Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 PDF
Preview Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930
LIVING WITH African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 Koritha Mitchell LYNCHING Living with Lynching The New Black Studies Series Edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Dwight A. McBride A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. Living with Lynching African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 koritha mitchell university of illinois press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfeld © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America c 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mitchell, Koritha. Living with lynching : African American lynching plays, performance, and citizenship, 1890–1930 / Koritha Mitchell. p. cm. — (The new black studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-252-03649-1 (cloth) 1. American drama—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. American drama—20th century—History and criticism. 3. American drama—19th century—History and criticism. 4. One-act plays, American—History and criticism. 5. Lynching in literature. 6. African Americans in literature. 7. Violence in literature. 8. Citizenship in literature. I. Title. PS338.N4M455 2011 812'.509896073—dc22 2011014508 This book is dedicated to my mother, Laverne Mitchell, my aunt, Frances Oliver, and all the other forebears who made this possible. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Whose Evidence? Which Account? 1 Part I: Making Lynching Drama and Its Contributions Legible 1. Scenes and Scenarios: Reading Aright 23 2. Redefning “Black Theater” 43 Part II: Developing a Genre, Asserting Black Citizenship 3. The Black Soldier: Elevating Community Conversation 81 4. The Black Lawyer: Preserving Testimony 115 5. The Black Mother/Wife: Negotiating Trauma 147 6. The Pimp and Coward: Offering Gendered Revisions 175 Conclusion: Documenting Black Performance: Key Considerations 193 Notes 201 Works Cited 231 Index 243 Acknowledgments This project has been with me most of my adult life, so it has required endurance, but I have consistently benefted from the support of institutions that saw the work’s potential. As a graduate student, I received encourage- ment in the form of a fellowship from the David Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora. Its director at that time, Eileen Julien, will never know how powerful her vote of confdence was. The Ford Founda- tion supported the work with a dissertation completion fellowship and a postdoctoral fellowship a few years later. Most recently, postdoctoral fund- ing from the American Association of University Women allowed me to take my work to the next level. Without question, any quality that readers glean here is largely the result of the support I received from the Driskell Center, the Ford Foundation, and the AAUW. The project also benefted from archival research at the Schomburg Center in New York City, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, D.C., and Emory University’s Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, which funded my visit there. Crisis Publishing Company, the offcial publisher of the NAACP, added value to the project by granting permission to reproduce images that originally appeared in Crisis magazine in May 1923 and July 1926. Finally, signifcant fnancial support came from the College of Arts and Humanities at Ohio State University. As much as this project has benefted from institutional votes of conf- dence, it has required personal support, which I have received from more people than I can name. This journey began when I was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of Maryland, which prepared me for the profession in every conceivable way. Carla Peterson gave me an exceptional master’s thesis experience. At the dissertation stage, I benefted from the support of Maryland faculty members Vincent Carretta, Shirley
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