Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the American Historian

Abstract

Place the 203 in a row, allowing 600 feet of space for each human torch, so that there may be viewing room around it for 5,000 Christian American men, women, and children, youths and maidens; make it night, for grim effect; have the show in a gradually rising plain, and let the course of the stakes be uphill; the eye can then take in the whole line of twenty-four miles of bloodand-flesh bonfires unbroken.... All being ready now, and the darkness opaque, the stillness impressive-for there should be no sound but the soft moaning of the night wind and the muffled sobbing of the sacrifices -let all the far stretch of kerosene pyres be touched off simultaneously and the glare and the shrieks and the agonies burst heavenward to the Throne.-Mark Twain, 1901, on lynchings in the two previous years'On Friday evening, October 11, 1991, Clarence Thomas accused America of executing a "high-tech lynching."> He, an African American, was the victim. The perpetrators were the opponents to his appointment to a seat on the United States Supreme Court, eagerly aided and abetted by the media, particularly television. I am indebted to Professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage for suggesting that I write a retrospect on lynching. I was comfortably settled in Rome during July and August 1995 with no other writing tasks before me. I began to write about Clarence Thomas, and the rest simply unfolded. I am exceedingly grateful to friends and superbly able colleagues who helped me bring this essayto print: Amanda Scoggins, my undergraduate assistant, who processed the early drafts; Rosalie Radcliffe, who did the later drafts; Steven Niven and Gary Frost, graduate students in the Department of History at uxc-Chapel Hill, who prepared the footnotes; and Susan Arrneny, whose editorial talents are matched only by her patience. I am especially grateful to David Thelen, who caught the vision of fixing on paper the image of several historians doing history. He caught us in motion and said, "Freeze." We froze. The downside for the writers is that we were not allowed to polish our language and broaden our references to other scholars so as to buttress our positions and our egos. I felt that instead of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, I was diligently polishing the sow's ear. The upside is that the reader sees not only what we did but also how and possibly why we did it. Possibly, too, the reader sees herself or himself.

Scenes from Graduate School: Playing in the Smooth Spaces of Academic Writing

“…These criticisms often highlight the failure of traditional academic genres to engage audiences both internal and external to the university. However, other scholars point out that writing in traditional academic genres also limits our ways of thinking: making space for alternative forms of academic discourse, they argue, may help us to better explore the nature of our academic work and to make way for new types of scholarship (Behar, 1997/2014Bizzell, 1999Ellis, 1995Ellis, , 2004Royster, Kirsch, & Bizzell, 2012;Tompkins, 1987;Williamson, 1997).…”

“…Take, for instance, Bartholomae's (1995) position: he is wary of teaching students personal, expressive genres in the academic classroom; he views personal writing as "an expression of a desire for an institutional space free from institutional pressures, a cultural process free from the influence of culture, a historical moment outside history, an academic setting free from academic writing" (p. 64). Bartholomae (1995) Despite the risk of criticism, some academics in the humanities (often in anthropology and sociology, but sometimes in other disciplines like English, writing studies, and history) have turned to vulnerable genres to explore the relationship between their lives and their academic work (Ellis, 1995(Ellis, , 2004Tompkins, 1987;Williamson, 1997). Indeed, sociologist Ellis (2004) has described in detail a research method-autoethnography-which encourages the active exploration of the researcher's experiences.…”

Female Lynchings in the United States

“…Social historian Joel Williamson (1997) has criticized the study of lynching in the United States as ''strangely disjointed and discontinuous' ' (p. 1252). Though scholars have recently intensified their academic interest in lynchings and established a more robust research record (Cook, 2011), there remains erratic and fragmented treatment of the contextual history of female lynchings.…”

The Historian’s Self-Reflection and American Racism

“…In his article, Williamson (1997) presents an intimate portrait of the geographical and cultural setting of his home in Anderson County, South Carolina, just across the Georgia state line. "I grew up with a vague awareness that white men had lynched black men at some time in the past.…”