Survivors' Stories

In "Survivors' Stories," Williams will use African Americans' stories of racial violence (told in testimonies, letters, ex-slave narratives, creative arts, and comments on Without Sanctuary) to call for historians to do a better job of investigating the different ways in which individual and collective victims articulated their experiences of it. Addressing the fact that attached to every victim was a matrix of social relations that had to live with what happened, she argues, is the key to unlocking such under-historicized issues as the impact of racial violence on families, individual and communal health, wealth, and memory and to providing more complete histories of this violence. Although she concentrates on African Americans, her findings have implications for scholars of racial violence directed at a variety of groups.