What do you think?
Rate this book
New Directions in Southern Studies
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940
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 antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.
Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.
Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.
368 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2009
28 people are currently reading
359 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 30, 2019
God forbid, a follower of Jesus might have objected to lynching in the 30’s, “A 1935 questionnaire answered by some 5,000 ministers showed that 3.3 percent had preached or worked against lynching in some way.” In fact, an evangelical in Georgia stated in the 30’s, “If a young man has a good case of religion, he is generally known as a sissy in society.” In that upside down Southern Christian world, Jesus, or anyone risking voicing his intact moral conscience (totally risking serious injury), would be a “sissy”. “Between 1880 and 1940, white mobs in the South killed at least 3,200 black men.” Not all the lynchings happened in the South. Behind most lynchings, one finds the “specter” of “violated white women.” Sites of lynching became a technique of reclaiming public spaces as all-white. Not overlooked was the intentional powerlessness and defenselessness of each victim, as well as the perceived “triumph” of the one-sided violence.
“The lynching photograph arguably most evokes… the hunting photograph.” “One in three lynching victims was emasculated.” In 1916, a NAACP investigator found that a white man in Waco, Texas was carrying around a lynched black man’s penis as a “souvenir”. The top grossing racist movie of all time was “The Birth of a Nation.” How racist, do you say? “A Kentucky man left the theater after seeing the picture and proceeded to shoot and kill a fifteen-year-old African American high school student.” It served as a great recruiting tool for the Klan, which swelled from one miserable guy wearing a dunce cap to “a national membership of 5 million” in the 20’s. Join the KKK and project yourself into the fantasy of white heroism. Some theaters banned blacks from seeing the picture because it “upset” whites if they were allowed in. As a black teenager then in Mississippi remembered, “When they showed that lynching, the whites were cheering, I tell you, we were suffering in the balcony.”
The beginning of the end was the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington – because 10,000 showed to watch, it had advance notice, newspapers across the country covered it, and all of them “watched as a mob mutilated, strangled, and burned Washington to death on the grounds of City Hall”. Lest we think such collective sadism was rare: as a witness to the 1938 lynching of C.C. Williams clearly stated in Louisiana, “Then we rammed a red-hot poker into him.” Other countries wrote scathing editorials on U.S. racism and ran them with lynching photos. One said, “This is a picture of what happens in America – and no place else on Earth.” Another country’s newspaper said of its lynching photo, “Nothing in Russia equals the above”. Lynching photos ended up being used by the opposition and soon racists were saddened that they couldn’t show their twisted fantasies to as many appalled people as before, but at least if lucky they could pose smiling for the pictures. Oppressive Jim Crow conditions, threat of lynching, “the decline of Southern agriculture, and the lure of northern industrial work” drove the Great Migration.
The 2016 book, “The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town” by Anthony Pitch, says that there were 4,680 victims of lynching but Amy’s book reviewed here says the figure was “at least 3,200 black men” – so who do we believe? And what is the best estimate?
“The lynching photograph arguably most evokes… the hunting photograph.” “One in three lynching victims was emasculated.” In 1916, a NAACP investigator found that a white man in Waco, Texas was carrying around a lynched black man’s penis as a “souvenir”. The top grossing racist movie of all time was “The Birth of a Nation.” How racist, do you say? “A Kentucky man left the theater after seeing the picture and proceeded to shoot and kill a fifteen-year-old African American high school student.” It served as a great recruiting tool for the Klan, which swelled from one miserable guy wearing a dunce cap to “a national membership of 5 million” in the 20’s. Join the KKK and project yourself into the fantasy of white heroism. Some theaters banned blacks from seeing the picture because it “upset” whites if they were allowed in. As a black teenager then in Mississippi remembered, “When they showed that lynching, the whites were cheering, I tell you, we were suffering in the balcony.”
The beginning of the end was the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington – because 10,000 showed to watch, it had advance notice, newspapers across the country covered it, and all of them “watched as a mob mutilated, strangled, and burned Washington to death on the grounds of City Hall”. Lest we think such collective sadism was rare: as a witness to the 1938 lynching of C.C. Williams clearly stated in Louisiana, “Then we rammed a red-hot poker into him.” Other countries wrote scathing editorials on U.S. racism and ran them with lynching photos. One said, “This is a picture of what happens in America – and no place else on Earth.” Another country’s newspaper said of its lynching photo, “Nothing in Russia equals the above”. Lynching photos ended up being used by the opposition and soon racists were saddened that they couldn’t show their twisted fantasies to as many appalled people as before, but at least if lucky they could pose smiling for the pictures. Oppressive Jim Crow conditions, threat of lynching, “the decline of Southern agriculture, and the lure of northern industrial work” drove the Great Migration.
The 2016 book, “The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town” by Anthony Pitch, says that there were 4,680 victims of lynching but Amy’s book reviewed here says the figure was “at least 3,200 black men” – so who do we believe? And what is the best estimate?
December 10, 2024
In analyzing lynching as a spectacle, Amy Louise Wood seeks to illustrate the active nature of spectating in lynchings, in person or through media. Rather than merely watching, those who consumed lynching media or watched in a crowd witnessed. The cultural power of lynching, its terrifying force, "rested on spectacle" (3). While noting that mass spectacle lynchings were dominated by the white middle-class of the South, the spectacle of lynching itself broadened participation in white supremacy in such a way as to reinforce white solidarity in a context where they were "not certainties—they were ideologies that needed to be constructed and established...performed and witnessed" (8).
Wood traces the spectacle of lynching as a descendant of the public execution, the feeling that there was a "right to witness" the punishment of violators of the racial order. Wood argues that, "white southerns resorted to lynching to guarantee their active involvement in and witnessing of criminal punishment, to satisfy their outrage and desire for vengeance" (23). As public executions began to be abandoned by the state as crowds no identified their own sinfulness with the condemned, lynchings became a Puritanical practice which projected an inherent white righteousness and punished an inherently demonic blackness (27).
Although often opposed by organized denominations as the 20th-century began, lynchings were reported by their perpetrators "as both a quasi-criminal trial and execution and an evangelical church discipline" (46). By representing mob lynchings as a retribution ordained and consecrated by God, "mobs...actively interpreted their violence as the willful expression of God's vengeance" (48). Exacerbated by southern concerns over the effects of modernity upon reality, lynchings were a way for white supremacy to express its moral righteousness.
Photography and early motion pictures became an "ideological force" of lynching, as "the presumed realist objectivity of the photographs served to legitimize the lynching as righteous expiation of crime" (84). D. W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation served as a "direct address to [white southerners], a spectacular vindication of their sectional pride and racial honor" (147). The visualization of history through a white supremacist lens which omitted the actual portrayal of Klan violence ensured Birth's positive reception in comparison to The Clansmen play it was based upon, and ensured a southern "overidentification with the film" which blurred "the slipper boundary between audience and player" (167).
Anti-lynching activists seized upon the tools of modernity which had been initially embraced by lynching forces. Through the publication and spread of lynching photographs and media, "the spectacle of lynching began to sow the seeds of its own collapse" (179). Anti-lynching "activists created an alternate form of lynching spectacleship, one that compelled viewers both outside and within the South to bear witness to white injustice and brutality" (183). This culminated in various anti-lynching films of the 1930s, which "self-reflexively commented on the lynching spectacle and what it meant to witness it" (227). With white protagonists but implying a greater injustice, white audiences prone to dismiss black criminality were faced with a choice to embrace lawlessness for the sake of white supremacy or recognize a fatal flaw in American society. The cultural shift towards disapproval of lynching and its decline throughout the 1930s and 1940s implies the latter, until the heating up of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s sparked a revival.
Wood closes with the observation that "in detaching images of lynching from local practices and transforming them into icons of oppression, anti-lynching activists unwittingly succeeded in detaching them from history itself" (269). I don't know that this observation is sound. Wood cites the rhetorical use of "lynching" and its terrifying memory as evidence. Of course when one thinks of lynching, there is generally a generic image which springs to mind rather than a specific incident, but this cannot be laid at the feet of those who cleverly used the media to defeat the murderous practice. It is a weak end to an otherwise very good study.
Wood traces the spectacle of lynching as a descendant of the public execution, the feeling that there was a "right to witness" the punishment of violators of the racial order. Wood argues that, "white southerns resorted to lynching to guarantee their active involvement in and witnessing of criminal punishment, to satisfy their outrage and desire for vengeance" (23). As public executions began to be abandoned by the state as crowds no identified their own sinfulness with the condemned, lynchings became a Puritanical practice which projected an inherent white righteousness and punished an inherently demonic blackness (27).
Although often opposed by organized denominations as the 20th-century began, lynchings were reported by their perpetrators "as both a quasi-criminal trial and execution and an evangelical church discipline" (46). By representing mob lynchings as a retribution ordained and consecrated by God, "mobs...actively interpreted their violence as the willful expression of God's vengeance" (48). Exacerbated by southern concerns over the effects of modernity upon reality, lynchings were a way for white supremacy to express its moral righteousness.
Photography and early motion pictures became an "ideological force" of lynching, as "the presumed realist objectivity of the photographs served to legitimize the lynching as righteous expiation of crime" (84). D. W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation served as a "direct address to [white southerners], a spectacular vindication of their sectional pride and racial honor" (147). The visualization of history through a white supremacist lens which omitted the actual portrayal of Klan violence ensured Birth's positive reception in comparison to The Clansmen play it was based upon, and ensured a southern "overidentification with the film" which blurred "the slipper boundary between audience and player" (167).
Anti-lynching activists seized upon the tools of modernity which had been initially embraced by lynching forces. Through the publication and spread of lynching photographs and media, "the spectacle of lynching began to sow the seeds of its own collapse" (179). Anti-lynching "activists created an alternate form of lynching spectacleship, one that compelled viewers both outside and within the South to bear witness to white injustice and brutality" (183). This culminated in various anti-lynching films of the 1930s, which "self-reflexively commented on the lynching spectacle and what it meant to witness it" (227). With white protagonists but implying a greater injustice, white audiences prone to dismiss black criminality were faced with a choice to embrace lawlessness for the sake of white supremacy or recognize a fatal flaw in American society. The cultural shift towards disapproval of lynching and its decline throughout the 1930s and 1940s implies the latter, until the heating up of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s sparked a revival.
Wood closes with the observation that "in detaching images of lynching from local practices and transforming them into icons of oppression, anti-lynching activists unwittingly succeeded in detaching them from history itself" (269). I don't know that this observation is sound. Wood cites the rhetorical use of "lynching" and its terrifying memory as evidence. Of course when one thinks of lynching, there is generally a generic image which springs to mind rather than a specific incident, but this cannot be laid at the feet of those who cleverly used the media to defeat the murderous practice. It is a weak end to an otherwise very good study.
June 10, 2018
Consensual till caught?
I found this book repetitive. I would like to know if the victims had been wrongfully accused and how many victims had engaged in consensual relationships with women.
I found this book repetitive. I would like to know if the victims had been wrongfully accused and how many victims had engaged in consensual relationships with women.
April 8, 2024
I found this book immensely helpful in understanding the meaning of lynching photography to the mob and to those consuming the photos. I research Holocaust history and found resonances with violence as performance in that context but the idea of killing as the restoration of order and white supremacy, and the idea of dutiful masculinity as an ideal also speaks to e.g. SS soldiers in the context of mass shootings (who also took photographs, obviously). The first third of the book was of the most interest to me because of this focus but everything was well written, persuasive and clearly explained for a non-expert.
November 8, 2021
Lynchers Were Worse Than I Thought,
It was worth the time and effort to get through this book. It has opened my eyes to the scapegoating of Black victims’ as the evil ones and whites as the religious moral ones.
That being said, this book was too detailed, making it slow reading.
Overall, it still was and is worth reading to understand this massive projection of guilt and evil on victims, and the taking of justice into mob rule.
It was worth the time and effort to get through this book. It has opened my eyes to the scapegoating of Black victims’ as the evil ones and whites as the religious moral ones.
That being said, this book was too detailed, making it slow reading.
Overall, it still was and is worth reading to understand this massive projection of guilt and evil on victims, and the taking of justice into mob rule.
Read
October 7, 2019364.134 W8735 2009
November 8, 2023
This was very good but I want to talk about ethics in publishing
December 28, 2024
A pretty thorough account of the history of Lynching with an emphasis on its place in contemporary media and primary sources.
September 9, 2025
Essential
February 8, 2014
Lynching and Spectacle is a horrifying account of the rise and fall of lynchings in the United States. It variously focuses on mob mentality, white supremacy, and cruelty. It demonstrates that while it is a subject that is largely not covered or even actively covered up in history classes and museums today, it gripped the citizens of the nation with fear, specifically blacks living in the South after the end of Reconstruction. The book also argues that it was not only the backwoods rural yokels performing the ghastly acts of lynching, but upstanding citizens in the new urban areas as well.
After grizzly recounting of many lynchings, complete with horrifying photographs, Ms. Wood devotes significant portions of the books outlining how the press and Hollywood help to marginalize the practice and facilitate its end.
This book serves as an important reminder that this nation is not perfect and can always find room for improvement. The awful and terrifying atrocities against humanity that the work outlines needs to be recounted and not pushed under a rug.
After grizzly recounting of many lynchings, complete with horrifying photographs, Ms. Wood devotes significant portions of the books outlining how the press and Hollywood help to marginalize the practice and facilitate its end.
This book serves as an important reminder that this nation is not perfect and can always find room for improvement. The awful and terrifying atrocities against humanity that the work outlines needs to be recounted and not pushed under a rug.
August 17, 2014
Fascinating, detailed and gruesome. Focuses on what it meant to watch and keep photographs from lynches, how the new technology of photography and film-making influenced the act of watching. People were sure that these new inventions made the pictures absolute truth and objective - somehow it didn't matter that the subject posed for the picture, it supposedly reflected the truth, in a kind of essentialist sense. And this understanding was applied to lynch photography too, with the white mob posed as calm, with their victim posed like a prey on a hunting trip. It also focuses on the pride of communities, how it made them heroic (it supposedly defended the white womanhood etc), how it was like a rite of passage - for young boys to help adult men during a lynch or how parents lifted their babies up above the crowd so they can see better. The constant hypocrisy was really jarring for me. Last chapter about the fictional lynches in movies was just ok compared to the rest.
Want to read
July 25, 2009
September 16, 2025
A tough educational read. Informatively tragic. I learned quite a bit and glad I read it. Highly recommend but not for the weak.
dnf-abandoned
April 25, 2011Read the chapter on The Birth of a Nation.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews