He has been an adjunct faculty member at the New School, teaching an undergraduate course, “The History of the Civil Rights Movement.” Dray is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. From 1994-2000 he was a staff writer at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). (Jan.Philip Dray has been a contributor to The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New York Post, and Mother Jones. The result is vital, hard-hitting cultural history. Whether he is explicating why the feminist-run Women's Christian Temperance Union refused to speak out against lynching, or why FDR refused to endorse antilynching legislation in the 1930s, Dray balances moral indignation with a sound understanding of history and politics. He faces the underlying sexual impulse of most lynchings head-on and shows how, in the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, the fear of blacks was transferred to a Jewish victim.
While there is much shocking material here-the 1918 lynching and disembowelment of eight-month-pregnant Mary Turner California governor James Rolph Jr.'s 1933 statement that lynching was "a fine lesson for the whole nation"-Dray never lets it dictate the complex social and political story he is telling. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation, Reginald Marsh's famous 1934 antilynching cartoon in the New Yorker, among much else, to supplement his impressive survey of the breadth of lynching in Southern society. He has pulled together a wealth of cultural material, including D.W. Yet Dray ( We Are Not Afraid) also covers the myriad attempts of popular and judicial resistance to lynching, in particular the campaigns led by Ida B. Covering the South's resistance to racial equality from Reconstruction and the 1875 Civil Rights Act (which gave rise to the widespread acceptance of public murders) through the mid–20th century, this prodigiously researched, tightly written and compelling history of the lynching of African-Americans examines the social background behind the horrific acts.
It was not until 1952, as Dray notes, that a full year went by without a reported racial lynching. Between 18 at least 3,417 African-Americans were lynched in the United States, an average of slightly more than one a week.
0 kommentar(er)
