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ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: A DIFFERENT KIND OF “STRANGE FRUIT”: LYNCHING DRAMA, AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY, AND U. S. CULTURE, 1890-1935 Koritha Ann Mitchell, PhD, 2005 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Vincent Carretta Department of English Since November 1999, the book and exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America has made nearly 100 pictures of mutilated victims readily available. These images convince Americans that we can plainly see the destruction that mobs caused and encourage us to overlook the disadvantages of equating lynching with the hanging body—what Billie Holiday called “strange fruit.” My work argues that we not blindly accept the corpse as the ultimate symbol of racial terrorism by taking seriously the antilynching plays that African Americans wrote in the midst of mob violence (that is, before 1935). The dramatists insisted upon the body’s inability to represent the horror of lynching. Rather than describe the crimes perpetrated on America’s trees, telephone poles, and bridges, the genre takes us inside black homes where widows and orphans survive only to suffer. Thus, it is clear that the violence continues long after the corpse has disintegrated and that the home itself is a lynched body. When a father is torn from the family, the household is “castrated” and its head removed. (None of the plays mentions women lynch victims.) Yet, the scripts do not merely protest racial violence; they also affirm racial pride. African Americans understood that black identity was vulnerable to the power of representation, especially when technology was making the distribution of negative images more efficient. At the turn of the century, blacks proclaimed themselves sophisticated, modern citizens…and they knew that mainstream messages to the contrary frequently caused—but more often did more damage than—physical assaults. So, even as recorded lynchings declined in the 1920s, black-authored lynching plays proliferated, in order to address the dehumanizing violence inherent in how the race was represented in America. In five chapters, this project examines why lynching drama emerged, develops a theoretical framework for understanding the plays, offers close readings of ten plays by black women and three by black men, grapples with the fact that most black- authored lynching dramas were not professionally produced, and argues that appreciating the genre requires complicating our understanding of theatrical value. A DIFFERENT KIND OF “STRANGE FRUIT”: LYNCHING DRAMA, AFRICAN AMERICAN IDENTITY. AND U. S. CULTURE, 1890-1935 By Koritha Ann Mitchell Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Professor Vincent Carretta, Chair Professor Elsa Barkley Brown Professor Charles Caramello Professor Shirley Logan Professor Judith L. Stephens © Copyright by Koritha Ann Mitchell 2005 Acknowledgements For the successful completion of this project, I am most grateful to God. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the resources to do this work, including my health and that of my family and friends. My Ancestors also made this work possible; my debt to them is immeasurable. Given what all of you endured in order to clear this path for me, I recognize any injustices that I face as my reasonable portion. Without question, every opportunity that I have enjoyed emerged from tremendous sacrifices. This project is dedicated to the only person on Earth who has sacrificed more than I have to get me to this point: my mother Laverne Mitchell. I sincerely thank my committee: Drs. Vincent Carretta, Judith Stephens of Pennsylvania State-Schuylkill, Shirley Logan, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Charles Caramello. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Carretta, who proved himself a real ally when this journey became exceptionally challenging. Besides the many intellectual gifts that I have received over time (many of which are evident in citations within the document itself), I have been blessed with extraordinary emotional and spiritual support. My husband, Craig Jones, has proven himself a true life partner. You have made an enormous difference in my life and, by extension, my work. Even with all those blessings, I would not still be standing to submit this dissertation without the support of Dr. Shireen K. Lewis and her organization, SisterMentors. It has meant so much to me that all these sisters actually wanted to see me succeed. Thank you for not allowing me to struggle in isolation. All of you chose to add to, rather than take away from, the strength I gained from the Ancestors. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................... II INTRODUCTION: STRANGELY INVISIBLE FRUIT.......................................................... 1 Tracing a Cultural Conversation........................................................................................................... 8 Dramatic Interventions........................................................................................................................ 16 Antilynching Drama as Invisible Fruit................................................................................................ 19 Antilynching Drama as a Fruit of Black Labor................................................................................... 35 CHAPTER 1: MINSTREL FATHERS, LITERARY DAUGHTERS................................... 41 NINETEENTH-CENTURY BLACK THEATER PRACTITIONERS & THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION .............................................................................................................................. 48 Black Minstrelsy ................................................................................................................................. 49 Black Musical Comedy....................................................................................................................... 55 Harlem’s Heyday ................................................................................................................................ 69 A CALL FOR BLACK-AUTHORED DRAMAS................................................................................... 76 CHAPTER 2: WHY DRAMA, WHY NOW?.......................................................................... 80 Modernization, Migration, Class Conflict, and the Investment in Propriety ...................................... 84 Domestic Fiction and the Club Movement ......................................................................................... 89 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) .................................. 99 Postbellum/PreHarlem ...................................................................................................................... 106 Antilynching Playwrights and the New Negro Renaissance............................................................. 112 Debating Black Drama and its Proper Outlet.................................................................................... 121 CHAPTER 3: ANTILYNCHING DRAMA: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .......... 127 The Playwrights as Cultural Theorists .............................................................................................. 128 The Conventions of Antilynching Drama ......................................................................................... 136 Black Homes................................................................................................................................................. 137 Black Manhood............................................................................................................................................. 141 De-generation................................................................................................................................................ 150 The Implications of the Genre’s Conventions................................................................................... 154 Finding a Stage of Their Own........................................................................................................... 157 CHAPTER 4: BLACK FEMALE TEXTS............................................................................. 170 WHY TESTIMONY? ....................................................................................................................... 172 THE DIFFERENCE THAT FORM MAKES................................................................................... 178 REFUSING TO REPRODUCE............................................................................................................. 185 Rachel, Angelina Weld Grimké, 1916 .............................................................................................. 185 Safe, Georgia Douglas Johnson, 1929 .............................................................................................. 192 iii DEBATING BLACK PATRIOTISM ................................................................................................... 198 Mine Eyes Have Seen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 1918 ......................................................................... 199 Aftermath, Mary Burrill, 1919.......................................................................................................... 207 ADDRESSING THE MYTH................................................................................................................
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