Learning about Lynching: Technologies of Transmission and Experiential Learning

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

Abstract

In the wake of the Civil War, nineteenth century North Carolina experienced a boom in its newspaper industry. The growth of small cities and towns was accompanied by newspapers, many devoted to a particular party or issue (as with The Charlotte Democrat or Clinton, North Carolina’s Caucasian.) Not coincidentally, it was these newspapers that provided detailed descriptions of the lynchings that were then plaguing the state and region. In this paper, I ponder the meaning of this temporal overlap, and suggest that it was the very rise of these technologies of transmission that helped expose people throughout the state to the mechanisms and vocabularies of lynching. In short, I suggest that newspaper accounts helped people learn how to lynch. I contrast these ghastly pedagogies with reflections on the process of helping guide undergraduate students through the process of learning about lynching, suggesting that we might try and embed historical subjectivities in the teaching of historical research to better enable students to understand the structural and individual legacies of lynching and racial violence.
This paper stems from the process of implementing, with Seth Kotch, The Red Record, a geographic data visualization of every historical lynching in North Carolina. A large part of that project was teaching students how to conduct historical research in newspapers, and to conceive of it as data. I suggest that that conceptualization, common to much of the theoretical and methodological structures of digital humanities, deadened students to historical and contemporary impacts of lynching. Accordingly, I will map out an approach here that thinks through the ways in which our students might come to better understand histories of lynching by being asked to write about the persons involved. This forces a reconsideration of our aims in teaching about and researching history, and a reevaluation of the means by which we find empathy and experience in the archives. As part of my reflections on both the possibilities and limitations of this work, I will explore the tensions between understanding and sympathy, suggesting that historical research and writing can help students resist the temptation to universalize African Americans as simply victims, while recognizing the dangers inherent in inviting engagement with individual, historical instantiations of white supremacy.
I conclude this paper by reflecting on the value of historic newspapers and other sources in helping students to both understand historical knowledge, and how knowledge was circulated in the past. This reflexive process, I argue, is one that might help students better understand the construction of historical knowledge, and see themselves as more than passive consumers of contemporary media accounts which continue to sensationalize, if not glorify, Black deaths.

Author

• Elijah Gaddis, Auburn University