By Jo Mikula, Opinion Editor
“The Legacy of Lynching” exhibition on view now at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery (CFG), is perhaps one of the most ambitious exhibitions in the gallery’s history. The exhibition opens with a quote from writer James Baldwin: “not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” This quote frames the mission of the exhibition, which is to confront the history of racially motivated lynching in America, and to face the ways that lynching still reverberates in the lives of black Americans today.
The exhibition was born out of decades of groundbreaking research conducted by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit organization that advocates for racial equality. EJI documented over 4,075 racial terror lynchings that occurred in the South between Reconstruction and World War II, which is 800 more than previous reports on lynching had identified. A recent report by EJI, “Lynching in America,” draws a direct connection between historical lynchings and the modern racial climate in America.
The report found that lynching has “profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the contemporary geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans.” It focused in particular on the racial biases in the incarceration system, exemplified by phenomena like mass incarceration, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police brutality.
When EJI published its findings in 2015, the Brooklyn Museum in New York proposed an exhibition that would put the research in dialogue with contemporary art by black artists. “Legacy of Lynching” is the product of this unique collaboration. Google also partnered with the two organizations, supplying important infrastructure and technological components.
Haverford became involved with the project when close friends of Haverford English professor Lindsay Reckson who worked on the EJI research showed her a preliminary video. “I knew immediately that I wanted to bring that work and the conversation around it to Haverford,” said Reckson in an email. Upon finding out that EJI and the Brooklyn Museum were collaborating on an exhibition, Reckson was inspired to use their exhibition as a model for the one at Haverford.
Over the past year, Reckson and a number of staff at the Hurford Center have collaborated with EJI, the Brooklyn Museum, and curator Kalia Brooks Nelson to create a version of the show for Haverford. Despite differences in the exact works of each show, both share the same core goal of confronting the truth of racism in our past and our present. Different permutations of “The Legacy of Lynching” will continue on to other locations, but the CFG is the first gallery to host it after it was first shown last fall at the Brooklyn Museum.
The artists featured in the exhibition approach the topic of lynching from a number of different angles. Works include photographs, sculptures, a New York Times front page that has been retouched, oral histories collected by EJI, and an interactive touch-screen map that gives more information about instances of lynching. “The multimedia nature of the show is testimony to the fact that this story must be told in many different ways and in different forms,” said Reckson. “So alongside EJI’s oral histories, which are absolutely crucial forms of memory-building, we have a piece like Sonya Clark’s ’Unraveling’ [an unweaving of the Confederate Flag] which demonstrates what kind of structures must be dismantled for those voices to be heard. Both kinds of work, historical recovery and present-day dismantling, are absolutely necessary.”
Hurford Center Post Bac Fellow Courtney Carter ’17 also highlighted the dual process of building and deconstructing that runs through the exhibition. “In the Hank Williams piece, there’s this really intimate process of taking prison uniforms apart and patching them back together,” said Carter. As for Clarke’s piece, Carter spoke about examining “what you’re left with when you take apart these objects.”
“This exhibition is really powerful for me in terms of the bringing together of all the materials” added Carter. Reckson expanded that “each piece is powerful in its own right, and they are powerfully in dialogue.”
Notably, none of the works in the exhibition show a body that has been lynched. For decades, white supremacists circulated images of black lynched bodies to spread the message of white superiority and to further intimidate black communities. EJI, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Hurford Center staff all made the conscious and intentional decision to not reproduce these images. Carter explained that the exhibition is “not trying to replicate the spectacle of the black body.”
A crucial element of “The Legacy of Lynching” is the dialogue not only between objects, but the dialogue they generate in relation to race in America. The Hurford Center will host a day-long symposium on November 16 where panels of artists, scholars, activists, and curators will discuss the exhibition and lynching in both a historical and modern context. Brooks Nelson, along with some of the artists featured in the show and one of the men featured in EJI’s oral history videos, will be among the panelists.
Haverford’s Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities is also mounting a satellite exhibition in the Visual Center for Arts and Media. Haverford English major Drew Cunningham ’20 curated the show titled “The Lynching of Zachariah Walker: A Local Legacy,” in collaboration with Reckson. The show uses archival materials from the Chester County Historical Society to explore a specific instance of lynching that occurred only 30 miles from Haverford’s campus in 1911.
Cunningham, Reckson, and the other Hurford Center members envision the satellite show in a dialogue with the larger CFG exhibition. Visitors to “The Lynching of Zachariah Walker” are invited to write down their impressions of the show, and their reflections will be archived permanently in Haverford’s Special Collections. Carter said, “this is a really cool aspect to me, because EJI and the artists in the CFG show are thinking really critically about what is archived and how it is archived.”
The exhibition has already begun to generate discussion within the Bi-College community. Two hundred and ninety two people attended the gallery opening on October 26, far surpassing the attendance at previous CFG openings, and many will undoubtedly revisit it in the weeks to come. It is a profoundly impactful and moving exhibition. Hurford Center director Ken Koltun-Fromm said in his introductory remarks at the gallery opening, “I hope you sit in and sit with this exhibit for some time.” “Legacy of Lynching” is on view at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through Dec. 16, 2018. “The Lynching of Zachariah Walker: A Local Legacy” is on view in the VCAM Upper Create Space through Dec. 23, 2018.
Photo credit: Rog Walker and Bee Walker for the Equal Justice Initiative
