Pale Vision of a Red Record?: Violence and Anti-Violence in the Classroom

• In Event: A Pale Vision of a Violent Past? Teaching about American Lynching with Technology in the Undergraduate Classroom

Abstract

This paper addresses technologies of representation in the context of teaching the history of lynching in the undergraduate classroom. We know that lynch mobs of the late 19th Century depended on new technologies to spread the terror of their actions. Wood noted that among the many sounds common at lynchings--in addition to the victims’ cries of pain or the surging of the crowd--was the clicking of newly popular Kodak cameras. These photographs, transformed into postcards, spread the violence of the lynching beyond the borders of the event itself. The growing newspaper industry circulated these images, too, making lynchings media events, “putting death into discourse, circulating images of dead black bodies, exploiting the tremendous entertainment potential that these lethal dramas possessed.”

Today, with social media awash in videos of Black men being killed by police officers, Americans are experiencing another long moment of exposure to racially-motivated violence, to the image of the Black body in pain, to the image of the Black body in death. How, in this context, can instructors teach about violence, networks of violence, and the impact of trauma without distorting or minimizing its significance, without losing sight of the humanity of the victims (and even of the mob members, whose names we now have the power to restore to the historic record) as complete people with jobs, families, and stories? I ask these questions with reference to the digital project, The Red Record. The Red Record is both an open-ended digital publication and a teaching tool, a project that engages undergraduate students in original primary source research to situate and contextualize historic lynchings in time and space. It activates a pedagogy of resistance that through reinscribing lynching events on our landscape, rethinking the roles of their participants, and empowering students to dig through historic material, engages students in the act of critically reimagining their real and social landscapes.

This project, both in the digital space and in the classroom, echoes historian Ashraf H.A. Rushdy’s critique of the end-of-lynching narrative. As Rushdy explains it, anti-lynching activists in the middle of the 20th Century engaged in furious debates over the definition of lynching, so as to count what they viewed as a dwindling phenomenon. By delimiting lynching into a countable phenomenon, these activists created a narrative of diminishment without recognizing the complementary forms of violence that coexisted with and continued beyond spectacle lynchings. Our project suggests that when we embed historic lynchings in contemporary landscapes, we dissent from the modern view that lynchings are confined to history and assert their connection with our present. The project also draws students into a community of anti-complicity, to pick up on another one of Rushdy’s formulations. By taking some small action on addressing racial violence, these students reject the complicity which witnessing such violence confers on us all.

Author

• Seth M. Kotch, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill