Department of History
INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF VIOLENCE FROM THE SOUTH, 1870S – 1930S “STRANGE FRUIT”: The strange history of the famous song
How can we understand this kind of horror and terror? What can history, and what can literature and music and the arts, contribute to some kind of understanding? Race and Violence in the South: Examples from Texts Douglass:
beatings of slaves; fight with Covey; brutality of slavery as an entire
system Beloved:
176: “Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to think––just think––what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education.” 183: “Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. . .” 212: “Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty–seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who’d read it, it stank. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: “Whatever faults and failings other nations may have in their dealings with their own subjects or with other people, no other civilized nation stands condemned before the world with a series of crimes so peculiarly national. It becomes a painful duty of the Negro to reproduce a record which shows that a large portion of the American people avow anarchy, condone murder and defy the contempt of civilization.” Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: “Sam Hose . . . Lige Strickland . . . Mary Turner . . . . All met their deaths in much the same way, as did nearly three thousand black Southerners between 1890 and World War I, with only slight variations in the rituals performed and in the hymns that were sung” (281). “The mob ‘execution’ of a black man, woman, or family was not only a public spectacle but also public theater, often a festive affair, a participatory ritual of torture and death that many whites preferred to witness rather than read about” (287). SPECIAL PRESENTATION IN CLASS: FILM ON JIM CROW, IDA B. WELLS, AND RACIAL VIOLENCE Race
and Violence in the South: Explanations and Hypotheses?
––the calculus of control versus investment “During slavery, blacks had been exposed to violence on the plantations and farms where they worked and from the patrollers if they ventured off those plantations. The financial investment each slave represented had operated to some degree as a protective shield for blacks accused of crimes, but in the event of an insurrection––real or imagined––whites had used murder, decapitation, burning, and lynching to punish suspected rebels and impress on all blacks the danger of resistance” (Litwack, 285) ––inducements and
coercions: making the black laborer labor 2. Race and Violence in Reconstruction (1865–1877):
“Redemption” (1877
forward): why a religious word chosen for the re–imposition of white
supremacist regimes in the South? “Tell me something, Stamp.” Paul D’s eyes were rheumy. “Tell me this one thing. How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?” “All he can,” said Stamp Paid. “All he can.” "Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” (277) 1880–1914: most violent and murderous period of racial violence in post–Civil War American history Rise of legal institutions as well as extralegal violence in support of segregation, or “Jim Crow”
Mechanisms of Racial Control in the South, 1890 – 1960s
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Supreme Court enshrines doctrine into national law. Case involves Homer Plessy, who appears to be white but is not, who seats himself in “white”section of train in order to be arrested and challenge segregation law on trains involved in interstate transport. Loss of case vindicates doctrine of “separate but equal”
Beloved, 128–29: “. . . and it was this last that had to be guarded against, for if one pitched and ran––all, all forty–six, would be yanked by the chain that bound them and no telling who or how many would be killed. A man could risk his own life, but not his brother’s. So the eyes said, ‘Steady now,’ and ‘hang by me.’” . . . . “It was decided to lock everybody down in the boxes till it either stopped or lightened up so a whiteman could walk, damnit, without flooding his gun and the dogs could quit shivering. The chain was threaded through forty–six loops of the best hand–forged iron in Georgia.”
Discussion of Ida B. Wells and Leon
Litwack articles How does Morrison deal with/transform this kind of history in her fiction? What is the impact of violence on her characters? For her characters, is there any hope of “redemption” from the legacy of this violence? |
