Moore Isaac

Chronicle of Higher Education, 2002

A report on "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," a powerful exhibit at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta and the web of issues it raised

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2006

Review of Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947, University of Illinois Press, 2004

This essay offers a close reading of the 2008 reenactment of the 1946 Moore's Ford Lynching of four African Americans in Walton County, Georgia. Throughout this fieldwork, we were ethnographically positioned as co-performative witnesses, both "a part of" and "apart from," mirroring the tensions between the intellectual remove of much rhetorical scholarship and the embodied engagement and understanding of performance studies. A complex and sophisticated repertoire of invention shared by the coalition of activists who planned and staged the performance enabled reenactors to mobilize their bodies to construct the ineffability of traumatic memory, challenge official accounts of the lynching, and advocate hope and healing for the future. Through the "cross-temporal slippage" of reenactment, all in attendance were invited to occupy the subject location of moral witness. A fracture in the coalition along lines of racial privilege/subordination and gender politics revealed the differential reliance upon archival and embodied knowledge, again mirroring the tensions that bind rhetoric and performance.

1999

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2014

RAPE, LYNCHING, AND MYTHMAKING IN M ISSOURI , 1804-1933” This thesis examines the creation and the perpetuation of the black rapist myth in Missouri at the turn of the century. It also explains the relationship between this myth, the practice of lynching, the popularized field of eugenics, and the long Civil Rights movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using criminal court cases from 1804 to 1900 and state prison records from 1871 to 1933 available at the Missouri State Archives in St. Louis, Missouri, newspaper articles from throughout the state, and Missouri’s history of lynching published by Harriet Frazier, I explain how the black rapist image was in fact a generated historical myth. I argue that the creation of the black rapist myth was a result of the post-emancipation construction of a sexualized racial caste system. This thesis will also show how the black rapist myth was shaped by racial relations in Missouri throughout the late nineteenth and early...

The Journal of American Culture, 2007

Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2004

Review of Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874 – 1947 by Michael J. Pfeifer, University of Illinois Press, 2004 in Law, Culture and the Humanities

eGrove, 2019

The role of silence is explored with regard to how two lynchings in North Mississippi have, or have not, been memorialized. L.Q. Ivy was lynched in Union County in 1925. Despite several newspaper articles over the decades since the lynching has occurred his death is not acknowledged in the local history narrative, nor is it memorialized with a marker. Elwood Higginbottom was lynched in neighboring Lafayette County in 1935 and, despite a silence that has persisted for decades, has recently been memorialized. The process of memorializing Higginbottom’s lynching and what it has meant to the family is compared to the continuing silence around Ivy. In addition, the development of a MFA project incorporating an experimental “illustrated audio” piece and website is described.

Current Research in Digital History, 2019

Lynching inventories are fundamental tools to measure the extent and trends of lethal mob violence against alleged criminals during the post-Reconstruction era in the United States. The digital history project "Racial Terror: Lynchings in Virginia, 1877-1927" revisits the Beck-Tolnay inventory of Southern lynchings, the most comprehensive and accurate scholarly catalogue of lethal mob violence in the Deep South. Focusing on lynching in Virginia, this project uses local, rather than national, newspapers as its main source of information. Importantly, the use of local sources reveals that white victims of lynching in Virginia have been overcounted in lynching inventories. This is a significant finding because lynching apologists often used white lynching victims to defend lethal mob violence arguing that, rather than a tool of white domination, lynching was a legitimate and non-racialized form of "popular justice" against hideous crimes. This project enhances our understanding of lynching as a form of racialized terrorism and recommends the systematic use of local newspapers and sources to correct existing lynching catalogues.

The Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 2023

This article examines the anti-lynching struggle of Jessie Daniel Ames and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in the 1930s, which aimed to bring an end to the practice of lynching in the southern states of the U.S. Originally a form of vigilante violence against various individuals, especially in the areas far from federal government's control, lynching became a practice based on racial superiority in the late nineteenth century. Allegations of sexual assault by African American men against white women were often used to justify the actions of lynch mobs in the southern states. In this respect, alongside northern anti-lynching organizations, southern white women standing up against lynchings, which were supposedly carried out in the name of protecting them, made a significant contribution to the anti-lynching struggle in the first half of the twentieth century. This paper analyzes the actions taken by the organization under the leadership of Ames in order to change widely held assumptions about the lynchers and their victims.