Front cover image for Living with lynching : African American lynching plays, performance, and citizenship, 1890-1930

Living with lynching : African American lynching plays, performance, and citizenship, 1890-1930

Koritha Mitchell (Author)
'Living with Lynching' demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honourable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence
eBook, English, 2017
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2017