This is the second part of a curated reading list on the theme of racial violence and resistance. If you missed the first, you can visit that list here. The books and the article below were recommended by Austin College (Sherman, TX) historian Felix Harcourt, whose research focuses on racial violence in the Texarkana region. This is not, by any means, a complete bibliography of the topic—just a good starting place for further exploration.
The resources are listed alphabetically by author. The “purchase” buttons are for convenience only: CIC does not make any commission on book sales. As always, we encourage you to share this post with others.
Terry Anne Scott, Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas (University of Arkansas Press, 2022).
Publisher’s description: “In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.”
Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow (University of Texas Press, 2005).
Publisher’s description: “In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as ‘freedom colonies,’ African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South. … [The authors] focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land.”
Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (NYU Press, 2012).
Publisher’s description: “Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans’ bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress. In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans’ testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses … created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed … [and] identities that grew from the experience of violence. This history fostered an oppositional consciousness to racial violence that inspired African Americans to form and support campaigns to end violence. The resulting crusades against racial violence became one of the political training grounds for the civil rights movement.”
Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
Publisher’s description: “Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the anti-lynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and anti-lynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching’s relationship to modern life.”
Jenny Woodley, “‘Witnessing’ Lynching in Scholarship and in the Classroom,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 20, no. 1 (January 2021), pp. 122-128: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781420000547.
Part historiographic essay, part reflection, Jenny Woodley re-centers the experiences of African Americans and asks historians to reconsider their own responses to mob violence as the starting point for new research possibilities: “How did families and local communities remember the lynchings that befell them? What of a wider African American community? What is the relationship between artistic and vernacular memories of lynching? What are some of the sites of memory for racial violence?” These questions help teachers and students reconsider how African Americans have responded to lynching in the 20th century, but also how they respond to contemporary lynching memories in the 21st century, especially in the growing age of Black Lives Matter and other movements of the marginalized.