "lens" through which Americanshave conceptualized of seen "contemporary race relations and racialspectacles" (7), from Bernard Goetz's subway vigilantism Taking the law into one's own hands and attempting to effect justice according to one's own understanding of right and wrong; action taken by a voluntary association of persons who organize themselves for the purpose of protecting a common interest, such as liberty, property, or inthe 1980s to the Rodney King beating to, most recently, the DukeLacrosse rape charges. Lynching, in this sense, has served as a vividmetaphor of what Markowitz calls the "most easily recognizablesymbol" of racism and racial injustice, most infamously evoked whenClarence Thomas referred to his confirmation hearing as a "hightech lynching." What's more, sadly and shockingly, lynching insymbolic form is still all too often used to harass and intimidateAfrican Americans in schools and workplaces around the country. As DoraApel has shown, the EEOC EEOCabbr.Equal Employment Opportunity CommissionEEOCn abbr (US) (= Equal Employment Opportunities Commission) → comisi��n que investiga discriminaci��n racial o sexual en el empleo has in recent years fielded an appalling numberof lawsuits in which employers have hung or displayed a hangman'snoose as a "chilling form of harassment meant to prevent laborprotest and 'keep blacks in their place'" (471). Yet, although lynching continues to permeate public understandingsof race and racial violence, most Americans do not have any real ofcomprehensive understanding of lynching's history, as theseexamples make evident. The term is potent enough to cause a visceralreaction in both black and white Americans alike, but its use is riddledwith all sorts of misconceptions and mythologies. It is remarkable, forinstance, that when comedian Michael Richards exploded a few years agoin a racist rant directed at several African American African AmericanMulticulture A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.See Race. hecklers in hisaudience, the discussion in the media afterwards focused on his repeateduse of the word "nigger" but ignored almost entirely hismisbegotten mis��be��got��ten?adj.1. a. Of, relating to, or being a child or children born to unmarried parents.b. Not lawfully obtained: misbegotten wealth.2. reference to lynching. When Richards wanted to assertauthority over his black hecklers, when he wanted to level the mostshocking and hurtful racist insult he could, he went directly to animage of lynching, even before he unleashed the forbidden word"nigger." Yet, most commentators either did not understand thereference of they chose to overlook it. Just as disturbing, if not more,was the tasteless comparison a number of opinion-makers and bloggersmade last year between lynching and the rape charges leveled at threeDuke University lacrosse lacrosse(ləkrôs`), ball and goal game usually played outdoors by two teams of 10 players each on a field 60 to 70 yd (54.86 to 64.01 m) wide by 110 yd (100.58 m) long. Two goals face each other 80 yd (73. players. For some, the unfounded prosecution ofthese men constituted "lynching without the tope," as one CNN CNNor Cable News NetworkSubsidiary company of Turner Broadcasting Systems. It was created by Ted Turner in 1980 to present 24-hour live news broadcasts, using satellites to transmit reports from news bureaus around the world. talk show host claimed, when, of course, these men had full recourse Full recourseNo matter what risk event occurs, the borrower or its guarantors guarantee to repay the debt. This is not a project financing unless the borrower's sole asset is the project. todue process under the law and more than adequate legal representation.(1) It is as if lynching haunts our social memories, but we arereluctant to grasp it or hold it carefully up for view. In this sense,lynching perhaps acts less like a lens and more like a prism, since ourperception through it is multiple and refracted, and it can obfuscate asmuch as it clarifies. These examples underscore the necessity for aclear and accurate social historical memory of lynching, so that, at thevery least, the term is less susceptible to manipulation or willfuldistortion, a distortion that does a further disservice to the thousandsof victims who suffered at the hands of lynch mobs in this country. Yet,as many of these essays reveal, the construction of such a memory iswrought with friction. Historical memory is rarely uniformly collectiveor consensual; it entails many voices, many ideological agendas, andmany contests over whose story gets represented and remembered, and how.(2) The definition and meaning of lynching, of course, has never beenstatic. As historian Christopher Waldrep has shown in The Many Faces ofJudge Lynch, what exactly constituted a lynching not only changed overtime but has been the source of considerable political contestation anddebate. In fact, the history of lynching is inseparable from the historyof its rhetoric and representation. The ways in which various groups orconstituencies defined, discussed, and imagined it had everything to dowith whether they deemed it socially legitimate or illegitimate, ortreated it as a local inevitability or a national crime. Today, we cannever know what exactly happened at a lynching or understand the fulldepth and range of experience, as our only access to this past isthrough its representation in news accounts, descriptive narratives, orphotographs, all of which provide only limited and ideologically-chargedperspectives. We do know, however, that most Americans at the turn of the lastcentury understood lynching as a form of white supremacist violence,perpetrated largely in the South, through which whites punished AfricanAmerican men accused of crimes against whites. Mass spectacle lynchings,in which crowds of white spectators watched as men were not only hangedbut tortured and mutilated and sometimes riddled with bullets of burnedalive, received the most public attention. But most lynchings werequieter, less sensational affairs, though still brutal and often public.As the work of a number of scholars has recently made evident, AfricanAmerican men were not the only victims of lynching, as mobs alsoattacked white men, Native Americans, Latinos, Chinese, and otherimmigrants, as well as African American women. Lynching was also not anentirely Southern phenomenon. Finally, we must not forget that lynchingoperated alongside other forms of racist violence and terror--personalassaults, rape, and murders--that were intended to subjugate sub��ju��gate?tr.v. sub��ju��gat��ed, sub��ju��gat��ing, sub��ju��gates1. To bring under control; conquer. See Synonyms at defeat.2. To make subservient; enslave. AfricanAmericans and that, although less sensational than lynching, wereequally traumatic to black families. (3) Nevertheless, between lynching's peak years from 1880 to 1940,an estimated ninety percent of lynchings took place in former slavestates, and about ninety percent of the lynchings there were committedby white mobs against African American men. In these years, white mobslynched over three thousand African American men in the South.Historians largely agree that this phenomenal surge in mob violence,particularly in the 1890s, was a reaction to the racial and socialupheaval that Emancipation and Reconstruction had wrought. Lynching wasa form of terror that asserted white power and domination against thethreat of black enfranchisement The act of making free (as from Slavery); giving a franchise or freedom to; investiture with privileges or capacities of freedom, or municipal or political liberty. Conferring the privilege of voting upon classes of persons who have not previously possessed such. and economic autonomy. It also ensuredand constructed white solidarity across class and geographic divisionsat a time when Southern society was teeming with all sorts of classtension and social disruption. The vast growth of towns and cities andthe rise of industry in this period brought whites and blacks into newkinds of labor arrangements and new forms of social mixing that upsettraditional racial and social hierarchies. White Southerners felt theiranxieties about these larger changes in terms of fears about crime andvice; that is, they imagined that depraved African American men, nowfreed from their traditional subservience, would literally attack themor, more specifically, their women. In short, amid this new sociallandscape, these Southerners believed that their moral and physicalintegrity was at stake. The image of the black brute rapist seized the white Southernimagination and became the primary justification for lynching. It struckat the heart of the matter: the fear that black political of socialequality would somehow diminish white male independence and authority,that black equality, above all, threatened white men's dominionover their own households and women. For most white Southerners,lynching was a just and necessary retribution against an abominablecrime, a means to ensure not only white supremacy and white purity butwhite manliness. Even as white men perpetrated the most sadistic sa��dism?n.1. The deriving of sexual gratification or the tendency to derive sexual gratification from inflicting pain or emotional abuse on others.2. The deriving of pleasure, or the tendency to derive pleasure, from cruelty. andhorrific atrocities on the bodies of black men, they insisted upon theirown manly civility and self-restraint over and against the violentsavagery of their black victims. This mythology continues to resonate in the present day. ManyAmericans, white Americans especially, might have only a hazycomprehension, if any, of lynching's history, but they know thisscript of black depravity and white innocence all too well. Even as somemight attempt to rewrite it of recoil recoil/re��coil/ (re��koil) a quick pulling back.elastic recoil? the ability of a stretched object or organ, such as the bladder, to return to its resting position. against it, it is rehearsedcontinually in the news and popular culture. Arguably, even more thanlynching itself, this story acts as the "prism" through whichpresent-day racial conflicts of incidents ate understood. A case inpoint is the 1994 controversy over Time's darkened magazine coverof O. J. Simpson's mugshot photograph, which drew heavy criticismfrom journalistic watchdogs and civil rights activists alike for tappinginto cultural scripts of black bestiality BestialitySee also Perversion.AsteriusMinotaur born to Pasiphaë and Cretan Bull. [Gk. Myth.: Zimmerman, 34]Ledaraped by Zeus in form of swan. [Gk. Myth. and criminality (Gaines). The absence of any clear and focused historical memory of lynchingin this country is not accidental; rather, it stems from concertedefforts at mid-century to erase lynching from public memory, largely asa response to the successes of the anti-lynching activists such as IdaB. Wells-Barnett and the NAACP NAACPin full National Association for the Advancement of Colored PeopleOldest and largest U.S. civil rights organization. It was founded in 1909 to secure political, educational, social, and economic equality for African Americans; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. . At the turn of the century, white mobssought to make their violence as public and conspicuous as possible inorder to imprint the fiction of white supremacy into popularconsciousness. Even the most private lynchings were made spectacularthrough photographs, news accounts, and other kinds of narratives thatcelebrated and justified the violence. Anti-lynching activists, however,were effectively able to use the spectacle of lynching to dismantle itspower. By reprinting the most sensationalistic sen��sa��tion��al��ism?n.1. a. The use of sensational matter or methods, especially in writing, journalism, or politics.b. Sensational subject matter.c. Interest in or the effect of such subject matter. of lynching accounts andphotographs in pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines, the NAACP and theblack press exposed the horror of mobs' crimes to otherwisedisbelieving and skeptical audiences. In doing so, they rewrote thedominant lynching narrative, so that lynching came to represent, aboveall, the savagery and depravity not of black men but of white mobs. Theyprojected lynching as an anathema to American ideals, a blight uponAmericans' sense of themselves as a just and democratic nation,particularly in contrast to European fascism and totalitarianism.Activists were enormously successful in inverting pro-lynching rhetoricin this way: by the 1930s, lynching had become the most conspicuoussymbol of racial injustice in America. In direct response to thispopular view that lynching was a depraved and backward practice, thosewho had previously defended and excused lynching began to change theirattitudes and behaviors. White Southerners, in particular, came to seelynching as a shameful practice that damaged their sectional reputationand undermined their New South ambitions to integrate fully intoAmerican economic and political life, even as they still wholeheartedly whole��heart��ed?adj.Marked by unconditional commitment, unstinting devotion, or unreserved enthusiasm: wholehearted approval.whole defended white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation. Although lynchingscontinued sporadically in the 1930s, they were increasingly rare; byWorld War II, the public torture and killing of African Americans hadbecome untenable and indefensible. But as lynchings became less public, so too did their most strikingmanifestations and representations. Communities that had previouslycelebrated lynching, commemorating the events in local newspapers, inphotographs, stories, and songs, began to retain a sort of embarrassedsilence about it. People destroyed or hid their photographs and localnewspapers stopped reporting on lynchings altogether. Although manyblack communities preserved their own memories of racial violence,stories of lynching were deliberately omitted from local histories,museums, and other official organs of social memory. For example, Waco,Texas, experienced one of the most sensational and gruesome lynchingswhen, in 1916, a mob tortured and burned Jesse Washington alive before acrowd of fifteen thousand people, an event that garnered much nationalattention and galvanized the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign. Yet nomention is made of this or any other lynchings that were committed inWaco in published local histories, and when interviewers from BaylorUniversity conducted oral histories of Waco residents in the 1980s,white informants remained evasive about the lynching. "Wedon't like to remember the horrible things that go on," saidone resident (Carrigan 194). (4) Despite this reluctance on the part of many white Americans to facethe worst in themselves, lynching has recently become the object ofrenewed public attention. The reasons for this sudden impulse toconfront and remember this history warrant consideration. Certainly theresurfacing of lynching photographs, collected in Without Sanctuary, hasdone much to reawaken Verb 1. reawaken - awaken once againawaken, wake up, waken, rouse, wake, arouse - cause to become awake or conscious; "He was roused by the drunken men in the street"; "Please wake me at 6 AM." public consciousness about lynching. As opposed toother historical artifacts of accounts, photographs have a particularability to create historical memories because they appear to beunmediated Adj. 1. unmediated - having no intervening persons, agents, conditions; "in direct sunlight"; "in direct contact with the voters"; "direct exposure to the disease"; "a direct link"; "the direct cause of the accident"; "direct vote"direct and objective pieces of evidence: there is an undeniabilityabout them. For those who might not be able to fathom that this kind ofatrocity could happen in America, especially because the horror oflynching challenges assumptions about what is imaginable human behavior,the photograph provides visual corroboration; it renders theincomprehensible comprehensible (Barthes 28; Zelizer 10, 84-85; Taylor).As Congressman John Lewis writes in his foreword to Without Sanctuary,these images "make real the hideous crimes that were committedagainst humanity.... these photographs bear witness especially sincemany Americans will not (don't want to) believe that suchatrocities happened in America" (7). The phrase "bear witness" implies not a passivetransference of historical knowledge, but an action, a focusing ofcritical attention and a recognition of social responsibility on thepart of the viewer. To "bear witness" entails that"we" (a collective "we" that is hailed and createdin the action of witnessing) act as spectators to this atrocity andattest to its happening. The photographs ate not, of course, objective,and therefore, in some sense, distanced of impartial records of tortureand murder; rather, they ate taken from the point of view of theperpetrators, who gather around corpses with pride and pleasure. Theviolent exploitation of the event is thus bound up in the photographitself. To look at these images is to recognize the objectifying gaze ofthe perpetrators and to position ourselves in relation to that gaze,even as we may shudder at the thought of it. Precisely because we ateimplicated in the images' violence in this way, we are denied anyaesthetic or emotional distance; instead, we are impelled to engageactively with this past, creating a historical memory of lynchingthrough the ways we convey and transfer this visual encounter withsuffering and death into the future. Much of this recent interest in lynching, particularly scholarlyinterest, pre-dates the resurfacing of these photographs, however.Surely both the relative distance of this past, as well as, conversely,its relevance to the present, have much to do with it. As Halbwachsargued, social memories ate continually changing to meet the needs andconcerns of the present, especially to legitimize le��git��i��mize?tr.v. le��git��i��mized, le��git��i��miz��ing, le��git��i��miz��esTo legitimate.le��git of challenge thedominant social order (40). For many, lynching has particular bearingupon how we understand and resolve contemporary problems ranging fromracial disparities in the death penalty to police brutality, to hatecrimes, to the torture of prisoners. Lynching testifies to the potencyof racial injustice in America, an injustice that, for many, enduresinto the present. On the other hand, many people recognize the resonanceof lynching in the present precisely because the passage of time hasoffered a certain amount of clarity and perspective on the past. What's more, despite the sense that many have that lynchingcontinues to reverberate re��ver��ber��ate?v. re��ver��ber��at��ed, re��ver��ber��at��ing, re��ver��ber��atesv.intr.1. To resound in a succession of echoes; reecho.2. , even persist, in the present, the public focuson lynching today has much to do with the social advancements thatAfrican Americans have made in the past half-century. As historianFitzhugh Brundage has pointed out, "because power and access to itate central to the creation and propagation of historical memory,changes in the relative power of groups invariably in��var��i��a��ble?adj.Not changing or subject to change; constant.in��vari��a��bil have far-reachingconsequences for what of the past is remembered and how it isremembered." It was not until recently that African Americans have"commanded the political power to insist on a more inclusivehistorical memory" and, in this instance, to ask that whiteAmericans recognize and memorialize, bear witness to, the suffering andinjustice that black Americans endured at the hands of white mobs("Introduction" 11). Others, however, may find themselves able to confront this historybecause it is, after all, safely of the past. Some white viewers ofWithout Sanctuary, for instance, expressed a deep sense of horror at thephotographs but at the same time evinced a sense of relief that so muchhas changed. "As a white man viewing these pictures, I cannotfathom the depth of hate it would take individuals to commit thesegruesome acts," attested one viewer on the Without Sanctuarywebsite. "I was horrified hor��ri��fy?tr.v. hor��ri��fied, hor��ri��fy��ing, hor��ri��fies1. To cause to feel horror. See Synonyms at dismay.2. To cause unpleasant surprise to; shock. ," wrote another. "I certainlywasn't raised with this hate and can only hope that many othersweren't as well." While viewers like these acknowledged thatracism in America was unconscionable Unusually harsh and shocking to the conscience; that which is so grossly unfair that a court will proscribe it.When a court uses the word unconscionable to describe conduct, it means that the conduct does not conform to the dictates of conscience. , they also may have believed thatit was contained within the grainy grain��y?adj. grain��i��er, grain��i��est1. Made of or resembling grain; granular.2. Resembling the grain of wood.3. Having a granular appearance due to the clumping of particles in the emulsion. , black and white images of the past.Since they could never imagine themselves engaging in such barbarism bar��ba��rism?n.1. An act, trait, or custom characterized by ignorance or crudity.2. a. The use of words, forms, or expressions considered incorrect or unacceptable.b. ,they could be even comforted by their own shock and disgust. Because the memory of lynching is so often deployed to make senseof and interpret racism and race relations in the present, it has becomea highly fraught "usable past." There seems to be so much atstake in how lynching is remembered for this reason, which makes writingabout or representing it particularly difficult. For instance,representing this past inevitably entails schematizing and structuringit into a discernible narrative or image. Indeed, social memories oftendepend on some sort of physical manifestation in order to be conveyedand sustained. That is, for the past to be grasped and remembered bylarge groups of people, it needs to be accessible and transferable insome sort of coherent and concrete form (Connerton 13-14; Zelizer 4-8).It is for this reason that there is often such an impulse to constructpublic memorials to the past and likewise why lynching photographs havedone so much to activate historical memory about lynching. But doing soinevitably requires that all of the complexity and ambiguity of a pastreality, which was never experienced by those in it as a single,coherent narrative, be rendered into one. This is a conundrum that allhistorians face, of course, but the problem is only compounded ininstances of human atrocity, especially one that was as dispersed andextensive as lynching. Any efforts to memorialize this past not onlyface the resistance of those who would rather not "remember thehorrible things that go on," but also unavoidably generateconflicts over whose story will be told, how it will be told, and whohas the authority to do so. Furthermore, because lynching was so often perpetrated throughspectacle and sensationalism, any attempt to represent it risksre-engaging in that spectacle or exploiting the sensationalism onceagain. Those responsible for public exhibitions of lynching photographs,of course, were compelled to face this dilemma, as Bettina Carbonellexamines in this volume, but the problem exists in any attempt tonarrate or convey the horror of lynching. Any public representation oflynching renders an individual's most excruciatingmoment--excruciating not only because he suffered physical pain, butbecause others watched and enjoyed that suffering publicly--public onceagain. It is a near impossible task to represent that moment withoutcausing shock and sensation--that is, without sensationalizing it. Butto represent or denote lynching without using direct imagery ordescription also risks diluting or sanitizing the atrocity and itseffects (Apel). In reviews of Without Sanctuary, a number of critics expressedconcern not only that the various exhibits sensationalized, evenaestheticized, this somber and terrible past, but that they held theblack victim in permanent tableau as a desecrated other--that they, infact, reified black victimhood. "How much does our moral revulsionchange the fact that these photographs still, as their creators andoriginal purchasers intended, present victimization victimizationSocial medicine The abuse of the disenfranchised–eg, those underage, elderly, ♀, mentally retarded, illegal aliens, or other, by coercing them into illegal activities–eg, drug trade, pornography, prostitution. as the definingcharacteristic of blackness?" asked historian Grace Hale in herreview (990). Hale and others have contended that in placing focus onthe victims of lynching, Without Sanctuary and other memorials tolynching, in effect, overlook the perpetrators and absolve ab��solve?tr.v. ab��solved, ab��solv��ing, ab��solves1. To pronounce clear of guilt or blame.2. To relieve of a requirement or obligation.3. a. To grant a remission of sin to. them ofresponsibility. The victims, for instance, are named, while theperpetrators and spectators remain anonymous and their motivations andimpulses remain unexamined; they are simply dismissed or evaded asmonstrous or unimaginable (Hale 993; Austin 719-22). Yet, other scholarshave concluded just the opposite, and have criticized those historianswho have attended too much to the psychology and rationales of whitemobs at the expense of lynching's victims. They call instead formore sustained attention to black agency and resistance and to theimpact of lynching on black families, relationships, and communities.According to one scholar, "failure to do so constitutes an academiclynching" (Cha-Jua 593). (5) This unfortunate charge speaks to theways in which, when it comes to lynching, disagreements ofrepresentational or scholarly emphasis get waged over moral andpolitical terrain. The essays in this volume all grapple, in various ways, withprecisely these kinds of conflicts about how lynching is to beremembered and represented, even as they themselves ate inevitablydirecting public knowledge about what needs to be remembered. The firsttwo essays consider the ways in which the violence of lynching was, atits very making, representational and held tremendous symbolic value towhite and black alike. Reprinted here, in revised form, is Donald G.Mathews's groundbreaking essay, "The Southern Rite of HumanSacrifice" that posits lynching as a "blood sacrifice," asacred rite of retributive justice and communal atonement. By placingthe lynching within the context of evangelical theology and the symbolicuniverse of white supremacy, Mathews shows the ways in which theviolence acted as a cleansing ritual, a means to expiate sin andimpurity im��pu��ri��ty?n. pl. im��pu��ri��ties1. The quality or condition of being impure, especially:a. Contamination or pollution.b. Lack of consistency or homogeneity; adulteration.c. from the white community and thus to secure the purity andsanctity of that community. In doing so, he sheds new light on why mobschose to engage in these elaborate and grotesque performances oftorture, hanging, and burning. Sandy Alexandre, for her part, examines the psychic impact oflynching photographs upon an African American sense of space and placein the American South. At a time when black property ownership was onthe rise and white ownership was decreasing, lynching photographs posedscenes of literal and symbolic dispossession The wrongful, nonconsensual ouster or removal of a person from his or her property by trick, compulsion, or misuse of the law, whereby the violator obtains actual occupation of the land. Dispossession encompasses intrusion, disseisin, or deforcement. for whites fearful of blackeconomic competition. Images of black bodies hanging from great heightsprovided whites with scenarios of black displacement and removal, andtherein lay much of their effectiveness in rendering black bodies andSouthern spaces as radically antithetical an��ti��thet��i��cal? also an��ti��thet��icadj.1. Of, relating to, or marked by antithesis.2. Being in diametrical opposition. See Synonyms at opposite. . The exposure and homelessnessevoked in those images signaled the exclusion of African Americans froma white-defined sense of place, underscored their vulnerability in aspace defined as hostile, and no doubt heightened the sense of urgencymarking the departures of so many who joined the Great Migration North. The next essays in this volume focus attention on the thornyimplications when writers, activists, and artists have attempted torepresent and bear witness to 1ynching's violence and its traumaticeffects. Julie Armstrong's essay addresses the literary andartistic response to the horrific 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, apregnant woman hanged, her fetus cut from her body, by a white mob inGeorgia. Because Turner was female, her lynching brought considerablenational attention to the atrocities white mobs were committingsupposedly on behalf of white women: anti-lynching activists were ableto use her story to challenge pro-lynching defenses effectively. But,because it disrupted "the conventional lynching narrative,"artists and writers found it particularly difficult "to shape andmake meaning" from her story, a story that "lay beyondlanguage, beyond sense." Armstrong focuses on the ways in whichFuller and Grimke's struggles to represent Turner's story, asblack women themselves, became personally charged confrontations, whichcould only be reconciled through a certain kind of distancedsentimentality and "righteous discontent." Christopher Metress examines the obstacles to representing lynchingand racial injustice on television. The lynching of Till, murdered forsupposedly wolf-whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, in1955, sent shock waves through the country because it happened longafter the period in which lynchings were a regular occurrence in theSouth and at a time when black freedom struggles in the South wereheating up. His death raised the specter of community-sanctionedlynchings, especially because an all-white jury acquitted his murderersand brought into stark relief for the nation the terror and injusticesthat blacks continued to endure in the South. Metress details RodSerling's attempts to dramatize dram��a��tize?v. dram��a��tized, dram��a��tiz��ing, dram��a��tiz��esv.tr.1. To adapt (a literary work) for dramatic presentation, as in a theater or on television or radio.2. Till's lynching and itsaftermath on the small screen in order to make that story known andunderstood by a wider public. Executives and sponsors, however, stymiedhis efforts at every turn, fearing that any faithful representation ofracial oppression would alienate Southern audiences. Serling, inresponse, worked to tell the story of Till's murder in twodifferent teleplays, with varying degrees of success, by "slantingit," that is, by using "oblique references and subplots"to obscure any direct references to Southern lynching and racialoppression. Metress's work not only adds to our understanding ofthe vexed but critical relationship between television and the civilrights movement in this period but also illuminates the largerinstitutional forces at work that can complicate and encumber To burden property by way of a charge that must be removed before ownership is free and clear.Property subject to an encumbrance may have a lien or mortgage imposed upon it. attemptsto represent and memorialize racial violence. Similarly concerned with the difficulties of representing andmemorializing Emmett Till's story is Lewis Nordan's 1993 novelWolf Whistle, which Harriet Pollack analyzes. A contemporary of EmmettTill's and a native Mississippian, Nordan has acknowledged beinghaunted nearly his whole life by the murder, but it was not until thepublication of Wolf Whistle, thirty-eight years after the fact, thatNordan was able to confront the story directly, and when he did heresorted to the vocabulary of comedy and magic realism to address aculture obsessed with boundaries, categories, hierarchies, and theracial status quo [Latin, The existing state of things at any given date.] Status quo ante bellum means the state of things before the war. The status quo to be preserved by a preliminary injunction is the last actual, peaceable, uncontested status which preceded the pending controversy. . Intent on telling the white version of EmmettTill's murder, Nordan produced a novel that blurs historical factand fictional account, merges damaged children separated by the colorline, and vacillates between comedy and melancholia MELANCHOLIA, med. jur. A name given by the ancients to a species of partial intellectual mania, now more generally known by the name of monomania. (q.v.) It bore this name because it was supposed to be always attended by dejection of mind and gloomy ideas. Vide Mania., , and by doing so,exposes the vulnerability and uncertainty of white privilege and his ownsense of complicity. The result, Pollack suggests, is a novel thatresorts to postmodern interrogations of history and the past, thepolitical uses of humor to unsettle our unexamined assumptions of selfand community, and disturbing questions about the viability of genuinesocial transformation. The next essays address the construction of public memories oflynching in our present time. Bettina Carbonell compares two verydifferent exhibitions of James Allen's collection of lynchingphotographs that took place in New York in 2000: one, Witness, at theRoth Horowitz Gallery and the other, Without Sanctuary, at the New YorkHistorical Society. In doing so, she interrogates the "ethics andaesthetics" involved when institutions, in exhibiting these images,attempt to make coherent and rational the disordered and chaotic natureof traumatic experience. In Witness, the photographs and postcards weresimply hung on the gallery walls, where they were allowed to "speakfor themselves," and viewers encountered them, bore witness tothem, in all their "horrible excess," within the constrictedspace of the gallery. Witness, however, became the object of much publiccriticism for its decontextualized presentation of lynching, so when theNew York Historical Society chose to exhibit the same images severalmonths later, the curators took great care to provide explanatorycontext, placing the photographs within a narrative framework oflynching history and anti-lynching activism. Carbonell, though, readsthese exhibitions against the grain, finding that Without Sanctuary, inits attempts to mediate and guide viewers' encounter with theimages, ultimately "distanced and protected the viewer from theunadulterated, searing violence" of the images, allowing them"to regain their composure in the face of lawlessness." Shefinds more value in Witness, which gave the viewer "little recourseto the space beyond lynching" in its "lawless" and"largely unmitigated un��mit��i��gat��ed?adj.1. Not diminished or moderated in intensity or severity; unrelieved: unmitigated suffering.2. re-composition" of lynching trauma.Carbonell's analysis does much to shed light on the theoretical,ethical, and political stakes involved in any public memorialization andrepresentation of atrocity. Dora Apel addresses the ways in which efforts to remember and honorlynching victims through the construction of public memorials raisesthese same representational difficulties. She considers one of the mostsignificant of these efforts, when a group of citizens in Duluth,Minnesota, successfully commissioned a Memorial Wall in remembrance ofthree African American men, who, in 1920, were hanged in the center ofthe city before a crowd of thousands. Apel traces the polyvalent polyvalent/poly��va��lent/ (-va��lent) multivalent. pol��y��va��lentadj.1. Acting against or interacting with more than one kind of antigen, antibody, toxin, or microorganism.2. elements that led to this memorial, which, in providing "historicalclosure" for the lynching and in fostering "publicconsensus" about the meaning of that history in a diverse anddivided city, bore considerable cultural weight. In particular, thememorial had a redemptive purpose that was meant to create a publicvoice for African American citizens of the city and offer them apositive self-image, while also creating a narrative of events thatwhite citizens could embrace. To do so, Apel contends, the memorial hadto "cast the victims in heroic proportions," while eclipsinglynching's horrifying context of white supremacy and blacksubjugation SubjugationCushan-rishathaim Aramking to whom God sold Israelites. [O.T.: Judges 3:8]Gibeonitesconsigned to servitude in retribution for trickery. [O.T.: Joshua 9:22–27]Ham Noahcurses him and progeny to servitude. [O. . Because "the nature of black oppression, suffering andloss remains obscured in this monument," its image of lynching is afalse one. "But what would be the alternative?" Apel asks.Apel uses this story to reflect upon the larger difficulties with whichany memorialization of traumatic events must contend when it seeks toredeem atrocities that are by their very nature irredeemable. Katherine Henninger, in turn, examines the continuing and highlytroubling relevance of lynching narratives in globalized Americanculture by setting in dialogue the lynching photographs from WithoutSanctuary with the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison The Abu Ghraib prison (Arabic: سجن أبو غريب; also Abu Ghurayb) is in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi city 32 km (20 mi) west of Baghdad. in Iraq that firstcame to light in 2004. Like the photographs in the 2000 New York City New York City:see New York, city. New York CityCity (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. exhibitions, the Abu Ghraib photographs put on display not just thevictims of American violence but the perpetuators of that violence aswell, who, like their predecessors in lynching photographs, look at thecamera that captures their abuse with confidence and sly complicity, asthough to underscore their bond with those who survey the photographs.If there is a difference, Henninger argues, between the images ofatrocity and the project of "nation-building," both at homeand abroad, it remains, chillingly enough, "in the eye of thebeholder"--as it did for those early white audiences of lynchingphotographs and postcards who turned to representations of racialviolence to define and bolster their own sense of whiteness andcommunity. Edwin Arnold examines the conflicting narratives and debates overthe 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, that continue toresonate throughout our culture today. It was a lynching, Arnold notes,that "provided a narrative of race madness" at a time ofmounting xenophobia XenophobiaBoxer RebellionChinese rising aimed at ousting foreign interlopers (1900). [Chinese Hist. , racism, and violence. Pronounced the "crime ofthe century" by no less a figure than journalist and anti-lynchingactivist Ida B. Wells-Burnett, the lynching quickly generatedconflicting and contradictory narratives by local white newspapers, aninvestigator hired by Chicago black activists, and a white new Yorknewspaper editor. Those contradictions and debates continue to live onin local memories, academic scholarship, and the efforts of contemporarycivic groups to bring a once-forgotten atrocity back into public memory. This special issue of Mississippi Quarterly on lynching andrepresentation in American culture concludes with an excerpt fromnovelist Anthony Grooms's work-in-progress focusing on the chaoticemotional interior of a white Georgia man who remembers participating ina spectacle lynching in his youth but who cannot account for thatparticipation or for the manifold contradictions in his life that renderhis sense of masculinity vulnerable. The excerpt offers a disturbingglimpse into the interior life of a man who takes white privilege in JimCrow Georgia for granted but who cannot integrate that sense ofprivilege with his attraction to blackness or with his own intenselyfelt vulnerability. It is a portrait, ultimately, of the ties that bindperpetrators of racial violence to the victims whose deaths wererequired to bolster both whiteness and manliness in men who felt certainof neither. Grooms's portrait of a white man who recalls a lynching almostas an afterthought presents a somber commentary on the difficulties wecontinue to experience in confronting those memories and assimilatingthem into our cultural and personal narratives. If it is disturbing toponder the hesitations and silences marking Twain's early attemptto take stock of the deeply embedded presence of racial violence inAmerican culture, it is equally dismaying to contemplate contemporaryappropriations and reiterations of lynching's language and imageryin venues as far-ranging as schoolyards and television talk shows, justas it is disheartening to acknowledge how easily rites of bonding andothering pioneered by turn-of-the-twentieth-century lynchings can be setin motion within the halls of an Iraqi prison. The "afterlife"of lynching--in Bettina Carbonell's vivid phrasing--suggests thatthe cultural wounds left by those late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century rites of violence have yet to be healed and may verywell continue to resist our best efforts to incorporate them into ournarratives of the past and render them finally comprehensible. Works Cited Allen, James, et al. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography inAmerica. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000. Apel, Dora. "On Looking: Lynching Photographs and the Legaciesof Lynching after 9/11." American Quarterly 55 (2003): 457-78. Austin, Andrew. "Explanation and Responsibility: Agency andMotive in Lynching and Genocide." Journal of Black Studies 34(2004): 719-22. Baker, Bruce. "Under the Rope: Lynching and Memory in LaurensCounty, South Carolina South Carolina,state of the SE United States. It is bordered by North Carolina (N), the Atlantic Ocean (SE), and Georgia (SW).Facts and FiguresArea, 31,055 sq mi (80,432 sq km). Pop. (2000) 4,012,012, a 15. ." Brundage, Where These Memories Grow319-45. Barrow, Janice. "Lynching in the Mid-Atlantic,1882-1940." American Nineteenth Century History 6 (2005): 241-72. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans.Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Beck, Glenn. "The Glenn Beck Show." 15 Jan. 2007. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. "Introduction: No Deed ButMemory." Brundage, Where These Memories Grow 1-33. --"Conclusion: Reflections on Lynching Scholarship."American Nineteenth Century History 6 (2005): 401-14. --, ed. Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and SouthernIdentity. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina North Carolina,state in the SE United States. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean (E), South Carolina and Georgia (S), Tennessee (W), and Virginia (N).Facts and FiguresArea, 52,586 sq mi (136,198 sq km). Pop. P, 2000. Burke, Peter. "History as Social Memory." Memory:History, Culture, and the Mind. Ed. Thomas Butler. London: BasilBlackwell. 1989. 97-113. Carrigan, William D. The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence andVigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. Carrigan, William D., and Clive Webb. "The Lynching of Personsof Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848-1928."Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 411-38. Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita. "'A Warlike war��like?adj.1. Belligerent; hostile.2. a. Of or relating to war; martial.b. Indicative of or threatening war.warlikeAdjective1. Demonstration':Legalism le��gal��ism?n.1. Strict, literal adherence to the law or to a particular code, as of religion or morality.2. A legal word, expression, or rule. , Violent Self-Help and Electoral Politics in Decatur, Illinois,1894-1898." Journal of Urban History 26 (2005): 591-629. Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge UP,1989. Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Natalie (Ann) Zemon(1928–) historian; born in Detroit, Mich. Educated at Smith and Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. , and Randolph Starn. "Introduction:Special Issue, Memory and Counter-Memory." Representations 26(1989): 1-6. Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of AfricanAmerican Identity. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Feimster, Crystal Nicole. "'Ladies and Lynching':The Gendered Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South,1880-1930." Ph.D. Diss., Princeton U, 2000. Gaines, James R. "To Our Readers." Time 4 July 1994. Gonzales-Day, Ken. Lynching in the West, 1850-1935. Durham: DukeUP, 2006. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. 1925. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1992. Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Exhibition Review. Journal of AmericanHistory The Journal of American History (sometimes abbreviated as JAH), is the official journal of the Organization of American Historians. It was first published in 1914 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review 89 (2002): 989-94. Jew, Victor. "'Chinese Demons': The ViolentArticulation of Chinese Otherness and Interracial in��ter��ra��cial?adj.Relating to, involving, or representing different races: interracial fellowship; an interracial neighborhood. Sexuality in the U.S.Midwest, 1885-1889." Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 389-410. LaCapra, Dominick. "Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to theVictim's Voice." Postone and Santner 208-31. Lewis, John. Foreword. Allen 7. Lutes, Jean M. "Lynching Coverage and the AmericanReporter-Novelist." American Literary History 19 (2007): 456-81. Madison, James Madison, James,1751–1836, 4th President of the United States (1809–17), b. Port Conway, Va.Early CareerA member of the Virginia planter class, he attended the College of New Jersey (now Princeton Univ.), graduating in 1771. H. A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory inAmerica. New York: Palgrave P, 2001. Markowitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence andMemory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Marlette, Doug. "New South Affirmative Action affirmative action,in the United States, programs to overcome the effects of past societal discrimination by allocating jobs and resources to members of specific groups, such as minorities and women. ." Cartoon.U of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel 20 April 2006. Oggel, Terry I. "Speaking Out about Race: 'The UnitedStates of Lyncherdom' Clemens Really Wrote." Prospects 25(2000): 115-39. Pfeifer, Michael J. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society,1874-1947. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. Postone, Moise, and Eric Santner, eds. Catastrophe and Meaning: TheHolocaust and the Twentieth Century. U of Chicago P, 2003. --. "Introduction: Catastrophe and Meaning." Postone andSantner 1-14. Thelan, David. "Memory and American History." Journal ofAmerican History 75 (1989): 1117-29. Taylor, John. Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War.New York: New York UP, 1998. Waldrep, Christopher. The Many Faces of fudge Lynch: Extralegal ex��tra��le��gal?adj.Not permitted or governed by law.extra��le Violence and Punishment in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Williams, Kidada E. "Resolving the Paradox of Our LynchingFixation: Reconsidering Racialized Violence in the American South after Slavery." American Nineteenth Century History 6 (2005):323-50. Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory throughthe Camera's Eye. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. AMY A`my´n. 1. A friend. LOUISE WOOD Illinois State University SUSAN V. DONALDSON College of William and Mary Noun 1. William and Mary - joint monarchs of England; William III and Mary II (1) Glenn Beck, "The Glenn Beck Show," January 15, 2007.For a transcript, see www.transcript.cnn.com. Cartoonist Doug Marlettesimilarly penned a cartoon that depicted a lynching rope hanging from atree, labeled "for whites only," with the Dulce chapel in thebackground. The caption read "New South Affirmative Action."Reprinted in the University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel (April 20,2006). (2) We Use the term "historical memory" to refer tomemories that groups or individuals might have of events in the pastthat they themselves never experienced firsthand. These memories are, ofcourse, always "social memories" in the sense that they areinevitably formed and transmitted through social structures andinstitutions. Social theorist Maurice Halbwachs was the first to cointhe term "collective memory" to consider the ways in whichprivate recollections were altered through the public framing of thosereflections, a concept that historians have appropriated to reflect uponhow people learn and understand the past. "Collective historicalmemory," however, suggests a uniform and consensual form ofremembering, while the term "social historical memory" leavesopen the possibility for variation, resistances, and counter-memories.See Halbwachs, Davis and Starn, Thelan, Burke. (3) For the lynching of groups other than African American men,see, for example, Carrigan and Webb, Jew, and Feimster. For studies oflynching outside the South, see Madison, Gonzales-Day, Pfeifer, andBarrow. On the impact of other forms of racist violence, see Williams. (4) In The Making of a Lynching Culture, William Carriganjuxtaposes white Wacoans' silence about lynching with blackWacoans' very active memories of it (198-206). For the ways inwhich white communities have been able to control the public memory oflynching over the past century, and the alternative ways in which blackcommunities have maintained memories of lynching in private discourse,see also Baker. (5) For a similar, though more useful and effective critique, seeWilliams.