This article is part of Sunday Edition: “Juneteenth.”
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On the brief timeline of the United States, we can point to one year as darkly potent: 1865.
A landmark in the nation’s short history, 1865 marked a shift in its timeline from the legal subjugation of enslaved Black people (the 13th amendment was also passed this year) to newfound means of disenfranchisement and abuse. On May 13 — 246 years after the first ship carrying enslaved people took port on the coast of Virginia and two and a half years following the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — the Civil War ended. On June 19, the announcement of slavery’s prohibition reached the southernmost state, Texas, after years of Southern enslavers trafficking human bodies farther south to stave off the creeping threat of abolition. On Christmas Eve in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, its legacy of terror an immediate response to the mere possibility of social progress.
When we consider the subsequent violence of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, bloodthirsty lynchings, assaults against civil rights activists, police brutality, and mass incarceration, it’s clear that post-slavery life for Black Americans remained plagued by vigilantism and systematized oppression.
Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 lynchings of Black Americans have been recorded. That such revolting displays of terror became a celebratory pastime for some white Americans has been fodder for some of the most devastating art in American history: from Billie Holiday’s omnipresent “Strange Fruit” to Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96). One of these artworks, lesser-known because of its eventual destruction, is John Wilson’s 1952 mural “The Incident,” a salient meditation on the horrors of lynching. Though physically lost, the mural endures in archival images, preliminary sketches, and studies from which we can glean this Black man’s perspective on racist terror amid Jim Crow.
Wilson depicts the victim’s foot exaggeratedly swollen, limp beneath him as he is dragged down from a thick tree branch. Enormous white hands, engorged by power and malice, wrap around a coiling black whip, a rifle, and the rope that hangs their victim by his neck. He wears tattered white pants, the same color cloaking his hooded and therefore anonymized killers. The tips of their hoods squiggle toward the sky — toward a god in whose name the self-described Christian faction committed such atrocities — yet their eyes appear angled and devilish. Behind them, a cross is licked by flames. Their trousers and dress shoes are black — standard professional clothing to signal their jobs as doctors, salesmen, lawyers, and police officers, careers to which they will return when the killing is done.
Wilson’s exploration of racist brutality stemmed from a lifetime of traumatic reckoning with lynchings. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts to Guyanese immigrants, Wilson’s father was an ardent activist and avid reader of Black chronicles such as the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier. Through these same papers, a younger John’s eyes opened to the reality and prevalence of anti-Black terrorism in the 20th century. He once said “The Incident” was the means through which he could “exorcise” his emotions about the lynching images he had held onto since childhood.
Wilson created the mural during a stay in Mexico City from 1950 to 1956, when he studied at La Esmerelda, as well as with print collective Taller de Gráfica Popular and at the Escuela de las Artes del Libro. “The Incident” — vaguely titled to indicate that lynchings persisted as a daily threat at the time — is a graphic and poignant portrayal of the terrorism sanctioned by the Ku Klux Klan. No longer in its original physical form, “The Incident” only exists in the studies and sketches made by Wilson in chalk, crayon, graphite, gouache, and oil. In all of these sketches, he exaggerates the features of his figures, tweaking and distorting their proportions and ultimately making the mural more than double life-size.
“The Incident” was created for a course at the school taught by Ignacio “Nacho” Aguirre; each student’s mural was intended to be temporary. However, Elisabeth Hodermarsky, who co-curated the Yale exhibition alongside Pamela Franks, tells me that, “at the time it was created, David Alfaro Siqueiros — who was then head of Mexico’s Department for the Protection and Restoration of Murals — saw Wilson’s mural and advocated for its preservation.” It remained intact throughout John and his wife Julie’s tenure in Mexico in 1956, but art historians “do not know when it was destroyed.”
The influence of the socially engaged practice of Mexican muralism (particularly the work of José Clemente Orozco) on Wilson is undeniable. “The aim of the Mexican muralist movement was to be spokespeople for the common man,” Wilson once said, continuing:
They wanted to create works of art expressing the reality of the forgotten ones, revealing their history, their celebrations and struggles. […] [Mural painting] is a public thing because it’s available to masses of people. And so, through Mexican art I began to experience a sense of how to depict my reality.
One study of the same female figure appearing in “The Incident,” seen clutching her baby tightly, was made in Wilson’s final year in Mexico (1956), years after the mural’s completion. One can imagine this depiction of a woman in mourning, fearful for her child and the world in which this baby will be raised, stuck with Wilson. Though her body turns away, her eyes flit toward the “incident” — she clutches her baby, protecting her child in a world that may intend to destroy them.
I have returned to this mural time after time since Yale University Art Gallery first mounted an exhibition of Wilson’s studies, Reckoning With “The Incident.” With each passing day, the work gains newfound relevance and newfound pain — its act of reckoning is far from done. The Klan, whose inception parallels the celebration of Emancipation, has created an insidiously deep stronghold within American culture. As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, a holiday uplifted by Black Texans and other African Americans since 1865, several Black people have been found dead, hanging from trees in apparent lynchings, including Dominique Alexander, Robert Fuller, and Malcolm Harsch.
As the families and communities of these men mourn and unprecedented nationwide protests in defense of Black life proliferate, the United States government flounders in its decades-too-late attempt to pass legislation to identify lynching as a federal crime. On the penultimate day of Black History Month this year — the same month as the extrajudicial murder of Ahmaud Arbery — Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act after 120 years of unsuccessful attempts. The bill, sponsored by Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush, classifies lynching as a hate crime, interjecting federal ruling into the failures of individual states. Months later, as the Senate attempts to reconcile the bill with its own anti-lynching legislation, Senator Rand Paul continues to stall the attempt at criminalizing racist killings.
As the world mourns George Floyd, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, and innumerable others, it becomes even clearer that the bill is not enough to curb the tradition of deadly anti-Blackness. Last year, a Senate bill noted that 99% of lynching perpetrators in US history escaped punishment.
Over 400 years later, Black folks continue to grieve, and affirmations of the value of Black life are met with revulsion and dismissal. As we approach a holiday uplifting the memories of the thousands who were subjected to chattel slavery, Juneteenth, I continue to mourn in reflection of the ways these people have been deserted by a nation modeled on a fallacious sense of liberty. I ask now: How do we adequately fathom the legacy of white supremacist terror that runs through the core of the United States and in the generational, genetic memory of the descendants of the enslaved and the enslavers?
In our continued consideration of Wilson’s “The Incident,” we are faced with his persisting agony over the systemic defilement of Black livelihoods. With his brush, Wilson pays attention to both his horror and distress at the loss of Black life and to the delicate moments between a Black family in their mourning. He took care to depict the clutch of the husband’s hand on his wife’s shoulder. Thickly drawn fingers wrapped around a gun for protection bring to mind a quote by anti-racist journalist Ida B. Wells: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” Wilson positions this man’s stoic, unflinching gaze toward the brutal scene: The victim’s life is drained from his face; the rope has been cut; the killing completed.
The anguish of seeing and grappling with violence finds its way back to Wilson’s canvases and sketchpads again and again. In my reckoning, I recall Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up.”
Reckoning with “The Incident”: John Wilson’s Studies for a Lynching Mural was organized by Yale University Art Gallery in partnership with the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum and Grinnell College Museum of Art. In 2019, it traveled to Faulconer Gallery at Iowa’s Grinnell College; the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland; and the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, before making its final stop at Yale University Art Gallery until October 25, 2020. (The museum is currently closed due to COVID-19, but the works are viewable online.)
