Jan de Baen’s “The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers” has become the dominant visual representation of the brothers’ lynching, but whether it deserves this honor is debatable.
lynching
Posted inArt
What We Can Learn From a Vanished Mural of Racist Violence
John Wilson’s 1952 mural “The Incident,” is a salient meditation on the horrors of lynching and though physically lost, the mural endures in archival images, preliminary sketches, and studies.
Posted inOpinion
When a Lynching Memorial Becomes a Photo Opportunity
A reflection on the commodification of Jim Crow’s violence through public memorials.
Posted inArt
A New Website Tells the Stories of Over 4,000 Lynchings in the United States
The Equal Justice Initiative, with the support of Google, launched an online interactive that visualizes lynchings from the Civil War to World War II in 20 American states.
Posted inArt
Creating a Spatial History of Slavery through Abstraction
Minimalist abstraction of the 20th century often feels placeless. Tony Smith’s angular, inky sculptures could have crawled out of a dimension void of organic life; Mark Rothko’s repeating black canvases in a Houston chapel reflected the space’s lack of specific religion.
Posted inPerformance
Early Anti-Lynching Plays, Read in Light of Ferguson
Just two days before the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) released its report “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” I sat in the audience at JACK in Brooklyn for a reading of playwright Mary P. Burrill’s 1919 anti-lynching play Aftermath.