Lynching In America

In “Lynching in America,” a recently released study making extensive use of local newspaper records, historical archives, as well as interviews with witnesses and victims’ descendents, the Equal Justice Commission has concluded that there were over 800 lynching victims, of the over 4,000 known, that had been previously unaccounted for, whether because of the covering up of the crime, a lack of documentation caused by municipal support of the murders, or by the more insidious systematic erasure of memory of the incident—at least among whites, at least in public conversation. In the English photographer Oliver Clasper’s project documenting various locations throughout the South that were lynching sites but now stand unmarked, with their history forgotten. These photos—eerie in their daytime mundaneness—highlight the degree to which lynching has passed the way of slavery and indigenous genocide into the nation’s “epistomology of ignorance,” its open secrets.  Though many survivors of these murdered men, women, and children are alive today—Emmett Till’s mother was alive until 2003—their grief goes largely untalked about, in many ways sacrificed at the altar of American comfort with our own history. And it is telling that these are the stories that have been erased, because as everything we’ve seen with African American activism, so much of what is emphasized and what is excluded in the construction of a narrative is a question of control, with the most powerful shaping the narrative to their benefit. I was struck by the profound injustice of the fact that mothers of murdered little boys have to see their child's life erased again every day, with each day that passes in which the nation forgets them again, simply becuase murdering little boys isn't part of how the nation wants to think of itself. It never was, in fact--while lynchings were still occuring they were excluded from the larger American narrative as unfortunate but unrepresentative isolated  incidents, and we do the victims and their families the same injustice and indiginty today when we refuse to fully acknowledge, atone for, and mourn them. The same when we refuse to learn from their deaths, which we now claim to abhor--when we hear of the extrajudicial killing of 14 year old boys today and think "they must have done something to deserve it."