ABSTRACT
This chapter uses some of the most canonical African American authors who engaged lynching in order to unpack how focusing on the vulnerability of the black male body yielded two enduring consequences: it helped erase female victims of the mob’s physical brutality, and it helped diminish recognition of lynching’s reverberating power and through generations. It describes Angelina Weld Grimke’s 1920 short story, “Goldie” and poems by Carrie Clifford and Anne Spencer in order to notice what deserved attention according to black women authors. Besides making the physical violence present, the poem casts lynching as a war between men that does not involve women and children. Spencer’s 1923 poem “White Things” continues the tendency among women to forego gruesome physical details and proves to be as invested in mythic proportions as the ending of Grimke’s “Goldie”. The genre of black-authored lynching plays provides the most striking evidence that African American women deliberately avoided replicating violent spectacles.
