Reviews for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

The average rating for Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-30 00:00:00 Georges Icke God forbid, a follower of Jesus might have objected to lynching in the 30's, "A 1935 questionnaire answered by some 5,000 ministers showed that 3.3 percent had preached or worked against lynching in some way." In fact, an evangelical in Georgia stated in the 30's, "If a young man has a good case of religion, he is generally known as a sissy in society." In that upside down Southern Christian world, Jesus, or anyone risking voicing his intact moral conscience (totally risking serious injury), would be a "sissy". "Between 1880 and 1940, white mobs in the South killed at least 3,200 black men." Not all the lynchings happened in the South. Behind most lynchings, one finds the "specter" of "violated white women." Sites of lynching became a technique of reclaiming public spaces as all-white. Not overlooked was the intentional powerlessness and defenselessness of each victim, as well as the perceived "triumph" of the one-sided violence. "The lynching photograph arguably most evokes… the hunting photograph." "One in three lynching victims was emasculated." In 1916, a NAACP investigator found that a white man in Waco, Texas was carrying around a lynched black man's penis as a "souvenir". The top grossing racist movie of all time was "The Birth of a Nation." How racist, do you say? "A Kentucky man left the theater after seeing the picture and proceeded to shoot and kill a fifteen-year-old African American high school student." It served as a great recruiting tool for the Klan, which swelled from one miserable guy wearing a dunce cap to "a national membership of 5 million" in the 20's. Join the KKK and project yourself into the fantasy of white heroism. Some theaters banned blacks from seeing the picture because it "upset" whites if they were allowed in. As a black teenager then in Mississippi remembered, "When they showed that lynching, the whites were cheering, I tell you, we were suffering in the balcony." The beginning of the end was the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington - because 10,000 showed to watch, it had advance notice, newspapers across the country covered it, and all of them "watched as a mob mutilated, strangled, and burned Washington to death on the grounds of City Hall". Lest we think such collective sadism was rare: as a witness to the 1938 lynching of C.C. Williams clearly stated in Louisiana, "Then we rammed a red-hot poker into him." Other countries wrote scathing editorials on U.S. racism and ran them with lynching photos. One said, "This is a picture of what happens in America - and no place else on Earth." Another country's newspaper said of its lynching photo, "Nothing in Russia equals the above". Lynching photos ended up being used by the opposition and soon racists were saddened that they couldn't show their twisted fantasies to as many appalled people as before, but at least if lucky they could pose smiling for the pictures. Oppressive Jim Crow conditions, threat of lynching, "the decline of Southern agriculture, and the lure of northern industrial work" drove the Great Migration. The 2016 book, "The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town" by Anthony Pitch, says that there were 4,680 victims of lynching but Amy's book reviewed here says the figure was "at least 3,200 black men" - so who do we believe? And what is the best estimate?

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-10 00:00:00 Jhon Alx Consensual till caught? I found this book repetitive. I would like to know if the victims had been wrongfully accused and how many victims had engaged in consensual relationships with women.