This dissertation is concerned with the commemoration and historicization of lynching in the United States and revisits several anti–lynching struggles from the 1930s–1940s to the present. Cases explored in this study include a transnational aspect of the interwar anti–lynching campaigns, African American protests on the street, jazz singer Billie Holiday’s lyrical rendition of “Strange Fruit,” the use of lynching photography in the anti–lynching movement, as well as the problem of bearing witness to the black suffering in recent traveling exhibits of lynching photography Without Sanctuary (2000–2005) and in the discussion of the U.S. Senate’s official apology for lynching in 2005. This dissertation asserts two major contentions. First, it claims that, from a perspective of historical memory, many African American anti–lynching struggles of the past, which primarily attempted to eradicate contemporary racial violence, simultaneously functioned as the act of remembrance that challenged the historical erasure and misconstruction of lynching. Second, it argues that this political act of remembrance was conducted through exhibitions of the black body. That is, in order to challenge the epidemic of the spectacle of lynching, in which the torture and annihilation of the black body was witnessed and consumed, and to contest racialized and sexualized (under)representation of blacks in white supremacist lynching discourse, African American anti–lynching activists demonstrated their resistance from within the very discourse and representation of lynching. It is this revisiting of the space of death—discursive, representational, demonstrative, and performative—that enabled African American activists to fight the existing power structure, the structure that attempted to extinguish the black body yet simultaneously represented it as a memento of racial “justice.” This study analyzes how their reentering into the space of death made it possible for African Americans to challenge, deconstruct, and ultimately reconstruct the dominant memory of lynching. In short, it illustrates how diverse black public spheres were formed in the anti–lynching movement.
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