Whence Disinheritance Holds: On Ida B. Wells and America’s “Unwritten Law”

Abstract

The following article thinks together concepts of the hold and disinheritance through the work and anti-lynching activism of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In doing so, the paper extends what Wells-Barnett already illuminated on the ways in which the State benefitted from the sexual politics of anti-black lynching violence. The article contends Wells-Barnett’s work and pedagogical implications continue to be critical and relevant in and to the horizons of Black Studies given the radical nature of not only her rhetorical analysis on lynching, but also in her ability to write and stand in her own dangerous mode of thought against the profundity of anti-black violence.

Keywords:

• Ida B. Wells
• Black feminism
• Afropessimsim
• Anti-lynching activism
• Lynching violence
• Black feminist pedagogy
• Black sexual politics
• State politics

Notes

1 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader,” ed. by Mia Bay, (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 395.

2 Ibid., 395–396.

3 Ibid., 396.

4 Ibid., 398.

5 Wells-Barnett, “Bishop Tanner’s ‘Ray of Light,’” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader,” ed. by Mia Bay, (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 55.

6 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 74.

7 Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press), 61.

8 Wells-Barnett arguably raises this notion throughout the oeuvre of her work. In addition to the previous citation, where she indicates that the Afro-American is considered “a man—nowhere,” she make this point further in that article, “Bishop’s Tanner’s ‘Ray of Light.’” Wells-Barnett writes, “To accept the Southern white man’s report that all the lynched are disreputable, or supposed disreputable characters, is to believe the race so criminal, ignorant and bestial it must be hunted with dogs and killed like wild beasts” (54). In this passage, Wells-Barnett makes evident the ways in which black criminality is not only pathologized, but how the disavowal of lynching also relies on the conditions blackness to be thought as nonhuman.

9 Sharpe writes, “The prison repeats the logics, architectural and otherwise, of the slave ship (and and across the global Black Diaspora). With these logics in mind, I want to suggest that what is also being birthed is what I call anagrammatical blackness that exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” (75).

10 Wells-Barnett, “Southern Horrors,” in The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader,” ed. by Mia Bay, (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 71.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 62-63

13 See for example, Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 76-77. There, he echoes Ronald Judy who also uses the term, “interdiction” to which Warren cites from Judy “in which ‘a censorship to be inarticulate, to not compel, to have no capacity to move, to be without effect, without agency, without thought’” (77). See Ronald Judy, DisForming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Also see, Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

14 Roland Barthes, “Mythology Today,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 66.

15 Ibid.

16 For a compelling elaboration on blackness that meditates on the notion of representation in particular relation to difference, truth, and its implications to law, see David Marriott’s “The X of Representation: Rereading Stuart Hall” in New Formations, Number 96, March 2019, pp. 177–228 (52).

17 For further reading on Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s early contributions to the critique of gender ideology in lynching, see Hazel Carby’s chapter, “‘In the Quiet, Undisputed Dignity of My Womanhood”: Black Feminist Thought After Emancipation” in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Also, see Jacquline Goldby’s “Writing ‘Dynamitically’: Ida B. Wells,” in A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

18 Patricia Hill Collins, “Assume the Position: The Changing Contours of Sexual Violence” in Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York and London: Routledge Press, 2005), 221.

19 See Robert L. Zangrando, NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); also see, Mary Jane Brown’s Eradicating This Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement, 1892–1940 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000).

20 See Jacqueline Goldsby, “Writing ‘Dynamitically’: Ida B. Wells.”

21 Goldsby, “Writing ‘Dynamitically’: Ida B. Wells,” 102.

22 Ibid., 103.

23 Ibid.

24 However, on this topic, see Amii Larkin Barnard, “The Application of Critical Race Feminism to the Anti-Lynching Movement;” Mary Jane Brown’s Eradicating This Evil: Women in the American Anti-Lynching Movement; Amy Louis Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Robert L. Zangrando, NAACP Crusade Against Lynching.

25 Again, see Christina Sharpe, “The Hold.”

26 Wells-Barnett, “The Bitter Cry of Black America: A New ‘Uncle-Tom’s Cabin’” in Light of Truth, 170.

27 David Marriott, “Bastard Allegories: Black British Independent Cinema,” in Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Volume 7, Number 1 (Fall 2015), 194.

28 Ibid., 195.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linette Park

Linette Park is the Thurgood Marshall Fellow in the African and African American Studies Program at Dartmouth College and holds a Ph.D. in the Culture and Theory Program at the University of California, Irvine. She has co-edited a special issue of poetry and prose for Haunt: Journal for Art, and published with the peer-reviewed journal, Theory and Event.