So that website address is a place that you can download everything she described and finally, the book obviously. Thats what ive given you is everywhere not everywhere but most places you can find the scripts themselves that my book is based on if you were interested enough this is where you can find it so this is literally resource, dont be distracted during the lecture. So that is bad. And finallthat. And finally i aly that im very grateful that you bothered to show up. Im very proud of this work and i love to be able to share it to the fact you are here allows me to share it so i have a gift for everyone before we leave. If i somehow seem to be forgetting that during the qanda reminded me very i have a small gift for the fact that you bothered to show up. So thank you very much. Southern trees bear a strange fruit blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the trees. I trust that you recognize these lyrics that describe the bodies of lynch victims. Billie holliday made these famous with her recording of lewis allens ballot and since then different versions have come from the british band ub40 two domain formerly of tony tony tony. As a result, generations of americans have come to regard this as the best representation of the mob destruction. Beasley or x. Therefore help to explain why gruesome images of lynch victims have become so influential. In late 1999 coming nearly 100 photographs of mob victims reinterred circulation over Museum Exhibition and a book of photography called without sanctuary. If these lyrics made us imagine, the photographs challenged us to face it and many of us have risen to the challenge because we were already convinced that the corpse post illustrates the lynching horror. The africanamerican bodies depicted are often delivered in burned or both. The images have enough interest to taste defeat could take the pricing book into the ten additions since 2,002 sustained academic conferences and journal issues on racial violence, Museum Exhibitions around the country in a virtual exhibition on the world wide web. Perhaps most remarkably the pictures led senate to issue a formal apology for having never passed the legislation. So, for the sense of what prompted those reactions, in 1908 this is a picture postcard. I share this with you because the victim is hanging from a light post which is a long railroad track. But then remembered that the countries march into modernity wasnt somehow antithetical to the barbaric practice of lynching. Enjoy the technological advances but no whos supposed to enjoy the technological advances so as you enjoy the mobility through the railroad, this is one of the messages that you will receive. Receive. Very clearly being told that they should be happy, that things are under control and blacks being told they are not free in the same way to enjoy the increased mobility. I share this with you because like all american crimes was never just a fillin phenomenon. So this is indiana in 1930. This image is famous for lots of Different Reasons. One is because we can see everyone in the crowd so clearly. We can see that there are women and men, we can see this guy pointing and smiling for example. The fact we can see everyone so clearly is part of the reason this has become a famous photograph. Its also the photograph that lewis allen also known as abel meyer pulled so and that inspired him to write those lyrics so that is another reason is famous but its also famous because there would have been a third victim here, James Cameron. Basically they were in jail and a drug them out to lynch them and before they drug him out, they convinced him not to lynch him as well. James cameron later founded the Holocaust Museum in the walkie wisconsin. So there would have been a third victim. When i talk about living with lynching im talking about the fact that we are still lynching in many ways but i want to talk about what does it mean to be someone like James Cameron who basically managed to escape this but then also have to live with the fact he would have been the third person and continue to live with the photograph itself circulating. So those are some of the things that we want to deal with. Finally, with this one i wanted to be very clear about the deliberate composition of the photographs that we are not just talking about a straightforward record but because of th that id composition to the photograph. Part of that i would suggest to you is that shape around the midsection. Historians have a little bit of delay to about this bu about thm convinced by those that suggest whenever you see that and suggest this victim was castrated. When i talk about deliberate composition that is part of what i mean. This might be a barbaric practice that anything can be done decently and in order. And so this is how we proved that we have done it the scent and in order. We take the time to cover that up. I share this with you because it became famous in 1935 partly because the naacp used it to convince people to be part of their antilynching efforts. They put a caption with this basically says dont look at the victim. His trouble is over. Lets focus on the damage thats being done to these children. Because again we can see very clearly we almost have a Nuclear Family out there it seems to me. The patriarchal father, the mother is in the background and all these children. And so the naacp is worried about the damage we are doing to them as a nation. And i find that interesting as a rhetorical strategy because it suggests im not going to assume that black paint will motivate you to join this antilynching movement but maybe if i can convince you of my pain. 1920 in minnesota. Again, we have three victims, two of them hanging and then one here on the ground. Part of what is striking here again when we think that the composition of the images it seems to me is the eagerness with which people try to make sure they are in the frame of the photograph. It also feels to me like there is a certain priority given to the younger teens, younger men that they can be a little closer and the older people are toward the back. So that eagerness with which we make sure we are in the frame of the photograph seems to be something we need to take seriously. When we understand the composition of these images. So i couldnt resist seeing the similarity. And this is something we can talk about during the qanda. Im still thinking through the composition but the argument of course is that these dummies are always a dark brown and so this isnt about black people. This is just teems. Kind of thing. Im interested in again that eagerness with which they are getting in the frame command can be interesting having the headsup and that kind of thing. So we can talk about this. But i was struck by the echo and i think that we are living with lynching. I wanted to be sure to show you one of the front and back and so this says this is the bbq we had last night. My picture is to the left, your son joe. So it seems to me this is the faded cross now. But this victim is burned beyond recognition. And if we have the pristine white sheet. Almost finished. So, again, im thinking about the delivered at composition here. You have to be in a particular place to take this photograph. You have to get a certain Vantage Point so that we could capture the dozens of people that made sure they were present for the lynching of these figures. It seems like they might be in a boat. There is a deliberate composition but lets take a closeup of nelson. So the situation here is that her son was accused of stealing livestock when they came to get him at the house she tried to stop them so they decided they would lynch her as well. But crystal come of the historian who has done the most work in terms of tracing was and the relationship of both black and white women, she seems to have found that she was raped before she was lynched. So i would suggest to you that her work is practical garment there is a modesty to the dress because this is how she dresses. I would suggest that once it becomes a part of the deliberate composition of the lynching photographs, it serves a very similar purpose to that. Undeniably powerful images. But lets consider how they fall short. The fact that without sanctuary could inspire the sentence of the apology and exemplifies americans problematic tendencies to allow the photograph to a close other representations of the history. Decades of antilynching activism and testimony from the victimized black communities did not move the nations leaders that the last turnofthecentury and more recently, they were not the inspiration for the historic gesture or even for the majority of the lynching scholarship. Instead, the photographs have become the evidence that just cant be ignored. Grandly this is out o out of leg the murderers condemn themselves. As the art historian argues, the lost of the historical understanding incurred by refusing to see these pictures would only serve to whitewash the kind of white supremacy. Obviously, i take her point. Otherwise i wouldnt have just shown you a few of those pictures. However, i am equally convinced that when we treat images of mutilated bodies as the ultimate evidence of lynching destruction, we reaffirm the authority of the mob. After all, its because they come from white perpetrators themselves that we continue to allow the images to trump the testimony from the victimized communities. And at the way we treat the pictures, we forget that photography was a key component of the ritual which helped them accomplish the goal both during and long after the victims murder. The photographs dating simply document violence. They very much performed it. Make no mistake without sanctuary collection exists because the mob inc. Photography into their violent rituals especially between 1890 to 1930 they were frequently Theatrical Productions to the newspapers announced the time and locations of the crowds could gather. Spectators knew they would see familiar characters from the socalled rapists and avengers and that the characters would perform a predictable script of forced confession and mutilati mutilation. The hunting would complete the drama with audience participation but because the most coveted keepsake of the victims bones and burnt flesh were in limited supply pictures became souvenirs. These pictures now survive to verify the theatrical qualities and the variety of stages that they claimed. For they dangled a month just from trees but also posts, telephone poles and bridges. When we elevate the photograph of other artifacts of the same time period, our focus on strange fruit amounts to an acceptance of a very specific representation of the violence. After all the gruesome images were created and preserved because they fell in line with the discourse that supported racial violence. It is surrounded by a mob of righteous whites with no grieving loved ones inside. The mainstream lynching photography depicted the victims with no connection to family or community or to institutions like marriage. To the similar effect, the images today and encourage an acknowledgment of the bodies and even bodily pain that the interest in them has not naturally led to an appreciation of the communities more enduring losses including psychological, emotional and financial suffering. Too often historians have interpreted the photograph according to the perspective that produced them. Sure the scholars were to expose the orientation, but we have been slow to undermine it by placing the perspective of the victimized communities on par with the photograph. Today i do just that. African americans that lived at the height of the violence and its photographic representation left artifacts including the the plays that offer insight into the causes and consequences of the violence that are not available through those photographs. It emerged in the 19 teams and they are increasingly recognized as a unique genre angst of the pioneer work of the scholars. In 1998 asi bush in their anthology of the representative works that the lynching drama is a play in which the threat or the occurrence past or present has a major impact on the dramatic action. American writers have always addressed racial violence but the mode developed when the playwrights moved beyond the brief references and focused on a specific lynching incident. So by definition, it engages mob violence but unlike the mainstream photographers, African Americans who lived and wrote in the midst of the lynching often refused to feature physical violence. Instead of a spot light the home and the impact it has on the families. And hed come it is most commonly with the mainstream discourse denied existed, loving black homes. According to the dominant assumption, the mobs targeted africanamericans because they represented an evil that was based by society. Blackman were supposedly rapists who cared nothing and black women were said to be incapable of creating that domesticity. Meanwhile, they offered the Community Scripts that preserved the truth that they disregarded. Allison Dunbar Nelsons whingeing played and exemplifies the genre focus on the black home. This script appeared in the crisis magazine for the official order of the naacp. And the father of the characters was lynched years earlier. By focusing on his children as survivors, Dunbar Nelsons script offers access to the conversations that africanamericans they have had at the turnofthecentury. The characters contend that black success attracts the mob. In the following excerpt which is how the play begins, they remember the home they had in the south and at the moment of the current Living Conditions in the nort north where they livedn the tenement apartment. Lucy coming down with a dishcloth in her hand wasnt it better in the old days when we were back home in the little house with a garden and you and father coming home and mother getting supper and studying lessons in the dining room at the table we didnt have to eat and live in the kitchen then come into the notice is posted because they have no business having such a decent home come and chris and i reading the wonderful books and laying out our plans to see them go up and everyone petting me because i hurt my foot when i was little and father shuts down like a dog for daring to defend his home calling me little brown the princess and telling dad with an ammonia in this climate that when you name for life in a factory broken. Lucy coming out of the trend throws aside to dishcloth and running out she lays her cheek against his and strokes his hair. Poor danny for disney im selfish. Not selfish, merely natural. Dunbar nelson has the characters highlight the fact that they made a display of their inpatients and prosperity. He recalls that there were notices posted on the fence before the house was set on fire. The father went outdoors where he was shot down like a dog. Chris, the other brother later wonders and for what, because we were living like christians . Dunbar nelsons character suggests that when blacks affirm themselves obtaining higher success by mining their own business, whites respond. The vengeance with which some perform their supposedly superior status is quite revealing of the cultural theorists have contended that the hegemony is never complete and it must continually reassert itself. Thus if the White Supremacists unite the black humanity and the ties and achievement, africanamericans must have been convincingly establishing it. Dunbar nelson suggests exactly that and she does so in the text that is a way of establishing the achievement that some thought to the race. Her play reminds them that they are not hunted because they are a racist criminal. Indeed the text and the periodical that it appears certified the existing kind of people that belong to these communities, editors and readers to name a few. In other words Dunbar Nelson produces the kind of cultural selfaffirmation that may very well back in the mob. The drama certainly acknowledges that racial violence is a threat, but it insists that the threat is to the successes that the race has already established and actively continues to augment. If bob violence was a response to the already existing black achievement and beauty, lucy remembers th the garden they usd to have fo have for instant, thr nelsons text is another example of those accomplishments and aesthetic contributions. So, quite deliberately vague chose to preserve very different sorts of evidence. The photographs emphasized the body while lynching spotlighted the household from which it was taken. In my eyes to his destroyed home is a member does the place where butter madbrother made dinner, s and lucy studied and where had and dan returned after a hard days of work. The survivors now inhabit a home that is one that theyve established despite devastating circumstances and i that is whee they encourage and comfort each other. Lucy prepares dinner and offers her brother affection laying her cheek against his hand stroking his hair. Not something you see on the mainstream stage then or now. Given these points of emphasis it also sheds light on the photographs. If we take the place help us to read those images critically. In order for the logic to work, it needed to be interpreted in ways that denoted anything that humanity and citizenship. This is why lynching photographs portray isolation surrounded by the righteous mob no grieving loved ones inside. But it certified that the victims were not isolated groups. They did care about the domesticity and their loved ones are grieving. In short, it suggests that the mob violence can only be justified by the erasure of exactly what they put forward, the black family seemed. All the plays that i examined were set in the black home and this is no coincidence. While mainstream discourse has been practiced and constantly asserted African Americans had no interest in or capacity for the stable domesticity, they preserved evidence of familial ties. The lynching, survived in the archive to point towards a repertoire of embodied practices through which africanamericans affirmed themselves. Against the worst odds they successfully build homes come it reestablished when necessary. They sustained each other with food and affection. They mourned each others death. This could not go without saying. After all the powerful message was that the victim deserved to die and shouldnt be warned. To highlight the grief was therefore to make a bold statement. Unfortunately the scholars can easily overlook the statement because we typically approach the mass protests most critics focus on identifying whether an artist altered perceptions if not their actions. Especially when lynching is referenced, some scholars and implicitly ask what good was it if it didnt convince them to stop the violence but t