They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I

by Kidada E. Williams

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 hoped they would be able to graphically disseminate enough knowledge about its occurrence and inspire Americans to take action to end it. In the process of testifying, these people created a vernacular history of the violence they endured and witnessed, as well as the 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.

Genres: History, African American, American History, Nonfiction, Race

293 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[P.J. O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read many books this year that deserve a good review, but I confess that I'm having a tough time summoning the words. I've spent the last few months appreciating reviews that others have written on a variety of subjects and genres; I see them as a literary form in themselves. But it's not one that I excel in, I'm afraid, nor one that I have much enthusiasm to learn. With all the things swirling around in my life right now, I just want to read books with no sense of obligation to do anything more.

But the books I've been reading deserve recognition and I feel a responsibility to do right by them. I certainly feel it for this one. So I am hoping that whoever reads these remarks will look beyond my construction of them and consider the book for its own merits. It was written by an academic and chronicles the emergence of Jim Crow laws and the terrorist groups who enforced them under-cover (literally in the case of the KKK). I suspect a good deal of our present reality has its roots in the stories that are documented here. It would serve us well to take a good hard look at them, whether in this book or others.

Very early on in the reading, I began to wonder if the way that my history classes covered the US Civil War and Reconstruction was portrayed the same way elsewhere in the country. I grew up and was educated in a former Confederate state, but I don't remember any teacher or professor trumpeting the cause for States' Rights or making any attempt to find nobility in enslaving other humans. A lot of attention in the textbooks and class discussion was given to the war itself however: to battle strategies and mini-biographies of the generals and leaders of both sides. Reconstruction was rather rushed over and woven with hints of unrealistic promises and rampant corruption by outsiders rushing in to make a profit.

They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I gives another perspective. In its well-sourced accounts, formerly enslaved people and their descendants worked long hours to farm land, educate themselves and their children, and do their civic duty to vote. In reading details of the damage done to their houses and fields, one appreciates how hard families had to work for their harvests and to recoup their expenses, and the difficulty they had in finding redress for unfair compensation and pricing structures. If there was widespread corruption during or after Reconstruction, it was more likely by those who cheated their sharecroppers, or engaged in unfair credit practices.

Over time, according to accounts taken from survivors, cheating disintegrated into violence and physical attacks if they attempted to protect their interests. Night Riders used the horribly euphemistic term "charitable exile" as the grim alternative to a targeted farmer who had a successful crop ready to harvest: flee the area now and leave everything behind or be beaten and murdered in front of your family. Sometimes the family was murdered along with the head of the household. If any took refuge in neighboring houses, or attempted to protest or report the violence, they and those who assisted them were also targeted according to the records that the book cites. This went on for decades with little intervention by local courts or federal authorities. Lynching became so widespread that it spurred the Great Migration and eventually became a national scandal.

If one considers the deaths of so many, over so wide an area, the thought occurs that surely there had to be some strenuous wrestling of consciences among those who considered themselves the more enlightened and noble of the races. Even if we consider these men in the context of their culture and time, would the fact that they did what they did in the dark offer some possibility that deep down they knew they were wrong and wished to stop? Did those covering themselves with masks and sheets ever wish they were not summoned or pressured to go? Did they ever discuss it with family or friends? One hopes for at least a soul-sick need for a deathbed confession or fear-of-hell sourced remorse for those who considered love and mercy integral parts of their professed faith.

I wish there were some accounts of this, in family stories or diaries or something to give me a little more faith in my fellow man. Because reading the later accounts of public hangings, open mob violence, and resistance to outside investigation leads me with little reassurance.

I have to accept that it stopped only because of the individual heroism of African-American investigators, writers, and their white allies who risked their lives to document the deaths and report them over and over again until the nation could no longer turn away and pretend it was an exaggeration of isolated cases. And that makes me wonder if the fear, greed, and hatred at the root of such socially-sanctioned terrorism (which is what it was, whether the word terrorism was coined then or not) never completely went away. Rather, those rages went underneath the surface when there was finally resistance from our better natures. And if so, are we catching glimpses of them bubbling up again? And do we have a better way to stop it this time around?

I find it hard to rate books like this. How do you give 5 stars that say "I loved it!" to unrelenting accounts of widespread lynching and systematic terror? I had to put it down several times, and read fast through some sections. I don't know if it was the way it was written, my state of mind, or the topic. I didn't love it, but I'm glad that I read it.

[Pamela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was interesting the connections the book made between Abolitionist activists and the generation of writers and activists that were the precursors of modern 1950/60s Civil Rights movement. Social Justice never took a break, only how historians have portrayed the struggle.

[Madison Ogletree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Williams begins her book with an anecdote describing James Hick’s experience with Klan terror. His resistance, she asserts, laid in enshrining his testimony into public record during the 1871 congressional hearings investigating Klan violence (2). This sort of discursive resistance lies at the core of William’s book. They Left Great Marks on Me provides an outlet for these black voices to speak. Their personal stories constitute what she calls a “vernacular history” that laid the foundation for black political organizing efforts from emancipation to World War I and after. The book constructs testimony—formal and informal, to outsiders and with each other—as a driving force for change and action during Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the height of the Nadir, and the years before and after the Great War. She ends with analysis of how black testimony made possible the NAACP’s antilynching campaign and so, later, the civil rights movement. She as the historian operates as a mediator between her readers and the stories, giving these voices the room to speak on their own terms but also providing necessary contextualization for the stories of physical and psychological terror but also of community and a collective counter-vision of black subjectivity and citizenship.

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book goes over Black people bearing witness of their abuse in different periods, from just after Emancipation, after Reconstruction was replaced by Reconciliation, and then post-WWI with the Red Summer. That included testimonies before committees, letters to government leaders and the NAACP, and other options that were available and used.

It includes conflicts that are familiar, like between Washington and Du Bois, or Du Bois and Garvey, but it was easier to sympathize with the different sides as going over the individual struggles opened up the reason for the conflict. It would be so hard to get it right, and you only know the results of the choice that you did make. So someone fighting back might get killed, or see others killed, and think that they shouldn't have fought back, but someone who didn't resist could end up with the same issues for the opposite reasons. So often the results was going to be losing all property and facing pain anyway. It becomes easy to just think "Team up and shoot them all together", but then more keep coming.

So much has been shameful long after the Civil War, and we need to know that. Much of the focus here is on the importance of bearing witness.

I would love an appendix with longer passages of testimony, and it is easier to follow if you have some basic familiarity with the different time periods.

The other thing that is disconcerting are references to "blacks" as opposed to "Black people", though this does match some of the quoted material.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's good and valuable, but it less about the violence than specifically, as the subtitle says, the testimonies of that violence--how African-Americans, especially victims and witnesses, communicated about and discussed responses to that violence. That focus on communication, interpretation, and reaction makes it often pretty abstract on the whole and a harder read.

[Andrew Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painful but important

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy book to read.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating discussion of black political mobilization and journalism in the face of overwhelming domestic terrorism that white racists perpetrated.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to read, but important testimony to all the ways we've failed each other and need to to better.