African American Violence

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The promise of freedom after the Civil War was shipwrecked by new and old forms of violence inflicted on African Americans. Kidada Williams observes that the shapes of white violence used to subjugate enslaved and free blacks before and during the Civil War both “continued and intensified” in its aftermath. The postemancipation challenges to African Americans of maintaining and creating their families, communities, and institutions were troubled by whites who believed emancipation posed a threat to white survival. Acting on their freedom and citizenship incited “the terror of emancipation.” Among the terrorizing ordinary and extraordinary violence that whites used to maintain power and terrorize black communities was what Donald Mathews …show more content…
African Americans affirmed their humanity and resisted violence and domination, as they had while enslaved in the antebellum South, in all kinds of innovative and resilient ways. Williams’ recent work has recast the history of resistance to white supremacy in the postemancipation era by attending to the voices and testimonies of African American women, men, and children. A contention of this paper is that an additional way to recast lynch law as well as the history of resistence lies at the intersection of violence and theological anthropology. By way of developing this contention, I break the paper into two parts. In …show more content…
Yet, lynching has been written about in religious studies and theology mainly through a “jack-in-the-box” approach, appearing here and there but never in a sustained manner. This neglect is not unique, as lynching has only lately been thematized in other academic disciplines. Recent works in religion and theology, however, in line with social and cultural history and other critical discourses, have challenged lynching’s marginal or occasional significance as a theme. Donald Mathew’s 2004 essay “Lynching is Part of the Religion of Our People” centered lynching as a primary subject for understanding southern religion and theology. As a testament to this essay’s significance, which Edward Blum judges to be the contemporary work that provides the basis to study religion and lynching, in the summer of 2015 The Journal of Southern Religion devoted an issued specifically to revisit Mathew’s essay. W. Scott Poole has followed Mathews lead and helpfully complicated the picture of the theological meaning of racist mob violence. Further, Emile Townes, Angela Sims, and James Cone exemplify recent theological interpreters engaging lynching. Specifically, Sim’s The Ethical Complications of Lynching and Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree set lynching as a programmatic theme for theologians and ethicists in the U.S. American
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