Koritha Mitchell
2003-2004 Graduate Fellow

Koritha Mitchell earned her MA in English Language & Literature at the University of Maryland in 2000. She is now a doctoral candidate in Maryland’s English department, specializing in turn-of-the-twentieth-century African American literature and culture. She is completing a dissertation on early anti-lynching plays and the implications of this unique genre’s existence, titled "A Different Kind of “Strange Fruit:” Lynching Drama, African American Identity, and U.S. Culture, 1890 – 1935."

Fellow's Project Description
A Different Kind of “Strange Fruit:” Understanding Black-Authored Lynching Plays, 1916-1935

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves, blood at the roots.
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees…”
- Billie Holiday/Lewis Allan

More than 60 years ago, Billie Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit brought mob violence into mainstream consciousness with an image that remains with us today. However, beginning in November 1999, America moved from imagining “strange fruit” to facing it, when nearly 100 photographs of lynch victims became readily available in the exhibition and book, Without Sanctuary. The collection has drawn thousands to the nation’s museums and thousands more to the virtual exhibition on the World Wide Web. The photographs also inspired the first international conference on lynching (Emory University 2002). As they generate unprecedented interest in mob violence, these gruesome images virtually ensure that the hanging body will continue to function as the ultimate symbol of racial terrorism. However, my study exposes the limits of that symbol.

The body cannot fully represent the destruction that mobs caused, and early lynching plays demonstrate this truth. The plays refuse to describe—never mind portray—the crime perpetrated on trees. Instead, they focus on the mother and children at home. Narrating the survivors’ pain, the playwrights suggest that mob violence occurs inside the black home and continues long after the “strange fruit” of the victimized body has disappeared. Making this statement in drama was especially important at the turn of the century because the American stage proved a powerful tool for justifying mob violence. Even before the debut of Birth of a Nation in 1915, play versions of white supremacist novels toured the country, and political activists called for plays that would oppose lynching. Between 1916 and 1935, at least ten African American playwrights answered that call, with women leading the way: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Unfortunately, despite the convergence of theatre and lynching in United States history, theatre scholars, historians, and literary critics have all overlooked the connection between racial violence and early black drama. As a result, we have neglected an important perspective on lynching—a perspective that de-emphasizes the spectacle of the hanging body and is informed by the historical moment in which mob activity flourished.

The first full-length studies of lynching in literature—Trudier Harris’s Exorcising Blackness and Sandra Gunning’s Race, Rape, and Lynching—argue that the American literary imagination has been significantly shaped by the violence inflicted on black bodies. For Harris and Gunning, writers who graphically describe lynchings preserve a painful, but important, part of American history. However, this focus discounts other articulations of lynching horror. In fact, because the earliest lynching plays do not portray or describe physical violence, Harris believes that the writers “…could almost be accused of disguising the horrors that serve as the impetus to their work.” Though indebted to her scholarship, my work insists that our historical moment cannot take precedence over the playwrights’. That is, modern audiences may need graphic photographs and descriptions to appreciate how horrible lynching was, but those who lived while it was a more palpable threat did not require such assistance.

The playwrights themselves inform my critical approach. The women’s plays share commonalities that speak to a similarity of perspective. For example, the genre always portrays lynching as an attack on black manhood and never mentions female victims. Also, the plays consistently feature families with a grandmother and grandchildren, but no husband-wife pair in the middle. Thus, the mob handicaps or destroys the generation that would normally guarantee the family’s survival. Given these trends, I argue for reading the plays through the lenses of turn-of-the-century conceptions of manhood and domesticity. This theoretical framework respects the nuances of the plays and follows Cultural Studies models which assume that literary works shape their historical moment, not just reflect it. I examine these plays as materialist accounts of black women’s cultural production at the turn of the century. These plays preserve their efforts as artists, political activists, social critics, and as sisters to the many women whose words we no longer have.

Cultural Studies not only provides the tools for interpreting the lynching play as both literary text and artifact, but it also enables the cross-disciplinary approach that such drama demands. As practitioners like Stuart Hall, Michael Green, and Hazel Carby insist, Cultural Studies critically assesses traditional disciplines, questioning disciplinarity itself and complicating each field’s construction, claims, and omissions. Thus, my work not only addresses the limits of lynching photography; it also complicates discussions in women’s studies, literary criticism, American history, and African American theatre and performance studies. For instance, though black theatre scholars decry Broadway’s exclusion of black playwrights, their histories nonetheless treat Broadway as the marker of cultural significance. Drama scholars ignore or discount lynching plays because they primarily contributed to community theatre movements. However, for the many black poets and prose writers who became dramatists after the first black-authored lynching play was staged, the genre was not insignificant. In fact, Willis Richardson—who is elevated for being the first black dramatist to reach Broadway—worked at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving when he saw Grimké’s Rachel and decided to become a playwright.

My dissertation addresses the emergence and implications of anti-lynching drama in six chapters. Chapter 1 explores black stage performances in the 1890s and early 1900s. I eliminate the false boundaries between theatre history and drama history and argue that black performers—even minstrels and musical comedians—made a path for black playwrights. Chapter 2 considers African American literature and intellectual thought at the turn of the century. Though Victorianism dominated African American novels of the 1890s, the black women’s club movement and Du Bois’ exaltation of vernacular culture allowed early twentieth century playwrights to envision heroines who are not genteel, but who are nonetheless exemplary homebuilders. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the literary strategies employed by black women writing lynching plays between 1916 and 1935 when the number of recorded lynchings decreased. Chapter 5 compares these plays to the drama that black men introduce in 1925, almost ten years after black women began establishing the genre’s conventions. I argue that men and women see lynching as an attack on black manhood (neither group mentions women lynch victims) but they articulate the emasculation differently. While women transfer castration onto the home, black men see it as a more direct physical threat. Chapter 6 analyzes the plays’ publication and production histories and the social impact the genre had on its reading and viewing audiences. During the fellowship term, I will complement my findings from New York resources, such as the Schomburg, with archival work at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, where Alain Locke and Montgomery Gregory founded the nation’s first black theatre department in 1920.