Violence. The element singularly constitutes a central hallmark of the black American experience across centuries. Spanning kidnappings, savage beatings, extra-legal executions, sexual assaults, pogroms, police brutality, and mass incarceration, violence acts as a powerful mechanism to control and keep marginalized groups at the bottom of social hierarchies. Despite the ubiquity of violence in African American history, the temporal, regional, and gendered contours remain understudied. Taken as a whole, the papers in this panel grapple with the intersection of direct violence, memory and meaning, and the archive. By using episodes of interpersonal and State violence as a starting point, these scholars consider the lasting impacts of such violence, namely periodization, resistance, and historical legacy. By centering anti-Black violence as a category of analysis, this broader interpretive frame provides new ways to consider some of the most vexing issues of the African American experience. Apart from acknowledging how the State and its agents reign terror on black bodies, these scholars recapture narratives of black agency both contemporarily and in the creation of modern-day historical narratives. At a time of increasing transphobic, racial, and ethnic violence, understanding the mechanisms for employing and resisting violence, is more vital than ever.

In his paper, Brent Campney examines “posse killings” against Blacks in the Midwest between 1910 and 1930. In identifying more than a dozen such incidents, his work challenges the periodization of the “late lynching” phase and assumptions that lynchings were declining during the early twentieth century. Additionally, his work highlights the blurred line between mob violence and police violence. Shannon King contextualizes the politics around the 1935 Harlem riot mayor’s commission and centers the contradictions between police occupation and La Guardia liberalism. Specifically, he frames how key stakeholders’ interpretations and explanations of the riot became an important battleground for its contemporary meaning. King also outlines that these understandings became rhetorical fodder for liberal law and order and the emergence of a nascent social movement against police violence. Treva Lindsey reconsiders the archive of anti-Black violence and the ways that Black women and girls occupy a status of perpetual vulnerability and disposability in the face of state violence. While she argues it irresponsible to ahistorically compare experiences of Black women across centuries, she employs the politics of disposability, to rewrite women into the long history of anti-Black violence, changing gendered assumptions in the broader narrative. Finally, in reflecting on the many afterlives of Will Brown, Ashley Howard demonstrates that violence occurs not only in the moment of bodily harm but in the stories and frames that occur after. She argues that by silencing or co-opting black community narratives, Brown’s historical legacy becomes one which centers white redemption, obscuring black agency. Taken as a whole, these papers address the many forms of anti-Black violence, be it extra-legal, police, gendered, or historical and the ways in which reimagining these narratives can impact and embolden resistance.