Despite the publicity, reporters do not investigate the arrest, just five years earlier, that landed Ledbetter in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. This chapter does so, looking at his arrest in Mooringsport on January 15, 1930 and at the protracted, but ultimately unsuccessful, legal battle waged on Ledbetter’s behalf by a white law firm. On the basis of the evidence, and unpublished drafts of the Lomaxes’ book, it seems that the Lomaxes, too, had reason to doubt the story as edited for their book.

Chapter 10 engages the global and historical attributes of lynching and situates the practice within a North American environment of anti-Black terror. This chapter links national lawmakers who advocated for White supremacy to the increase and severity of violence against Black individuals (and others), surveying how violence and the construction of race served to create and uphold relationships of power and economy in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. It centers on Congressional discussions in the Reconstruction era and the brutal death of Lee Walker, a Black man, at the hands of a White mob in 1893. The creation of a new racial order, one that harkened to earlier forms of racial intimidation, was intricately connected to work. Violence ensured that the linkages between low-status labor, poverty, and skin color remained unbroken.

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.

Through an examination of scraps of clothing collected from the sites of lynching, this chapter theorizes the persistence of the reliquary object into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. The chapter focuses on the particularity of clothing as material objects capable of holding sensory and conceptual memories of the human body. This comes as part of a larger discussion of relics and reliquary cultures and builds on discourses on the Black male body from history, African American studies, and visual culture studies.

The conclusion to this book looks at the public afterlives of lynching objects as they move from personal collections into archives and museums. Through a study of several visual and material collections from lynchings, the chapter makes a claim for the persistence of lynching's material culture as part of an evolving historical conciousness. Further, this conclusion serves as a blueprint for a rethinking of the public historical interpretation of racial violence and of the rethinking of the entanglements between cultural heritage and racial violence.

“The Tree” examines lynching souvenirs in the context of the emerging tourist economies of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern United States. The chapter focuses on mementos taken from lynching trees as well as the overlaps between this practice and other forms of landscape documentation and tourism. Through this study, the chapter also charts the overlaps between different object categories, particularly souvenirs and relics, as the image of the South became an increasingly commericalized and consumable one. This study of lynching souvenirs thus makes an argument for the inextricability of southern identity from its foundations in racial violence.

This chapter juxtaposes the history of the first Black-funded textile mill in the postbellum southern United States with the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer. The study uses the opening of the Warren C. Coleman mill in the same year and town as the Kizer and Johnson lynching to examine the overlaps between white definitions of labor and justifications for racial violence. Through a study of the hammer and chisel used to break into a jail cell to abduct the two victims, the author examines the evolution of working memory in and of the South, particularly as it pertains to questions of race, gender, and age.

“The Song” takes as its subject the material, visual, and sonic circulations of a ballad written about the Kizer and Johnson lynching. The chapter focuses in particular on its first recording, a 1960s single by the folk musician J. E. Mainer. By looking at its circulation first as a performed and then recorded song, the chapter examines the sonic and visual circulations of the ballad as a signifer of southern authenticity. By delving into discourses on authenticity and folk culture, “The Song” points to an evolution in the meaning of racial violence as a constitutive part of a white southern identity. Further, the study examines how this emblem of white southernness came to represent a particular form of personal authenticity for a new generation immersed in the folk revival movement of the 1960s. In this way the chapter serves as a study of both the racist ideology of some countercultural movements as well as the evolution of lynching's meaning in the late twentieth century.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal both get mixed reviews in song. The Dust Bowl hits the middle of the country, bringing to the fore not only Woody Guthrie and “Sis” Cunningham but also a stable of lesser-known “Dust Bowl Balladeers.” The Harlan County Wars continue in Kentucky, and the balladry proliferates. Sit-down strikes rock Detroit, and their songs resound. “We Shall Not Be Moved” becomes a Spanish-language anthem, and Rafael Hernández Marín sings of Puerto Rico’s Ponce Massacre. Abel Meeropol takes on lynching with his masterpiece, “Strange Fruit,” and Lead Belly damns the racism of the nation’s capital with his “Bourgeois Blues.” The Popular Front resurrects Lincoln as a working-class hero in song, and the fighters of the Lincoln Battalion in Spain march to their own battle tunes. The arenas of musical theater, dance, classical music, and jazz also become battlegrounds with Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles, William Grant Still’s Lenox Avenue, Helen Tamiris’s How Long, Brethren?, Langston Hughes’s Don’t You Want to Be Free?, and John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts. Marian Anderson transforms “America” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Paul Robeson sings a “Ballad for Americans” from coast to coast.

Reconstruction ended in 1876 as railroads, mining, and agriculture grew. Robber Barons emerged as the leaders of these activities became rich. The Supreme Court in the 1880s eliminated the constitutional amendments passed during Reconstruction to help Blacks by either rejecting them or reinterpreting them. Jim Crow laws were passed in many Southern states after 1896 depriving Blacks of the vote and leading to a decline in Black education. I describe the movie, Birth of a Nation, to show the attitude of white people at the time of World War I toward Blacks and Reconstruction. Those views have been shown since to be totally false.

This chapter examines Wright’s critical appropriation of the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Robert Nixon murder trial (1938-39). Although Nixon was tried and executed for murdering Florence Johnson (a white woman), the Tribune routinely – and groundlessly – called the Black teenager a “rapist.” As Wright reminds us, if fascination with the condemned African American criminal dates back to the Puritan gallows ritual, the trope of the “Black beast rapist” evokes lynching in the post-Reconstruction South. With Native Son’s pointed revisions of the Tribune’s racist coverage, Wright exposes the press as the conduit by which the extrajudicial violence and dehumanizing rhetoric of the lynch mob entered the Northern courtroom.

On November 27, 1933, in San Jose, California, two white men were lynched by an angry mob for allegedly kidnapping and murdering a local celebrity. This chapter traces Steinbeck’s interest in the event and the difficult process of writing about it that would culminate in his short story “The Vigilante” in The Long Valley--a story largely faithful to the historical events but that changes the racial identity of the lynching victims from white to black, and tells the story from a lyncher’s point of view. Drawing on manuscript evidence, on Steinbeck’s developing theory of group psychology (what he called the “phalanx”), and on the history of lynching--and lynching photography--in the United States, the chapter argues that the power of Steinbeck’s short story emerges from its disturbing participation, like a souvenir, in a moment of racist violence. Steinbeck’s problematic play with the short story form is reversed in his story “Johnny Bear,” which employs unreliable narration to undermine the authority of white power by exposing the interracial sexual affairs that lie at its heart.

This chapter examines the transitions in Black intellectual thought at the turn of the century. It charts the shifts in W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking, not in isolation, but as a member of a Black intellectual elite who were grappling with the same questions and challenges regarding the role of the Black intellectual. The chapter shows that Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and others saw their academic training as intimately connected with efforts to advance racial understanding and challenge the ideological bases of white supremacy. Rereading Du Bois’s pre-1900 work and the transition in his thinking that Du Bois himself attributed to the horrific lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, the chapter reveals how Du Bois’s thinking shifted over the course of the decade from a commitment to historical method and fact-finding to a more activist and militant approach that would take roots through his work on his John Brown biography, published in 1909, and eventually finding expression in the founding of the NAACP that same year.

Although scholarship on anti-lynching literature generally is robust, most focuses on prose and drama. In parallel, although increasing attention is being devoted to turn-of-the-century poetry, this discourse still often diminishes women’s contributions to this oeuvre by denigrating the aesthetic qualities and political intentions of most female poets in this period other than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Addressing both gaps, this chapter examines anti-lynching verse by three undeservedly little-known authors: Priscilla Jane Thompson (1871–1942), Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–1922), and Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868–1936). All have been nearly ignored, except for discussions of their dialect poetry. Yet close attention to examples of their formalist verse demonstrates that these poets were not anomalies in their era and instead constituted a key link in a tradition of Black women’s poetics of protest, traceable to Harper and to Phillis Wheatley before her. Ultimately, their poems on this subject offer a new lens on this decade, often unfairly viewed as a pre-Harlem fallow period in African American women’s poetry and political contributions.

For African Americans, World War I continued a long, vexed history of broken promises to those who gave their service:a history critical for understanding Black responses to the Great War. As they had done in previous wars, the majority of Black people stood by their country, including activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, and novelist Charles Chesnutt. But a tense debate also ensued in African American communities around the efficacy of Black participation given that wartime experience did not match the democratic rhetoric of the mobilization. Military and political leaders ensured that Jim Crow accompanied the troops to Europe, and although Black units became the most decorated in the US army (albeit by the French), the military pressed a disproportionate majority of Black soldiers into service as stevedores and other non-combat positions. Domestically, racist violence flared with new intensity, and writers like Mary Burrill and Claude McKay directly addressed the lynchings of servicemen and the “red summer” race riots of 1919. This essay nuances the ideas and realities of patriotism, freedom, and citizenship through African American lenses and Black military participation.