“The Article” looks at newspaper accounts of lynching through the lens of print, visual, media, and material culture. This materialist lens draws particular attention to the production and circulation of newspaper accounts. Further, this chapter conceptualizes the broader issues of memory, absence, and narrative in the use of newspaper articles as historical primary sources.

Through an examination of scraps of clothing collected from the sites of lynching, this chapter theorizes the persistence of the reliquary object into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. The chapter focuses on the particularity of clothing as material objects capable of holding sensory and conceptual memories of the human body. This comes as part of a larger discussion of relics and reliquary cultures and builds on discourses on the Black male body from history, African American studies, and visual culture studies.

The conclusion to this book looks at the public afterlives of lynching objects as they move from personal collections into archives and museums. Through a study of several visual and material collections from lynchings, the chapter makes a claim for the persistence of lynching's material culture as part of an evolving historical conciousness. Further, this conclusion serves as a blueprint for a rethinking of the public historical interpretation of racial violence and of the rethinking of the entanglements between cultural heritage and racial violence.

“The Tree” examines lynching souvenirs in the context of the emerging tourist economies of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern United States. The chapter focuses on mementos taken from lynching trees as well as the overlaps between this practice and other forms of landscape documentation and tourism. Through this study, the chapter also charts the overlaps between different object categories, particularly souvenirs and relics, as the image of the South became an increasingly commericalized and consumable one. This study of lynching souvenirs thus makes an argument for the inextricability of southern identity from its foundations in racial violence.

This chapter examines another form of conventional historical source through a material culture lens by considering a letter written in 1898 by a former Fusionist supporter and the father of Emma Hartsell. Hartsell was the alleged cause of Kizer and Johnson's lynching, and her father's letter defended the lynching as a necessary corrective to his own former political beliefs. This chapter puts the letter in two broader contexts: the white supremacist political campaign of 1898, and the built environment of media in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century South. In particular, the chapter juxtaposes various landscape texts, such as notes left on lynched bodies and commerical advertising on buildings, to conceptualize broader printed and built cultures of white supremacy.

This chapter juxtaposes the history of the first Black-funded textile mill in the postbellum southern United States with the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer. The study uses the opening of the Warren C. Coleman mill in the same year and town as the Kizer and Johnson lynching to examine the overlaps between white definitions of labor and justifications for racial violence. Through a study of the hammer and chisel used to break into a jail cell to abduct the two victims, the author examines the evolution of working memory in and of the South, particularly as it pertains to questions of race, gender, and age.

“The Song” takes as its subject the material, visual, and sonic circulations of a ballad written about the Kizer and Johnson lynching. The chapter focuses in particular on its first recording, a 1960s single by the folk musician J. E. Mainer. By looking at its circulation first as a performed and then recorded song, the chapter examines the sonic and visual circulations of the ballad as a signifer of southern authenticity. By delving into discourses on authenticity and folk culture, “The Song” points to an evolution in the meaning of racial violence as a constitutive part of a white southern identity. Further, the study examines how this emblem of white southernness came to represent a particular form of personal authenticity for a new generation immersed in the folk revival movement of the 1960s. In this way the chapter serves as a study of both the racist ideology of some countercultural movements as well as the evolution of lynching's meaning in the late twentieth century.

This introductory chapter examines the study of lynching through the lens of material culture with particular attention to landscapes of memory. It both introduces the narrative of the lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer in Concord, North Carolina in 1898 and uses interdiscplinary theories drawn from African American studies, American studies, cultural history, and cultural geography to advance new methodologies for the study of racial violence.

How is the material world affected by place? How does an urban, suburban, or rural environment shape spaces, the built environment, and the form and use of objects? Why does this matter? This chapter explores siting and location as important factors in understanding the material world. The chapter also addresses the concepts of non-place and repulsive places.