James P. Brochin
This Unit seeks to involve students in student-to-student discourse about lynching in America: causes; descriptions of the phenomenon in the South, the West, and other locales; the historical trajectory for its eventual end, and lessons to be learned.
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Teachers should be mindful of the possible traumatic impact on students that teaching about such raw violence poses. Here is a brief excerpt of a reflection about this issue by a teacher of freshmen in New York:
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"Looking back on my first year of full-time teaching, I can still say with certainty that the lynching unit facilitated some of the most valuable discussions that I have had to date with students both inside and outside the classroom. Nevertheless, after discussing the risks and benefits of teaching such traumatic material with colleagues from universities in the United States and Canada and with students, I have become more circumspect about incorporating a unit about lynching into a freshman-level, general education course. Before I would teach such a unit again, I would assess the class more carefully than I did the first time around. In retrospect, there were important questions concerning teaching potentially traumatic material that I ought to have considered in advance: is it pedagogically appropriate to expose students to graphic images and texts? How do we recognize and accommodate the different ways that students will identify with the history they are studying? To what extent are we obligated to give students the freedom to opt out of a pedagogical encounter that will expose them to visual or written representations of violence?" (Tucker, Linda. "Not Without Sanctuary. Teaching About Lynching." Transformations. Vol. XI, No. 2.)
After reading about individual reactions to the harrowing stories told so harrowingly in Without Sanctuary, I quote their rough range as follows, and have proposed a unit plan which confronts the reality and detail of lynching with no explicit provision for students opting out or other modification for the possible sensitivities of an individual or group of students. I am aware that there are some uniquely disturbing aspects of lynching's long and awful history that distinguish it from other largely racially motivated violence, even the Holocaust. In many if not most lynchings, there was some veneer of legitimacy, in the form of vigilance committees that held trials and meted out punishment. Hundreds who seemed to view it as on the spectrum of normal often viewed the events. I know of no similar participation of German or occupied citizenry in large numbers to capture, try and execute individual Jews. The willing participants in the spectacle largely produced the postcards and photographs. Sometimes, body parts of the dead victim were sold as trophies. These factors could be uniquely upsetting to some students, particularly African American students. I recommend that the classroom teacher treat the unit in a similar way that one would treat a unit on the Holocaust. Know your students. Anticipate how and when the material might be overwhelming or cause disengagement. And remember that edifying lessons can be extracted from the experience. (We must be vigilant to guard against a repetition of such disregard for the rule of law. Some newspaper editors, even in the Deep South, protested)
The following posts are in response to James Allen's role as co-author of the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, narrator of the film with the same name, and a web site devoted to the message and content of the book:
"Thanks so much for this website. Modern day students, in general, do not understand the gravity of the race situation back at the beginning of the 20th c., so when I teach Langston Hughes's "Let America Be America Again," many of his points are lost. Lynching, subjected mostly on African-Americans, demonstrates the depth of the horrors blacks in the U.S. struggled against. As Charles W. Chesnutt notes in his The Marrow of Tradition (1901), the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments hardly meant the end of racial barbarism and the beginning of joy between the races, and this website shows the truth behind African-American furor then and continued calls for justice now. Thank you, James Allen, for your courage in posting these photos, and for your eloquence in speaking of them. (The book is incredible, too!)"
"I appreciate you making a web page of this, because I heard about it in class and seen some pictures, but to watch them on this web page brought tears to my eyes. My ancestors had a harsh life to live through. They lost their lives to stupidity and cruelness. Well I'm going to stop typing because this is really making me upset."
"I watched your movie. [James Allen, co-author of Without Sanctuary has produced a film, viewable on the Internet, combining the book's photographs with his narration.] I looked at many photographs. It all evokes deep feelings that remind me of the way I felt on 9-11. Human beings are capable of atrocities that seem impossible to me. I am glad that you have put this collection together, because I think it is important to look and see and know just how atrocious. I feel a personal commitment to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again, and yet, I think that there is little difference between these lynchings and war… Your collection is a reminder."
"I'm going to teach this to my sophomores, because it wasn't taught to me. I found out about the history of lynching when I was just out of college. And I still-still-don't understand why the true story of American history is not part of our curriculum. As part of a Social Justice Unit on Poetry, we will spend time looking at this collection of atrocities. If not now...when?"
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"My US History class teacher showed this presentation [the film by Allen], and after it was over, there was a silence in the classroom that was deathly. As an African-American, I've always been into the history of my ancestors. I knew about lynchings, but a picture is worth a thousand words. A thousand words that left me stunned, in disbelief. These pictures made me feel angry, sad, and scared. They made me ask, why? They made me feel sick. This is one of the most touching experiences that I've ever had in my life, and it was in the form of a presentation. Something about the way the man [Allen] talks, something very haunting about it all. And the thing I found most disturbing, was not the pictures of the hanging corpses, but the smiling faces in the background. Farmers, and mothers, store owners, children smiling up at the dead and abused body of a human being. Christians, people who went to church everyday, and lived by the word of God. But, in a sense, maybe it's not so surprising that they believed in God. More people die in the name of religion than in the name of evil. This presentation showed me the importance to end ignorance. The world, whether India, Iraq, Rwanda, Spain, Brazil, America,... We are all one people. One species. We are all human beings and it only hurts us in the end when we allow our hearts to turn to stone. Yes, we all have our own cultures, our own beliefs, and faiths. But am I really that much different from you just because the tone of my skin may be darker, or your hair thin or thicker? We all have the same mind, the same hearts, the same red blood flows through our body. We all can either love, or hate, and this is one of the many messages that the hate needs to end, before it ends all of us."
The above quotes make a good argument for why the unit should be taught. But what about how it should be taught? First, it should be taught in the context of Reconstruction's eventual failure, and the West's development and conflict between whites and Mexicans. Second, it should be taught in a way that students face the horrors head on, without softening around the edges, but in a way that the students see themselves as experts, scholars, historians, and perhaps as outraged bystanders, and not only as shocked students. Should a teacher be Caucasian, or in my case, a mix of Caucasian and Mexican by nationality and Jewish by religion, the teacher might admit his/her distance from the events in the unit, or, for example, address a similar experience such as anti-Semitism and relatives' murders during the Holocaust, and should stress the importance of expressing empathy and outrage as an underlying theme of the unit. All students should be able to express empathy and outrage, whatever their racial, ethnic, or language background. If the teacher is African American, the teacher might describe his experiences with prejudice or other experiences that connect him/her to the material in a personal way.
New Haven School District's history curriculum, post civil war, is a mile wide and an inch deep. It begins by asking the worthy question: Did Reconstruction succeed in putting the country back together and in defining and protecting the rights of African Americans? Many subjects are covered in few pages in the textbook offered to "College" level students, including the Reconstruction Amendments, Black Codes, the KKK, the Freedmen's Bureau, election of black Congressmen and Senator Hiram revels, poll taxes, Jim Crow laws and segregation. There is no real effort to introduce, explain, interpret, or to deeply describe lynching: the motives for, the numbers of victims by region and state, the psychology of participants and bystanders, and the efforts to criminalize the act federally and in individual states. The curriculum and text entirely leaves out the "other" lynching events, particularly on the frontier, and in the West: there were white victims, Asian victims, and Hispanic victims. There is little doubt that the clear majority of victims were African Americans: "There are "2805 [documented] victims of lynch mobs killed between 1882 and 1930 in ten southern states. Although mobs murdered almost 300 white men and women, the vast majority, almost 2,500 of lynch victims were African-American. Of these black victims, 94 percent died in the hands of white lynch mobs. The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob" (Tolnay, Stuart and E.M Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lychings 1882-1930, Urbana and Chicago, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1992.)
My students generally understand the fact that lynching existed, that it was usually done to African Americans, that it may have had to do with the KKK and scaring African Americans from voting. They fail to understand the deeper cultural divide between primarily southern whites and African Americans, the often sexual nature of the accusations against the victims, and the extent of acceptance of the act, shown in many famous images of smiling or indifferent bystanders.
The District curriculum completely leaves out any discussion of extrajudicial hangings and other lynchings in the West or other places outside the South. "The lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent has been largely overlooked by historians of American mob violence. This essay offers the first attempt to construct a systematic set of data on the subject. The authors contend that between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched at least 597 Mexicans. Traditional interpretations of western violence cannot account for this phenomenon. The actual causes of mob violence against Mexicans were several-fold: race and the legacy of Anglo American expansion, economic competition, and diplomatic tensions between Mexico and the United States. Throughout this era, Mexicans formulated numerous means of resistance against Anglo mobs. These included armed self-defense, public protest, the establishment of mutual defense organizations, and appeals for aid to the Mexican government." (Corrigan, William and Clive Webb. "The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928." Journal of Social History. Volume 37, No. 2, Winter, 2003)
Ken Gonzalez-Day's book, Lynching in the West (1850-1935), estimates that a much lower total of Mexicans were lynched (132) than do Carrigan and Webb. (597). The value of Gonzalez-Day's book is based on a number of unique elements: Gonzales-Day begins by photographing lynching sites in order to show empty spaces which are symbols of the forgotten history of lynching in the West. He tries to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the lynchings that had occurred in the spaces he was photographing. The result is an original and moving record of a lost time. Gonzales-Day explores the development of lynching photography. The author tries to explain why the history of lynching in the West has been obscured until now, popular misconceptions of frontier justice as race-neutral and the role of the anti-lynching movement in shaping the historical record. Most usefully, the book breaks down each and every extrajudicial killing by date, name, town, county, alleged crime, and racial origin. In total, according the book, 352 persons were lynched, a plurality of whom is identified as Mexicans.