From the very beginning of the political movement against lynching in the United States, women played a critical role. In the late nineteenth century Ida B. Wells Barnett published her famous pamphlets “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases” and the one-hundred page “A Red Record” and took to the public stage in her radical and determined campaign against the rampant violence that plagued primarily Southern, African American communities. Barnett, also a women’s rights activist, largely inspired a legacy of African American women’s participation in this political effort. African American women led an increasingly interracial fight against lynching well into the modernist era, for, in fact, the late teens and early 1920s marked a dramatic increase in nativist sentiment throughout America and with this the nation saw a resurgence of lynch violence. These activist women wrote countless speeches, editorials, or, as became increasingly popular, stage dramas, but their writings are rarely read as modernist texts. While their political writing is decidedly different from the characteristic style of canonical modernist writing, because lynching was a blatant and oppressive reality of the era (a social reality neglected in hallmark modernist texts), reading these women’s wide variety of texts stands to upset the as yet highly hegemonic canonization of modernist literature. In other words, by reading these women activists as modernists we stand to diversify our conception of both modernism and the modernist era in positive, and potentially radical, ways.
Included below is an annotated bibliography of primary historical sources as well as secondary literary sources that should serve a sufficient introduction to women’s political anti-lynching writing of the modernist era. The document compiled in the Women and Social Movements in the United States database include speeches and editorials that are useful in that they lend insight into women’s participation, in fact, spearheading of some of the most radical politics of the era. In terms of how these documents complicate and challenge modernism, we can think of the act of taking to public spaces with radical ideas as itself as a way of writing modernism. In other words, while canonical modernists were breaking the rules of literary form, politically active African American women of the modernist era were breaking entrenched societal rules of gendered expectations and limitations by both participating in politics and taking to the streets with their politics as well as rules of racial segregation by organizing women across race lines in the fight against institutionalized lynch violence.
Antilynching flag flown outside of the NAACP headquarters in New York. While lynching primarily occurred in the South, African Americans in those Northern, urban centers that were the heart of the New Negro Renaissance were both aware of and involved in the fight against lynching. In other words, it is important to remember the political context of the artistic Renaissance, and how this dark political reality influenced Renaissance expression. Sourced from: “An NAACP Antilynching Banner.” The Constitution and Supreme Court. Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, 1999. American Journey. U.S. History in Context. Web. 7 Nov. 2014.
Anti-lynching plays can be considered, at least in part, influential to the development and proliferation of staged, dramatic protests like the one pictured above. Sourced from: “African Americans protest in front of DAR Memorial Hall against the crime conferences neglect to…” American Decades Primary Sources. Ed. Cynthia Rose. Vol. 4: 1930-1939. Detroit: Gale, 2004. U.S. History in Context. Web. 7 Nov. 2014.
Annotated Bibliography for Further Research
Primary Historical Sources
Dublin, Thomas, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Karen Vill, eds. “How Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, accessed through University of Portland Library at http://www.library.up.edu. 21 Nov. 2014. This document project that includes political pieces and speeches written by African American women is highly valuable for its insight into a political issue that marred American culture during the modernist jazz age, but that was, and still is, overlooked. While the documents provide a comprehensive overview of anti-lynching activism beginning in the late nineteenth century, most of the documents included were published in the 1920s and 30s. Many of these political and editorial documents were written by African American women, and are valuable in studying alternative modes of modernist writing. Most importantly, these documents lend insight into the interracial cooperation between southern women, and such interracial focus is rarely featured in any modernist texts. In other words, these documents are important because they lend insight into a dynamic, interracial movement that is unexplored in other contemporary texts, and thus often overlooked as a part of national history and memory.
Mungarro, Angelica, and Karen Anderson, eds. “How Did Black Women in the NAACP Promote the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, 1918-1923?” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, accessed through University of Portland Library at http://www.library.up.edu. 21 Nov. 2014. This document project is very similar to the first, but focuses solely on those years that are often considered the hey-day of modernism as well as NAACP activism in particular, which is key in efforts to redefine or expand conceptions of modernism for the NAACP was very closely associated with the Harlem Renaissance and its modernist writers.
Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens, eds. Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Print. Perkins and Stephens provide a comprehensive anthology of lynching plays written by primarily African American women beginning with Angelina Weld Grimké’s 1916 work, Rachel, to Michon Boston’s 1994 retrospective biographical, Iola’s Letter, of Ida B. Wells life. The anthology includes two brief introductions by each author that lend useful historical background about the central role of women in the decades-long fight against lynching. The plays of most interest to readers interested in modernism would likely include; Grimké’s Rachel is both hailed as the first anti-lynching drama, and considered groundbreaking for its unprecedented depiction of racial protest, that, some claim effectively gave birth to an entirely new dramatic protest genre; all three plays included by Georgia Douglas Johnson – now considered the most prolific anti-lynching dramatist for having written six in her lifetime – that went unpublished in her lifetime and thus serve as a point for discussion about the politics of the canon, or more specifically the modernist canon; and May Miller’s 1933 Nails and Thorns, which, like many of Miller’s plays, made a bold move by featuring white protagonists in situations dealing with race and racial justice.
These plays importantly challenge standard conceptualizations of modernism simply because they are concerned with, racial justice, radical political protest, and written by women. While the plays are more heavily “realist” in form, the pioneering nature of the play’s content should challenge established notions of how we define modernism. Moreover, the transformation of the dramatic stage into political stage that these plays facilitated is tremendously significant in the larger historical context of racial activism, for, arguably starting in the 1930s with the Scottsboro Boys case, political protests took dramatic and staged action (i.e. protests, marches, etc.) into the streets. In other words, these early plays likely influenced the forms of political protest that would define the civil rights movement well into the late twentieth century.
Literary Criticism
Gourdine, Angelleta, “The Drama of Lynching in Two Black women’s Drama, or Relating Grimké’s Rachel to Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,” Modern Drama 41.4 (1998): 535-545. Print. Although Gourdine’s article compares a modernist era drama, Rachel, to the more recent A Raisin in the Sun, her insights into Grimke’s original lynching drama are highly valuable, especially considering the dearth of criticism written about Grimke’s work in general. Gourdine is primarily concerned with how both plays demonstrate how lynching was not only an issue which effected black males, but black women, too, and that both Grimke and Hansberry create distinct feminist voices in their plays in order to emphasize this central role of women. To make this point Gourdine provides pertinent historical context that focuses on the socio-economic incentives behind lynching as well as the dynamics of Southern, systematic violence against African Americans. In her analysis of Rachel more specifically, Gourdine notes that Grimke creates a feminist narrative by focusing on the impact that the lynching of black men has on his family that is left behind. Moreover, she focuses on black mother’s anxieties regarding their children’s futures, especially their young male children, for whom the threat of lynching loomed large. From here Gourdine moves to draw parallels between themes of racialized, socio-economic oppression between the two texts. Her analysis is valuable for it cuts across time, from 1916 to 1959 the year that Raisin premiered, in order to show how the physical lynching that prevailed in Grimke’s day was implicitly bound up in the same ideologies as the metaphorical lynching that Hansberry’s characters face.
Stephens, Judith L., “Art, Activism, and Uncompromising Attitude in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Lynching Plays,” African American Review 39.1.2 (2005): 87-102. Print. Stephens article counters the prevailing image of Georgia Douglas Johnson as the “lady poet” of the New Negro Renaissance by providing an analysis of her role and influence as playwright in the politically radical fight against lynching. Stephens likewise begins by placing anti-lynching plays in their larger historical context of black theater beginning with anti-slavery dramas. Stephen’s literary analysis is principally devoted to deconstructing Johnson’s main tropes of irony conveyed chiefly through her plays titles that employ subversive modes of indirection, music which she attributes to both the African American musical explosion of the Renaissance and Johnson’s own background as a composer, and the figure of the black family as a microcosm of the African American community’s experience of lynching as a whole. While Stephen’s close reading is well done, considering the lack of Johnson scholarship her analysis leaves plenty of room for other scholars to expand upon her readings and further solidify the connection between the textual elements of Johnson’s plays and her role as a radical political activist.
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