Class Notes on Lynching: "A Red Record" and "Within Our Gates"

Monday's class covered assigned excerpts from Ida B. Well's A Red Record and Oscar Micheaux's film Within Our Gates.

A Red Record

The class summarized from Well's Red Record that the three main excuses given by white southerners for lynching were "Negro Domination" (political power), suppression of race riots, and rape. The class noted that each of these reasons was based on fear of black persons, and even of black men in particular. We also noted that it was important that white southerners constantly framed their actions in terms of their own victimization. It was their "defense" of their community that justified their actions. They didn't see themselves as bad guys.

We had to reckon this reasoning with the actual sport-appeal of lynchings themselves, in which the class agreed the white southerners took an obvious pleasure. This pleasure was sadistic: it was a pleasure that came from the spectacle of suffering. As we read over selected passages from A Red Record about the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, in 1893, the class argued that the parade and gathered thousands was an event that demonstrated that tolerance for certain kinds of violence is learned social behavior. The enjoyment felt by the south might be awful to us, but it was a product of the era. We didn't let the matter rest there, however; we did note that the lynchers inability to "see" the extremity of their violence came from an "ideological" blindness. The violence that occurs without question is violence that has been fully integrated into a worldview. We debated briefly what forms of violence that occurs today that might appear heinous to the future, such as the death penalty.

Within Our Gates

In Oscar Micheaux's film Within Our Gates (1920), we watched the school teacher Sylvia Landry head north to Boston from the south to secure funding for southern black schools. In the north, we witness Sylvia head to the home of rich Bostonian woman and ask for money; the woman debates the matter with her southern friend, who argues against Negro education. While there, she meets one Dr. Vivian, a black intellectual, and they fall in love.

In one interesting scene, a gambler named Larry Prichard (brother of Sylvia's friend Alma) has a shoot-out with his mate Red. He's chased by the detective Phillip Gentry.

 We learn that in the past Sylvia's family was lynched by a southern mob bent on punishing her father for an accused murder of a leading white plantation owner, Phillip Gridlestone. In reality, Gridlestone was shot by an angry white worker. When Gridlestone's son comes to rape and probably murder Sylvia during the lynching, he finds a scar on her chest that reveals her as his long lost sister - Sylvia is "white." She returns to Boston to be with Dr. Vivian.

We focused on the lynching scene in particular. The black character Efrem is lynched first, before the mob can find the Landry family. The family is then lynched upon their discovery, although their youngest son escapes and flees on a horse.

Please check my plot notes against the summary HERE.