The Legacy of a Lynching: Community and Familial Adaptation in the Wake of Racial Trauma (original) (raw)

The history of lynching in America has been shaped by statistics, trends, and characterizations of the mobs involved in the murder of an accused individual. But, few have studied the lives and the communities of the victims of the lynchings, and even fewer have sought to recreate the circumstances in which the lynchings took place by means of digital resources and tools. As a result, the memory of a lynching is often defined by purported criminality, angry mobs, and an eventual death, rather than by the community conditions that precipitated the lynching, the life lost during the murder, and the community condition thereafter. In this thesis, I introduce the notion of personhood in lynching victims through the case study of a single victim: Eugene Daniel from New Hope Township, North Carolina, who was murdered just six days after his sixteenth birthday in 1921. This thesis argues that one cannot separate people from the context in which they live; acts of racial violence, like lynchings, neither exist in a vacuum nor solely affect the murdered individual. I further argue that modern digital tools allow historians to gain a better understanding of the circumstances that perpetuated lynchings, the communities in which lynchings occurred, and the contemporary implications of historic acts of violence.