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Mari N. Crabtree, PhD is an associate professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston who specializes in African American history and culture since 1865. Her book, My Soul is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, 1940-1970, is forthcoming from the New Directions in Narrative History Series at Yale University Press, and she has an essay on subterfuge in the African American cultural tradition published in Raritan as well as an essay on reimagining the temporal and geographic boundaries of lynching that will appear in an edited volume, Reconstruction at 150. Her next book project expands upon the subject of her Raritan essay and is titled Shuffling Like Uncle Tom, Thinking Like Nat Turner: Humor, Deception, and Irony in the African American Cultural Tradition.
Most Black people have long known about the anti-Black violence captured on shaky cell phone videos and police body cameras over the past several years. Unlike many of their fellow citizens, they don’t need video evidence to believe that such violence is still present in the United States. They recognize that incidents like the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are not outliers. Rather, their deaths are part of a long and enduring continuum of anti-Black violence in the United States.
From the mass public executions following the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the lynching of thousands of Blacks during Jim Crow, public spectacles of Black torture, mutilation, and death have been endemic to the United States. These public executions serve to assert white dominance over Blacks and to ease white anxieties about their hold over US society. Acts of white supremacist terrorism, including the Wilmington race massacre in 1898, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, and the recent massacre of nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel in 2015, are attempts to control Black communities through violence and fear. Black people have also endured centuries of state-sponsored violence from the surveillance and harassment by slave patrols and the police to the disproportionate usage of the death penalty and incarceration to punish Black people. These examples are compounded by the intimate violence of rape and sexual assault and its systematic erasure through non-prosecutions, which have excluded Black women from the most basic protections of the law. Over time forms of anti-Black violence have evolved in response to major social-historical shifts like emancipation, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights Movement. However, the history of anti-Black violence is, at heart, a story of entrenchment and continuity. Over many centuries the purpose of anti-Black violence has remained consistent: to protect and consolidate white power and to control and degrade Black people.
Lynching is among the most grisly and public forms of anti-Black violence. These ritualized spectacles of Black death illustrate the profound impact of white violence on constructing white identity and shoring up white power. Many lynchings were community affairs designed to unleash violence publicly and collectively upon Black people. They reassured whites of their near absolute power and taught white children their place atop the social hierarchy. Lynchings were legally sanctioned by the courts and socially sanctioned by prominent members of the white community who either participated in or turned a blind eye to these murders. Backed by the power and legitimacy of the state and society at large, mob violence silenced dissent against white supremacy within the white community. At the same time, lynching sought to discourage Black economic success, claims to political power, educational achievement, and protest the degrading social mores of white supremacy. Punishment was not really the point—suffering, degradation, and control were.
In the wake of these horrors, Black survivors grieved the dead, the maimed, the lost, and the incarcerated. This devastation left a bitter inheritance to generations of Black children who, despite their birthright claims to US citizenship, were cast out from the promise of freedom. That mourning continues across generations, but Black families certainly passed along more than grief and trauma. Their inheritances also included freedom dreams, love, a spirit of ingenuity and creativity, laughter, and the legacy of a centuries-long struggle for liberation. In the face of enslavement, free and enslaved Blacks plotted insurrections and fled to free soil. When lynching was a near daily occurrence in the 1890s, Ida B. Wells launched her crusade against the ritual desecration of Black bodies. The Black freedom struggle, too, is also a story of continuity, one that flows from the likes of Harriet Tubman to Mary McLeod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Patrisse Cullors, and Mariame Kaba.
Anti-Black violence had (and continues to have) a long afterlife. Seemingly discrete events or episodes (i.e. a lynching, an execution, a massacre, an instance of police brutality) seep into the present as continually unfolding intergenerational tragedies, and anti-Black violence has continued to evolve over the past few centuries as well. This evolution has often tempted observers to assign clean breaks between one form of violence and another—the abolition of enslavement, the outlawing of convict leasing, and the legal end to segregation. Scholars of lynching, for instance, typically focus on the period between roughly 1880 and 1940 as the era of lynching. However, Ashraf Rushdy points out that lynching has evolved in form over time (both before 1880 and after 1940) and continues to occur to this day, and the white supremacist motives that sustain the practice remain constant. To Rushdy, the impulse to mark a definitive endpoint to lynching speaks to a desire to end the bad old regime of white supremacy and start anew, but without dismantling white supremacy. Rushdy’s expansive conception of lynching might strike some historians as ahistorical, but his argument about the continuities of anti-Black violence forces an often-uncomfortable reckoning with how little the US has actually changed since enslavement was abolished and Jim Crow crumbled.
Labeling present-day lynchings as “hate crimes” or ignoring their existence in the first place may offer some comfort to those who hope the US has miraculously moved beyond its white supremacist history with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Movement, or the election of Barack Obama (take your pick). However, George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s deaths serve as devastating reminders that (white) Americans should not be entranced by such wishful thinking. For the reason that most Black people expressed horror and outrage but not shock at Floyd’s and Taylor’s deaths is that anti-Black violence and white supremacy have never disappeared. The noose may have evolved into a chokehold, and night riders may have evolved into the police serving a no-knock warrant, but the ever-present specter of Black death and the callous disregard for Black life have never left us.