More Than a Snapshot: Historical Violence, Memorialization, and the Many Afterlives of Will Brown

The grisly portrait of Will Brown’s corpse taken after his 1919 Omaha lynching testifies to the heinous nature of anti-Black violence while gesturing to the still lingering structural and cultural violence which lingers a century later. In expanding the narrative beyond this captured moment to discuss previous extralegal executions, historical “misremembering,” and the city’s changing relationship with Brown’s memorialization, I demonstrate that violence occurs not only in the moment of bodily harm but in many forms as black community narratives are silenced or co-opted. Memory is a vital and sustaining community exercise. By documenting the changing meanings and accounts of Brown’s murder I demonstrate that far from being an aberrant event of Omaha’s “darkest day,” the popular narrative surrounding his death is one of reconciliation which actively ignores the ongoing racial terror that remains. The 21^st century framing and misremembering of Brown’s murder ties directly to regionally specific interpretations of anti-Black violence nearly 100 years ago.

Public remembrances and commemoration of racial violence arise from, and continue to shape, contemporary racial politics. In these narratives African Americans are relegated to mere props in an overwhelmingly triumphalist account of white Midwestern progress. Brown’s murder centers white actors at the cost of obscuring black agency. In using archival research, literary analysis, and participant-observation, I expand the view of Brown’s lynching from an aged sepia print capturing a moment of death to a careful interrogation of the many afterlives of Will Brown after his death. In naming the interpretative violence that has taken place since, scholars can more carefully investigate ongoing events of racial antagonism within a community, knowing that these instances are not isolated moments in time but rather playing in a continual film loop.