Beginning in 1880s Africans Americans became the targets of a lynching craze that claimed thousands of lives.  In Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lyching on Black Culture and Memory, University of Oklahoma historian Karlos K. Hill argues that narratives are key to understanding not just what drove the lynching craze but how African Americans responded.  It was the narrative of the black beast rapist that fueled and justified the lyching mania.  African American activists and cultural actors responded with their own victimization and consoling narrative to galvanize public support and to offer examples of courage and heroism to inspire future generations.  Victimization and consoling narratives were both examples of how African Americans found usable pasts to fight against racial violence and injustice.  

Prior the late nineteenth century whites had actually been the primary targets of lynching.  Karlos Hill notes that between 1882 and 1885 whites accounted for 64% of lynching victims while blacks represented 34%.  1886 marked the turning point when blacks first became the majority of victims of lynching violence, a place they would never relinquish.  Between 1886 and 1892 blacks accounted for 73% of all lynching victims.  By the time we reach the 1890s one lynching occurred every three days, typically with no investigation and no trial.  The Equal Justice Initiative has documented over 4000 lynchings between 1877 and 1950.  The NAACP estimates the number to be closer to 5000.  The true number is undoubtedly higher.  

It was in reaction to the lynching mania that African American activists and cultural actors began to fight back by challenging the predominant stereotypes with their own victimization narrative.  The victimization narrative subverted the idea of the black beast rapist by showing how lynched black bodies were actually the victims of unbridled white hatred and violence.  In response to specific lynching cases black newspapers used extracts of white newspapers to feature the depravity of those who participated in the lynching violence.  By using quotes that highlighted the horrific violence that accompanied lynchings black newspapers undercut the idea of lynching as a bulwark of white civilization. 

Beyond the graphic details of white violence, black newspapers tried to instill a sense of outrage in readers by spotlighting how local authorities were often complicit in lynchings.  Far from taking a stand against mob violence, it was the police who often sealed the fate of victims by handing them over to their executioners.  When the time and place of a lyching was announced in advance, black newspapers underscored how local authorities did nothing to intervene.  Only through the intervention of federal authorities, writers of the black press asserted, would it be possible to end the reign of terror.  

The NAACP undertook a massive public awareness anti-lynching campaign in 1921.  Using graphic extracts culled from the white press coverage of the lynching of Henry Lowery that same year, the NAACP compiled and sent ten thousand copies of a nine page press kit, entitled “An American Lynching,”  to newspaper across the country and beyond.  By excluding any of their own commentary and relying entirely on quotes from the white press, the NAACP hoped to achieve a greater degree of credibility, shock, and empathy for the victims.  By framing the lynching of Henry Lowery as “An American Lynching” and an “American Shame,” Hill argues that the NAACP tried to convince white Americans that what was really at stake was “the souls of whites and white civilization.” 

Emphasizing how black Americans employed or represented the lynched black body at different times for different rhetorical effects is important, because it highlights that the lynched black body in the black cultural imagination should be seen as a floating signifier rather than a static, one-dimensional symbol of black death or white terror.  Karlos K. Hill, Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Memory and Culture. 

In their efforts to solicit white sympathy, the NAACP had to select what Hill describes as the “perfect” victim.  These were victims who had no means of defending themselves and were in no position to fight back.  The perfect victim could not possess character flaws or personal shortcomings that might embarrass the organization.  Only through the use of the perfect victim, the NAACP believed, would it be possible to place the blame and responsibility for the lynching violence on whites.  

As lynching became racialized prominent African American anti-lynching activists, such as Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington, spoke out against Black vigilantism.  Black vigilantism referred to how African Americans participated in lynching as a means social control.  Although black vigilantism was far smaller in scale compared with white on black mob violence, individuals like Wells and Washington feared that it could lend legitimacy to the new racialized form of lynching.  By sensitizing African Americans to the dangers of justifying white violence, Wells and Washington, together with the black press, helped curb black vigilantism.  

Victimization narratives may have helped challenge the stereotypes that drove the lynching mania but they did little to assist African Americans in coping with the trauma of the violence.  Victimization narratives were centered on what was done to black bodies, not how African Americans responded to lynching violence.  The role of consoling narratives was to reclaim agency and to offer a source of pride by showing how African Americans reacted to the reign of terror.  Consoling narratives put the spotlight on how the African Americans fought back and demonstrated tremendous courage often in the face of overwhelming odds.  Consoling narratives were not about escaping the violence of lynching but rather overcoming and transcending the fear and terror that lynching was intended to instill.  

Hill argues that Ida B Wells was the earliest proponent and a key shaper of the consoling narrative.  In “Mob Rule in New Orleans,” written in response to the 1900 lynching of Robert Charles, Wells rejected the depiction of Charles in the white press as a lawless and brutal killer of two white police officers.  Instead, Wells portrayed Charles as a hardworking and upstanding citizen.  She used several white character witnesses to substantiate this depiction.  The true aggressors, Wells argued, were the police who initiated the violence and forced Charles to defend himself.   Outnumbered and surrounded, Charles courageously fought to the death.  While the white press might cast Charles as an outlaw, Wells argued that he would be remembered by his own people as a hero.  

Typically cast only as the objects of lychning violence, Hill points out how African American activists and cultural actors devised diverse strategies to defend their community. Victimization narratives, although ultimately unsuccessful, were an attempt to find ways for whites to see victims as fellow human beings worthy of care and concern.  When early activists like Ida B. Wells came to see lynching as irrational and beyond the remedy of reason, they turned to consoling narrative to offer African American another usuable past.  By featuring stories of courage and heroism in the face of insurmountable odds, consoling narratives offered models and sources of inspiration for future generations.