“A woman was lynched the other day”: Memory, gender, and the limits of traumatic representation

Abstract

I borrow the this essay’s title and the following image from Brooklyn-based artist Kim Mayhorn’s 1998 multimedia installation memorializing Black women who were victims of lynching and rape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (See Figure 4.1). The declaration "A Woman Was Lynched the Other Day" recalls the banner the New York NAACP would unfurl from their Fifth Avenue office when news of another lynching would surface. White letters inscribed on a black background would announce "A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY" and ignite a chain of communication that rallied member organizations to don black armbands and march through Times Square chanting "Stop the lynching," former National Council of Negro Women chair Dorothy Height recalls in her memoir (See Figure 4.2).1.