"Witnessing" Lynching in Scholarship and in the Classroom.

Keywords: lynching; pedagogy; spectacle; memory EN lynching pedagogy spectacle memory 122 128 7 11/16/21 20210101 NES 210101 Amy Louise Wood's I Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 i was published in 2009, just as I finished my PhD on the cultural campaigns of the NAACP. It explains why lynchings occurred (and why there were fewer lynchings in some areas) and documents opposition to mob violence.[3] Wood is less concerned with differences between types of lynching (though she recognizes such differences exist); instead, she argues that all lynchings were "sensational." Moreover, the white mob, rather than the Black victim, was at the center of the anti-lynching discourse.[7] Wood's argument led me to rethink my own analysis of anti-lynching rhetoric and to ask whether it applied to the examples of lynching narratives in my work. "Communities that had previously celebrated lynching ... began to maintain a sort of embarrassed and horrified silence about it" and came to "deliberately omit stories of lynching" from public memory.[15] But I am less interested in why and how white Americans forgot lynching, as I am in African American efforts to remember. [Extracted from the article]