Memory – Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston

Lynching’s Afterlives: Memory, Trauma, and the Sensibility of the Blues

Dr. Mari Crabtree, author of *“My Soul is a Witness”: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, 1940−1970.*

As part of the Black Lives World Affairs Signature Series, hosted by the College of Charleston’s School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, Dr. Mari Crabtree will be holding a book talk entitled “Lynching’s Afterlives: Memory, Trauma, and the Sensibility of the Blues.” The talk will be over Zoom on Thursday, March 3 at 6pm.

Dr. Crabtree teaches at the College of Charleston in the department of African American studies. Her book “My Soul is a Witness”: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, 1940−1970 is set to be published by Yale University Press this year:

My Soul is a Witness traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. By interweaving the stories of people and places haunted by lynching, Mari N. Crabtree unearths how Black southerners lived through and beyond these horrors, offering a theory of Black collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.

Jim Crow and its threat of violent, if not deadly, reprisals tried to impose silence upon Black southerners, but they did find their voices. They often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. In these and other ways, they infused a blues element into their lynching narratives as they confronted traumatic memories and kept the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or suffering that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that, amid the utter devastation of lynching, were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.

View Dr. Crabtree’s faculty profile for more information on her work.

To register for this event: https://cofc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CI3GDDlUSH6_9oLPjccMyw

Three Lectures on Race, Memory, and Slavery

David Blight lecture: Race & Memory in Charleston, Fri Nov 8, 1:30 PM, The Citadel

CLAW lectures on “Ancestries of Enslavement:” Elizabeth West, “Black Kinship Lineage and the Cistrunks of Noxabee County,” Wed Nov 20, 5:30 pm, Rita Hollings Cntr; Terri Snyder, “Claiming Freedom and Black Antislavery Work in the American South,” Thurs Nov 21, 5 PM, Addlestone 227.

CSSC at the Reburial

The Social Justice Committee of CSSC hosted the start of the May 9 Gullah Society procession on the C of C campus, in Barnet Courtyard.

Cards were inscribed with messages that were then buried with the ancestors.

C of C faculty in academic regalia joined city officials, Gullah society members, schoolchildren, and other community members in a procession down George Street to the Gaillard Complex.

Gullah Society President and founder Ade Ofunniyin, walking with the Mayor of Charleston, escorted the coffins to their final resting place. Dr. Ofuniyyin teaches African and African American studies at the College of Charleston.

Charleston Mayor John Tecklenberg and CofC’s Dr. Ade Ofunniyin escorting the coffins

The program was designed by Ms. Joanna Gilmore, a Gullah Society staff member who also teaches at C of C. It included an essay by C of C professor of architectural history Dr. Nathaniel Walker and another essay by CSSC director and emeritus history professor Dr. Bernard Powers. Among the speakers during the ceremony was Dr. Kameelah Martin, chair of C of C’s African American Studies department and a member of CSSC’s Executive Board.