While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men,
postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the
victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited and
embodied links between violent collective action, American civic
identity, and the making of the nation.
Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic
engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the
changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the
relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and
contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From
the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of
symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted
citizenship, and upheld political community.
Grounded in Ida B. Wells's summation of lynching as a social contract
among whites to maintain a racial order, at its core, Ore's book speaks
to racialized violence as a mode of civic engagement. Since violence
enacts an argument about citizenship, Ore construes lynching and its
expressions as part and parcel of America's rhetorical tradition and
political legacy.
Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as
critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said
and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the
forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. In doing so, she
demonstrates how lynching functioned as a strategy interwoven with the
formation of America's national identity and with the nation's need to
continually restrict and redefine that identity. In addition, Ore ties
black resistance to lynching, the acclaimed exhibit Without Sanctuary,
recent police brutality, effigies of Barack Obama, and the killing of
Trayvon Martin.
