Waiting To Be Heard: The Emergence of the Voices of Victims of America’s Racial Terror

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

As reaction to the racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, has demonstrated, and the rise in hate speech and hate crime around the nation generally has corroborated, the contemporary resurgence of white supremacy has met with tacit approval from the highest levels of government. Simultaneously, the current administration has been systematically dismantling the social safety net, including environmental and labor protections, and scapegoating immigrants as a threat to the American economy. We have seen such periods before. But the nation has failed in the past to account honestly for the intertwined histories of labor exploitation and maintenance of the regime of white supremacy and racial violence. Because the American people have never collectively faced the extent of this insidious legacy we lack the language and understanding needed to counter the periodic resurgence of racial demagoguery.

In April 2018 the Equal Justice Initiative is to open a museum and memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, that will present and document the country’s violent history of lynching and enslavement. It is the first such memorial in the nation. Among other things, it will highlight the role of labor exploitation as one of the pillars for sustaining racial violence.

The papers in this session seek to make audible previously dormant voices of victims from the underbelly of America’s violent racial history, articulations at the intersection of labor and race that have been marginally explored, and largely suppressed. Yevette Richards offers new insights into the infamous 1938 lynching of 19-year old W.C. Williams through the use of oral histories of her cousins who were related to the victim and analysis of census records. Jesse Carr examines the high levels of police involvement in Jim Crow era lynching, linking pro-lynching discourses that justified police collusion during Jim Crow to public discourse on police shootings and brutality today. Laura Wexler explores how Kate Chopin’s proximity to Reconstruction violence in Northwest Louisiana, particularly the Colfax and Coushatta Massacres, influenced the cycle of short stories she wrote about women, race and labor and her own sense of oppression in the violence by which she knew that white men ruled. LaTanya Autry highlights the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and others, to supply not only a living history of the consequences of racial violence but also a path, by means of that articulation, to a better future.

Concentrating on extralegal racial violence, which often involved the collaboration of law enforcement and the oppression of African Americans as workers, these papers highlight our present obligation to reckon with the past and present in a way that could influence communities silenced by violence to seek reparations and restorative justice.

In accordance with the conference theme of “States of Emergence,” we think of our common topic as a sound waiting to be heard.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Lisa Arellano, Colby College

Individual Presentations

• New Revelations from Louisiana’s Last Mob Lynching in Daylight - Yevette Richards, George Mason University

• The Emergency of Now: Re-Purposing the Exception to Resist State Violence - Jesse S. Carr, Beloit College

• Silencing Which Past?: Kate Chopin and the Buried Story - Laura Wexler, Yale University

• Looking for Lynching - LaTanya S. Autry, University of Delaware

Comment

• Lisa Arellano, Colby College