>> so thank you. thank you so much. southern trees bear strange fruit. blood on the leaves, blood at the root. black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. strange fruit hanging from the trees. i trust that you recognize these lyrics which describe the hanging bodies of lynching victims. billie holliday made these words famous with the 1939 recording of lewis alan's ballad, and since then versions of the song have come from artists ranging from ub40 to dwayne wade gens. as a result, generations of americans have come to regard the hanging bodies as the best representation of mob destruction. these lyrics, therefore, help explain why gruesome images of lynching victims have become so influential. in late 1999, nearly 100 photographs of mob victims reentered circulation via museum exhibitions and a book of photography called without sanctuary. it's strange for its lyrics made us imagine the hanging body, the photographs challenged us to face it you're in many of us have risen to the challenge because we were already convinced that the mutilated corpse best illustrates lynching or. the african-american bodies depicted are often bullet ridden, burned, or both but the images have demanded enough interest to take photography into 10 additions since 2000, and to sustain academic conferences and journal issues on racial violence, major museum exhibitions around the country, and a virtual exhibition on the world wide web. perhaps most remarkably, the pictures let the u.s. senate to issue in june 2005 a formal apology for having never passed anti-lynching legislation. so for a sense of what prompted those reactions, 1908, this is a real picture of a postcard. i share this because the victim is hanging from a light post, which is along a railroad track. let's then remember that the countries of march into modernity was not somehow antithetical to the barbaric practice of lynching. enjoy technological advances, but no who was supposed to enjoy those technological advances. so as you've enjoyed increased mobility through the railroad, this is one of the messages that you will receive. whites barry gordy being told that they should be happy, that things are under control, and blacks being told that they are not free in the same way to enjoy that increased mobility. i share this with you because lynching, like all-american crimes, was never just a southern phenomenon. so this is mary in indiana 1930. this image is famous for lots of different reasons. one is because we can see everyone in the crowd so clearly. so we can see that there are women, that our men. we can see this guy pointing. we can see that he is smiling, for example. i'm not doing this for well. but he is smiling. so the fact that we can see i don't so clearly is part of the reason for this is become a famous photograph. it's also the photograph that lewis allen, also known as able meyer pull sal and that inspired him to write those lyrics of strange fruit. that's another reason why its famous but it's also things because would've been a third lynch victim. basically they were in jail. they drive them out to lunch them and before the drug chains out to lynch them, they convinced them not to lynch him as well. james later founded the black holocaust museum in milwaukee, wisconsin. so the wood of a third victim here. when i talk about "living with lynching" i talk about the fact we're still living with it anyways but what does it mean to be someone like james cameron had basically managed to escape this button also have deliver the fact he would've been a third person and continue to live with the photograph itself circulating. so those are some of things we want to deal with. finally, with this one i want is to be very clear about the composition of lynching photographs. that we're not just about some kind of straightforward record but there's a deliberate composition to this photograph. part of that compositicompositi on i would suggest is that what cheats around the midsection of one of the victims. historians a little bit a debate about this but i'm convinced by those historians who suggest whenever you see that white sheet on the midsection, it suggests that this victim was castrated. so when i talk about deliberate composition that's part of what i mean that this might be a barbaric practice but anything can be done recently and in order. so this is how we prove we have done it decently and in order. we take the time to cover that up. i share this with you because this became famous in 1935 part because the naacp used it to try to convince people to be a part of their anti-lynching efforts. they put a caption with this one that basically said, you know, don't look at the victim hanging. is trouble is over. let's focus on the damage that's being done to these white children. again we can see very clearly we almost have a nuclear family out there it seems to me. patriarchal father, mother in the background and all these children. and so the naacp says worry about them, the damage we're doing to them as the nation. i find that interesting as a rhetorical strategy because it suggests i'm not going to assume that black pain will motivate you to join this anti-lynching movement but maybe if i can convince you of white pain. 1920 minnesota, began north. we have three victims, to hanging and then one ear on the ground. part of what's striking it again when we think about the composition of the image it seems to me is the eagerness with which people are trying to make sure they are in the frame of the photograph. it also feels to me like there's a certain priority given to the younger man, but they can be a little closer in and the older people are towards the back. so that eagerness with which we make sure we are in the frame of the photograph seems to be something we need to take it seriously. when we understand the composition of these images. i couldn't resist seeing the similarity. this is something we can talk about during q&a. i'm still thinking through the applications of this but the argument of course is that these dummies are always a dark brown, and so this isn't about black people. this is just team spirit kind of thing. but i'm interested in it in the eagerness with which they are getting in the frame, and then the interest in having the hoods up in that kind of thing. we can talk about this but i just was struck by the echo, and i want us to deal with the echo because i think we're living with lynching. i said that these were sometimes you postcard someone to be sure to show you one of the front and back. and so this says this is the barbecue we had last night. my picture is to the left with across over. your son, joe. so seems to me this is the faded cross now. at this victim is burned beyond recognition and yet we have that pristine white sheet. almost finished. so again, i'm thinking about deliberate composition here. you have to be in a particular place to take this photograph. you had to get a certain vantage point to we could really capture the dozens of people who make sure that they were present for this lynching of these two figures. i don't know, seems like they might be in a boat. there's a deliberate composition there but let's take a close-up. so the situation here is that her son was accused of stealing livestock. when the mob came to get them at the house she tried to stop them so they decided they would lend her as well. but kristol, the story has been the most work in times pashtun in terms of tracing with relationship of both black and white women was to lynching was, she found she was raped before she was lynched. so i would suggest to you that her work address, practical garment, she's working, and there's immodesty to the dress because this is how she dresses, but i would suggest once it becomes part of the deliberate composition of a lynching photographs, it serves a very similar purpose to that white sheet. undeniably powerful images. but let's consider how they fall short. the fact that without sanctuary could inspire the senate's apology example vice americans problematic tendencies to allow the photograph to eclipse other representations of this history. decades of anti-lifting -- act that -- anti-lynching, did not move the nation's leaders at the last turn of the century and more recently, they were not the inspiration for the senate's historic gesture or even for the majority of lynching scholarship. instead, white offered photographs and become the evidence that just can't be ignored. granted, this is hardly out of the spirit of letting the murderers and then themselves. as art historian argues, the lost of house tour of understanding and kurd by refusing to see these pictures would only serve to whitewash the crime of white supremacy. obviously i take her point. otherwise i would not have just shown you a few of those pictures. however, i am equally convinced that when we treat images of mutilated bodies as the ultimate evidence of lynching destruction, we reaffirm the authority of the mob. after all, it's because they come from white perpetrators themselves that we have continued to allow the images to trump testimony from victimized communities. and we would treat the pictures as mere records, we forget that photography was a key proponent of the lynching ritual which helped the mob accomplish its goals, older during and long after the victim's murder. the photographs didn't simply document violence. they very much performed it. make no mistake. without centura collection exists because mob incorporate photography into their violent rituals, especially between 1890-1930, lynchings were freckly theatrical productions. the newspapers often announced the time and location so the crowd together. spectators knew that they would see familiar characters, so-called black rapists and white adventures, and that these characters would perform a predictable script of forced confession and mutilation. souvenir hunting would complete the drum with audience participation, but because the most coveted keep state, the victims bones and burnt flesh, were in limited supply, pictures became souvenirs. these pictures now survived to verify lynchings theatrical quality and the variety of stages that mobs claimed. their victims dangled not just some trees but also light post, telephone poles and bridges. when we elevate the photograph above other artifacts of the same time period, our focus on strange fruit amounts to an acceptance of a very specific representation of this violence. after all, these gruesome images were created and preserved because they fell in line with discourse that supported racial bias but the lack of corpses from a mob of righteous whites. no grieving loved ones inside. mainstream lynching photography depicted victims as isolated fruits with no connection to family or community or to institutions like marriage. the similar of that, the images today encourage them acknowledgment of black bodies and even black bodily pain, but the interest in them is not naturally led to an appreciation of the committees more enduring losses, including psychological, emotional and financial suffering. too often historians have interpreted the photographs according to the perspective that produce them. sure, scholars worked to expose the racist orientation but we have been slow to undermined by placing the perspective of victimized communities on par with the photograph. today, i do just that. using black authors whingeing drama. african-americans who lived at the height of mob violence and its photographic representations left artifacts, including plays that offer insights into the causes and consequences of mob violence that are not available through those photographs. black authors lynching place emerged in the 1910s and their increasingly recognized as a unique jahnke thanks to the pioneering work of theater scholars to discuss defense and kathy perkins. in 1998, they establish representative works that a lynching drama is a play in which the threat or a current of lynching, past or present, has major impact on the dramatic action. american writers had always addressed racial violence but the mode develop stevens and perkins maintained, when playwrights would be a brief references and focus on a specific lynching incidents. so by definition, a lynching and play engages mob violence. but unlike mainstream photographers, african-american, does who lived and wrote in the midst of lynching often refuse to feature physical violence. they are script instead spotlight the blackcomb and the impact that the mobs activities have on the families. indeed the drum is most commonly depicted exactly what mainstream discourse denied existed, loving black homes. according to dominant assumptions, the mobs targeted african-americans because they represented an evil that would destroy society. black men were supposedly rapists who did nothing for stable domesticity and black women were said to be whores and capable of grading that domestic city anyway. meanwhile, the dramatists offered the committees script that pressured the truth that these myths disregarded. alice dunbar nelson's 1918 lynching play mine eyes have seen, sympathize with the genre focus on the blackcomb. this one at descriptive scene in crisis magnet official organ of the naacp and the father of the featured characters was lynched years earlier. by focusing on his children as survivors of mob violence, dunbar nelson's script offers access to the conversations that african-americans may have had at the turn-of-the-century. the character is in mine eyes have seen contend that black success attracts the mob. in the following excerpt which is how the plays begins, and in those remember the home they had in the south and bemoaned their current living conditions in the north where they live in a tenement apartment. lucy coming down front with a dishcloth in her hand, then, wasn't better in the old days when we were back home in the little house with a garden and and father coming home night and monday getting supper and chris and i study lessons in the dining room at the table? we didn't have to eat a live in the kitchen been, and the nose is posted on the fence for us to lay down because we had no business in such a decent home, lucy, not heeding the interruption, and chris and i reading the wonderful books and laying out plans to see them go up in the smoke of our burnt home. and everyone pity me because i hurt my foot when i was little, and father, shot down like a dog for daring to defend his home, calling a little brown princes and telling mother, that when you, maimed for life in effect of hell, useless, useless, broken on the wheel. dan's voice breaks in a dry sob. lucy coming out of her trance throws aside the dishcloth in running to dan conflates her cheek against his and strokes his hair. for dany, poor danny, forgive me. i'm selfish. not selfish, little sister, merely natural. dunbar nelson has her characters highlight the fact that whites may display other in patients with black prosperity. dan recalls there were notices posted on the fence before the house was set on fire. trying to stop the vandals, the father went outdoors where he was shot down like a dog. crisp, the other brother, later wonders and for what, because we were living like christians? dunbar nelson characters suggest that when blacks often themselves obtaining hard earned success by mining their own business, whites respond to the vengeance with which some whites perform their supposedly superior status is quite revealing as cultural theorists have long contended hegemony is never complete. it must continually reassert itself. dusk, if white supremacist deny the black community, black familial ties and achievement, african-americans must have been convincingly establishing it. dunbar nelson suggests exactly that, and she does so in a text that is itself a way of establishing the black achievement that some whites thought to be raise. her play reminds african-american readers that they are not hunted because they are racist criminals. the text and the periodical in which it appears, crisis magazine, certified existing of the kinds of people who belong to these communities. in other words, dunbar nelson produces the kind of cultural self affirmation that may very well back in the mob. but, certainly acknowledges that racial violence is a threat but it insists the threat is to the successes that the race has already established, and actively continued to augment. is mob violence was a response to already exist and black achievement and black authored duty, lucy rivers the garden of the ustinov, for instance, than dunbar nelson's text is yet another example of those accomplishments and aesthetic contributions. so quite deliberately they chose to preserve very different sorts of evidence. white authored photographs emphasized them be later blackbody while lynching plays spotlight the households from which it was taken. in mine eyes, the destroyed home number as a place where mom made dinner, young chris and lucy study become and where dad and dan returned after a hard days work. the survivors that inhabit a drab home but it is one that they established despite devastating circumstances, and it it would encourage and comfort each other. lucy prepares addenda and offers her sobbing brother affection laying her cheek against his and stroking his hair. not something you see on the mainstream stage then or now. given these points of emphasis, "mine eyes have seen" also sheds light on lynching photographs. if we take heed the place help us to read those place critically. in order for the mobs logic to work, the blackbody needed to be interpreted in ways that connoted anything but humanity and citizenship. this is why lynching photographs were tried blacks in isolation surrounded by a righteous mob no grieving loved ones inside. but the plays certify that the victims were not isolated brutes. they did care about domestic city and their loved ones are grieving. in short, the genre suggests that mob violence can only be justified by the erasure of exactly what the place of put forth, the black family seems. all other place that i examined are set in the blackcomb, and this is no coincidence. while mentioned discourses and practices constantly asserted that african-americans had no interest in or moral capacity for stable domesticity, sound familiar? african-americans preserve evidence of black familial ties. black authored lynching, survived in the archive to point toward a repertoire of embodied practices through which african-americans affirmed themselves. against the worst odds, they successfully built homes, they reestablish homes when necessary. they sustained each other with food and affection. they more to each other's death. this could not go without saying. after all, the powerful message offered by lynching photographs was that the victim deserved to die and should not be mourned. to highlight a black grief was therefore to make a bold statement. unfortunately scholars can easily overlook this statement. because we typically approach black art as protest, most critics focus on identifying whether an artist work altered white perception, if not their actions. especially when lynching is reference when lynching is referenced, some scholars implicitly ask, what good was it if it didn't convince whites to stop the violence? but african-american communities do not just need those would work to gain white sympathy but they also need individuals who could provide tools for surviving. in other words, it's important to consider the strategies used in the fight to end of mob violence, but we should also ask, how did blacks of each other cope while lynching remained a reality? yes, they hoped there was a brighter coming day, but what were they plan to do in the meantime? my work offers a case study of the genre that deserves to be read as much more than protests. it challenges americans to the black art about lynching less as a reaction to violence and more as a continuation of affirming discourses and practices in africa and america. blacks self affirmation that the mob felt compelled to answer. so what i'm presenting is based on the genre's foundation, which is there and on your handout. black authored lynching drama emerged when poet and fiction writer angelina wells krinsky circuit at the plate now known as rachel. the script had been written by 1914 because the point is that the naacp were leading dress hazard as january 1915. later that year, w.e.b. dubois created a drama committee and a march 1916 that committee sponsored a semiprofessional production of rachel making it the first black authored nonmusical drama executed by black actors for a broad audience. and this is the playbill from the staging today's in washington, d.c. rachel went itself to the naacp goals of reaching integrated audiences. it is a full-length sentimental plate whose emotional appeal largely hinges on the similarities between blacks and whites. in fact, she later explained that she'd written at the plate to convince whites, especially white women, that lynching was wrong as illustrate by the fact that even outstanding black citizens were vulnerable to a. the initial production of rachel ran for just two days but it sparked intense discussion about african-american identity, racial violence and about what lacked drama should accomplish. rachel impacted writers and thinkers of the time but the significance has been underestimated by theater histories that locate the origin of black, in the 1920s. because willis richardson took fortune, the black author play to be produced on broadway in 1923 and langston hughes is two-year run of broadway in 1935, these men are often hailed as the fathers of black drama. yet richardson admitted that it was rachel that prompted him to be, a playwright. just as importantly, his work inspired conversations that led to increasing investment in black authored it, but some of the most influential negro leaders. he circulated the managed it before w.e.b. dubois form the, to me so her work was not a response but likely an inspiration for it. then once the committee decided to sponsor its debut, she helps others identified their artistic mission. often called the architect of the negro movement, and howard university college montgomery gregory objected to the naacp's propagandist platform, which they believe was exhibited by by the organization's presentation of rachel. they therefore vowed to create a space in which purely artistic concerns rained. the more that she publicized their approach, the more w.e.b. dubois refined his articulation of the need for political art. so without question, rachel deeply impacted the founders of both the naacp drama committee and howard universities of drama department, organizations that would encourage and train black playwrights throughout the 1920s. so by 1916, and without reaching broadway, the work rejuvenated black drama. they often took a just agreement to the pages of periodicals and many joined them including authors who entered the debate by simply executing their own vision of what black drama should publish. some like willis richardson became playwrights because they were convinced they could do a better job. others simply seem to believe the perspective on lynching and black family life was just too important to leave unaddressed. when dunbar nelson published "mine eyes have seen" in 1918, just two years after the dramatic debut, she seems to have wanted to address krinsky's investment and appealing to whites and she do so by using the one act format. a serious one act play about african-americans was conducive to publication in periodicals, but it would not appeal to theater practitioners who would reach a broad audience. the commercial stage didn't generally welcomed sears depictions of black characters, and it was even less receptive of one version of such material. if a writer did not have three complementary one acts that could serve as an evening of entertainment, the work need at least to provide comic relief so it could be inserted between the show's other components. tailoring once a script for periodical publication also meant writing with amateur performance in mind. so it's significant the other black authors who wrote lynching place in the 1910s and \20{l1}s{l0}\'20{l1}s{l0} also use the one act format because it allowed the genre to perform community centers, cultural work. in other words, by embracing the one act format, the successes were not striving to have their test come to light before integrated audiences. they did that game to reach whites with hope of convincing them that lynching was wrong. instead they targeted black readers by publishing in magazines like the urban league opportunity and the naacp i suspect obviously other people read those magazines but the targeting of those audiences is relevant because those readers been staged the plays in committee spaces such as black churches and schools and even in their own homes. as literary historian elizabeth mchenry demonstrates in forgotten reader, african americans have long exercise what she called communal literacy, by advocating memorization as a kind of literacy, by reading text aloud to each other, and by encouraging dramatic reading. given the legacy that mchenry traces, surely we can imagine families in which each member read or memorized a part in the one act play. does the ritual of reading these valued periodicals now prompted in formal performances and dramatic readings about lynching. so while trees, telephone poles and bridges became stages upon which lynchings occurred, african-americans claimed equal latitude in redefining spaces, including their own living rooms to accomplish theatrical work. in light of these internet venues, the content of these plays becomes even more suggestive. though the one acts rejects many of the literate choices, they follow her lead in reducing to portray the crime perpetrated on trees. by focusing on stable nurturing successful black homes, the place insists that the home can be mutilated just as a body can be. when an honorable father, son or brother is taken, the household is castrated and its head removed. rooted in the black domestic sphere, these scripts offer a perspective that mainstream lynching photography does not. as they feature characters who testify to the victims honorable life, the place of memorialize the committees did and is your real life survives that they're not alone in their grief. the dramas communicate that both in the world of the play and in the flesh and blood of black community, the mob claims have not been accepted. while conveying this larger message, three import a letter rate trends emerge. physical violence is issued because action is set in the blackcomb, definitions of manhood are conspicuously interrogated, and the families generation is removed or neutralized through a process that i call degeneration. in inches the time ago to talk about number three. as much as lynching place a spotlight of the homes, they argue for the importance of black manhood within the. the playwrights seem to suggest in fact that domestic success requires male presence by routinely portraying families that deteriorate after losing man. though black women are sometimes missing, it's the man's essence that destroys these homes. through this trend, and let's be clear, this is a literary trend to i'm not saying that men are the be all end all of domestic success, and i'm not even saying that i think a playwright is a success and we can talk about that during q&a but it's a literary trend so it's giving us information we should pay attention to. so through this man who dissented literary, the playwrights exposed degeneration, meaning generation removal and prevention. with its particular vengeance towards men, the mob altered the structure of the black family, eliminating the generation that would otherwise guarantee immunity survival. the plays and usually feature a grandmother and grandchildren, but no mother or father pairing in the middle. the mob publishes degeneration in one of two ways, either the mother and father are missing altogether, or lynching keeps the husband wife unit from functioning. in "mine eyes have seen" aftermath, a sunday morning in the south and for unborn children. that's four of the seven earliest place. there is no middle generation at all. however, grandmothers replace mothers so that the household and function. but those grandmothers are always widows themselves. so there's no substitute for that missing father. even when the generation is not represented, the fathers essence feels more detrimental because there's no substitute. there a place in which the middle generation is depicted at the mother is often it's only representative. rachel and blue blog, black women survive but only in marriages have been destroyed. after she finally shares the truth about her husband's murder, her daughter rachel rejects her loving suitors proposal because she refuses to have children while the nation allows lynching. with her widowed mother testifying to the mob's power, she would rather remain childless then produced pray for barbaric whites. in blueblood, the wedding ceremony is only moments away in the future seems full of promise but as their mothers work in the kitchen, mrs. bush reveals the name of her father, and women realize that years earlier they were raped by the same white man. having exchanged stories, the mothers must call off the wedding because they are actually brother and sister. but most interestingly we see the generation that worked even when the husband and wife live, the only one of the foundational scripts to fix such a family. john analyze have a loving marriage, but when h

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