By Jo Mikula, Opinion Editor
Professors, students, and members of the greater Haverford and Ardmore community gathered on November 16th in the VCAM for “The Legacy of Lynching: Art and Practice” symposium. Organized by Haverford English Professor Lindsay Reckson, the symposium was part of the “Legacy of Lynching” exhibition on view through Dec. 16 at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.
Reckson assembled three panels of speakers to lead the day-long symposium. Much of the discussion during these panels focused on the ways in which lynching, a form of terrorism, has shaped contemporary American society. Issues like mass incarceration, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police brutality are all examples of the legacy of lynching has lasted in American society. Panelists were also keen to focus on the ways in which black people and communities have resisted and persisted in the face of racialized violence.
Reckson prefaced the panels with some remarks that framed the exhibition and the symposium in their cultural and social context. Reckson read a quote by Anthony Ray Hinton, a wrongfully convicted former prisoner who spent 30 years on death row before being exonerated, who stated “they took off the white robe and put on the black one,” a reference to the fact that the American judicial system fully institutionalized the racial violence that was once partially carried out by lynch mobs.
On the first panel, professors Courtney Baker, Koritha Mitchell, and Autumn Womack discussed their work on historical lynchings and the contemporary reverberations of this form of racial terror. On a second panel, filmmaker and activist Shirah Dedman joined photographers Bee and Rog Walker, along with screenwriter and producer Allison Davis, to discuss the intersections between visual storytelling and social justice.
Dr. Womack returned to the third panel alongside multidisciplinary artists Josh Begley and Alexandra Bell for a discussion on the power of aesthetics. During the discussion, Womack posed a question to frame the work being done by the panelists: how do we mobilize data without reducing black life to data?
Both the symposium and the exhibition are attempts to respond to Womack’s question. “Legacy of Lynching” was born out of decades of groundbreaking research conducted by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) on racial terror in the South that documented over 800 more lynchings than previous reports had identified.
But EJI did not simply collect and publish this data, their report also contained a detailed examination of the ways that lynching “shaped the contemporary geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans.” They collected and published a number of oral histories in which black Americans discuss the ways that lynching and mass incarceration have affected their lives, which help to contextualize the raw data.
EJI’s report, the exhibition that grew out of it, and the symposium held at Haverford are all an attempt to mobilize numbers without reducing black life to data. The numbers that EJI collected are an important entry point into understanding the scale of lynching, modern day mass incarceration, and miscarriages of justice. The artwork in the exhibition and the conversations at November’s symposium harness this data while constantly returning to discussions of the real lives that are affected by racism in America.
Each panel member had a unique approach to the project. Dr. Mitchell, an associate English professor specializing in African American literature at Ohio State University, focused her talk on the role that lynching plays had in black communities. She noted that lynching was a response to the success of black Americans. “Just the fact that you [as a black person] think you are human and deserving of citizenship is a victory that needs to be kept in check” said Mitchell, explaining the sources of racial violence. For Mitchell, lynching plays were one way for black Americans to affirm themselves in the face of a culture of racial terrorism. These plays, were largely written by black Americans in the early 1900s to depict not the violent event of the lynching itself, but the toll that lynchings had on black families.
Where many of the panelists approached the legacy of lynching through academic study, Bell explores these topics through art. Bell is well known for “Counternarratives,” a project in which she edits New York Times articles to reveal racially biased coverage.
These works have been featured on the exterior of MoMA PS1 in New York City, and Bell has also placed them on walls in neighborhoods. By displaying her work in these public places, she hopes to start a public conversation about the representation of people of color in the media. “A Teenager With Promise,” one of the works from this project, is currently on display in the “Legacy of Lynching” exhibition.
“Counternarratives” is Bell’s attempt to identify and communicate these moments of untruth in media. She explained that the project explores, among other things, the “ways in which papers use a certain type of language to other people.” But Bell also looks at the photos that papers chose to publish, the prominence that editors give to certain stories, and the frequency with which media outlets discuss certain issues. She encourages everyone to look at the media with a more critical eye, to ask “why this photo, why this word, why so much reporting on this topic?”
Bell’s own background is in journalism, as she received an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University, and it was during this time that she began to think deeply about the way stories are presented in the media. Said Bell, “there was the feeling that something was amiss, but of not really knowing what it was or how to communicate it.”
Bell’s work, like that of the other panelists, goes beyond data to examine how individual stories are presented. Nicole Fleetwood, professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, re-emphasized the limits of data in her closing remarks, reminding the audience that lynching statistics cannot adequately capture “the many millions of people who have lost their loved ones,” nor does data capture “the restructuring of the deepest intimate relationships because of anti-black violence.”
For Fleetwood, the power of mass incarceration has been “to mark and eliminate people, to shame them and their families into silence” with the result that “some of us are just getting to the point where we see the incarcerated as people”. The exhibition and the symposium attempt to combat this shame and break through this silence.
Photo credit: Kris Graves for the Equal Justice Initiative
