A three-part series on lynching in America continues Tuesday at Jackson State University by a professor who has been studying the subject for more than a decade.
The three lectures by Dr. Deborah H. Barnes, associate professor of English, are titled “Murder, Mayhem, and Lynching: Constructing Race, Class, and Gender in America.”
This second lecture is titled “The Furrow of His Brow: The Lost History of Black Lynch Mobs” at 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 24, at the Fannie Lou Hamer Institute@COFO at Jackson State University. The final lecture is “Written in Blood: Discourses in Lynching,” at 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 31 at Gallery1 at Jackson State University.
The lectures are free and open to the public.
Barnes said that she has been researching lynchings in America since the novel Paradise by Toni Morrison was published in 1997. The Nobel Prize winning book begins with an episode of the mass violence.
“I thought it was a literary allusion, a fiction,” Barnes said. But she looked deeper into the reality of mob executions and discovered much more to it, even beyond its gruesome nature.
“People think of it as people out in the woods as a clandestine affair,” she said, but lynchings often became “a great spectacle.” They have social, political and economic aspects far beyond popular depictions — and certainly don’t exist only “out West in cowboy movies.”
Barnes took a sabbatical in 2002-2003 to study lynchings and has been accumulating first-person accounts by witnesses — and some survivors — since then.
She is currently working on a book to be published as an anthology of those accounts.
For more information, contact Barnes at 601-979-1466 or Deborah.h.barnes@jsums.edu