Ask me anything!

Thank you so much for joining us for this AMA!

After emancipation, do you have any insight into how did the campaigns of violence, and black resistance, and the broader frame of white supremacy impact the construction of male honor within the African-American community in the American South? What did it mean to 'be a man' in the face of the institutional oppression being visited upon them?

Hello Professor Williams, thanks for doing this AMA.

When and how did African-Americans begin producing their own fiction that attempted to deal with this violence and its effects? I'm familiar with some of the political writing and journalism of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century, but I know embarrassingly little about how they reckoned with the violence through music, poetry, novels and the like.

Hello Prof. Williams and thank for doing this AMA!

My questions are:

How do you deal with the silence of the oppressed and discriminated against in the sources? You mention using testimonies. As someone not from the US, could you go into those sources a bit more?

In terms of also current events, what modes of resistance have stood out particularly to you in your area of study?

Thanks so much for hosting this AMA!

You gave an amazing answer to a previous question on psychic violence, speaking to the collective burden of knowing that bloody, violent injustice was inescapable. (Except your wording was rather more eloquent.) Did traces of coping mechanisms for psychic injury--or rather, psychic resistance--come across in your sources?

Hi Prof. Williams! Thank you so much for joining us today, we're privileged to have your attention and expertise.

White violence, and an overtly murderous, white supremacist legal system were obviously a lived reality for African Americans living around 1900 as organisations like the NAACP were emerging. While much emphasis is placed on Civil Rights and political activism, I also imagine that there would have been a huge impetus for African American people to organise for personal protection against lynchings and white abuses of power. What was the prevalence of organised resistance against white violence in the form of militias, neighbourhood watches, etc, and what relationship did these organisations have with nascent national Civil Rights movements like the NAACP?

Hello Dr. Williams!

I would like to ask how do you handle racial violence pedagogically? I've been trying to work on study plans that deal with the Haitian Revolution. Specifically, I want to help students differentiate violence caused by racism vs violence in response to racism. However, I'm worried that students will use certain examples, such as the killing slave-owning families by black revolutionaries, as excuse to frame race as "both sides" problem. How do you avoid this problem?

Hello Professor Williams! Thank you for doing this AMA!

How have families addressed the lynching of a family member in their family histories, especially moving into the second and third generation? Were there conscious efforts to remember such a horrific death, or were families hesitant to emphasise the violent nature of the deaths of their family members? Are there common themes that can be drawn from family memories of lynching victims, or are the memories too varied to highlight any sort of commonality?

What was the reaction of other countries (especially Europe) to this violence? Was it known at all? Was there any moral judgment against it or was violence against black people seen as a natural/nonproblematic thing?

Hi and thanks for coming on to do this AMA!

On a relatively historiographical note, why has prior research tended not to focus on the immediate victims of violence? Has it been mainly a matter of source accessibility, a general methodological bias, outright racism, or something else, or all of them combined?

Thanks for creating the AMA, I'm African-American myself, while I don't know of any relatives that have been confirmed to be lynched, one of my great uncles, whom was fairly wealthy at the time and had his own business, turned up dead one day in the mountain in western Virginia and we suspect he was murdered. Anyways my question is how did the treat of Lynching impact African-Americans at the time when it came to perusing wealth? Was there always the threat in the back of their minds that if they got too successful it could put a target on their back? So to speak?

Hi Professor Wiliams,

thanks so much for joining us today.
I have another question on the psychological impact: Frantz Fanon did groundbreaking work on colonial violence and its long-term psychological effects on colonized peoples, especially in the Algerian context. Has Fanon influenced studies of racial violence in the US and/or your own work?
Thanks in advance. 

Probably not nearly as interesting as you were hoping, but I do have one quick question.

I am especially interested in the immediate and long-term physical, psychic, and psychological injuries from this violence.

What exactly do you mean by 'psychic' injuries?

Big THANK YOU for your work as well as offering your time to us today. It's a huge asset to our community to have such opportunities, so again thanks.

In 1912 in Forsyth, GA the entire black population (with very very few exceptions) was terrorized out of the county following a series of lynchings and forced removals. The county remained white for 75 years, yet this is a hidden fact in history that most don't know about. Did this same action also happen at that time in other places that likewise do not get "air time" in our collective history? How rare was the Forsyth event?

As a followup to that, if I may: The neighboring county, Hall County, allegedly had a similar event instigated but the sheriff would not tolerate it and put it down immediately. How influential would a southern sheriff have been in permitting or not such acts of community violence? Was it more common for a southern sheriff to act like the one in Hall County or Forsyth County?

Thanks!

Thanks everyone for asking such great questions!

Hi Professor Williams, how did The African American community react to when prominent leaders in the community were killed very abruptly or incarcerated by various interests during the years directly passing the Civil Rights era? I would say approximately the 1970s.

Hello, Professor Williams. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I saw you on PBS last year and now I cannot wait read your book.

I wish I had a better question for you, but I was wondering if you could talk about the effects of lynchings on the community in the terms of terroristic acts? I guess I’m wondering if lynchings ever really worked to serve that purpose? Did mothers warn their children? What about sunset towns? Did white supremacy “do it’s job” as terrorism?

Professor Williams, thanks for joining us!

I have a question about the push/pull of African American migration out of the South after the Civil War. Growing up the narrative was always the pull of economic opportunities in northern and western cities fueled massive migration to places like Chicago and New York. Now, after reading about the horrors of Reconstruction, I wonder how much of that migration was due to the push of violence and white terrorism in the South. Of course these elements never operate completely independently of each other, but in your perspective do you see this demographic upheaval as more of a push or pull? How can we best combine thousands of individual family stories to understand this great migration?

Thanks for this AMA!

Your studies here span several generations. What was the biggest differences that you saw in the way that African-Americans reacted to violence and racial exclusion between those generations? How did that response evolve between a family of freedmen in the wake of the Civil War, and their children or grandchildren in the early 20th century?

Thanks so much for doing this AMA. I have a question about the long term effects of racist violence. I'm white British, and the more I learn about my own history, the more I learn about the history of the United States, the more I learn that many of the things I was taught about history are either outright lies or built on a legacy of white supremacy that was always just hidden from view, and I keep asking myself the same question: what now? How do we get from our history of injustice and atrocity and white supremacy to a fairer, more just society, how do we make something positive out of it all? The scope of what has been done to people of colour by white supremacy is so awful, so huge, that I honestly can't get my head around it, and I'm not even a victim of it.

If this question is too vague, or too personal, feel free to delete, but I've been struggling with this for a while and don't know who to ask about it.

Hello Prof. Williams-

I read your book for a class this past Fall and really enjoyed it. It certainly shaped how I considered the rest of the readings by setting a high standard and providing a useful framework to think about violence and activism.

I'm curious if you could tell us about the process of giving testimony? I'm thinking about things like how people were chosen, the travel and costs involved, if whites would know beforehand that a Black person planned to testify, and anything else you'd want to tell us about

Hello, and thank you for doing this. I'm working my way thru "this non-violent stuff will get you killed", and I was wondering if you know A) how black communities were able to arm themselves B) how often black communities were able to defend themselves And c) what the repercussions of self defense were? Specifically during reconstruction and early 1900s. Thank you!

For the architects of Reconstruction, what developments in the former Confederacy would have made them declare the program a success and thus cause them to voluntarily end it?

Thank you for doing this. I recently read Ron Chernow’s biography on President Grant. In it he claims that President Grant made a valiant effort to protect blacks in the south and that it was mostly due to party politics and the loosing interest in the North that made reconstruction a failure. My question is there anyone in your opinion that could have lead the US to see reconstruction through? The balancing act between the spirit of Appomattox and the need to protect newly enfranchised blacks seems impossible. Do we know enough about Lincoln’s plans to think he could have done it? Could people like Thaddeus Stevens or President Hayes(had be made different choices) make a significant change? Or was it pretty inevitable the south was going to revert into Jim Crow?

Have you read Radio Free Dixi ? What are some books similar to the above that shows black WWII veteran’s confronting the klan or racism in general.

Professor Williams hello!

How did the first slaves learn english? Did it have a lasting effect on Black dialect?

Thank you for sharing...Professor Williams.