SOURCE: Harris, Trudier. “Literary Lynchings and Burnings.” In Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, pp. 69-94. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Harris provides an overview of works addressing the theme of lynching and argues that raising the topic was, for many writers, a consciously political act.

William Wells Brown depicts a scene in Clotel in which a group of slavers pursues, captures, and later burns a slave to death for being “impudent” to his master. Four thousand slaves are brought in from neighboring plantations to witness the spectacle and to assimilate thoroughly what the consequences would be if they should dare to be similarly impudent. Brown's novel is the first in a long line of works in which black American writers show black people being summarily executed for some “offense” against whites. In particular, Brown's novel illustrates how politically powerless Blacks were...