elcome to our collaborative website on the subject of lynching and violence in American culture.  We are a partnership of college students from Dillard University (New Orleans, Louisiana) and CU Boulder (Boulder, Colorado).  This website is a by-product of our Fall 2004 literature class, Chicano and African American Literature: Resistance and Human Rights (please see course syllabus for a description of the CU-Dillard Educational Technology Partnership).  We’ve read a number of transformative and powerful texts, such as Tomas Rivera’s …And the Earth Did not Devour Him and Assata Shakur’s autobiography, Assata.  More importantly, we used technology; discussion board, email and this website project to communicate between our university campuses and share passionate insights on a number of issues, such as women’s rights, migrant farm worker rights, the Black Power movement, and 1960’s prison writings and political movements, among other things.

Initial thoughts and ideas for this website came from class discussions about lynching and mob mentality in American culture.  In 1964 James Baldwin wrote the play, Blues for Mister Charlie, in honor of Emmett Till, an African American youth lynched and then disposed of in a river by racist whites in Money, Mississippi, in 1955.  It was common practice to lynch African Americans during the Jim Crow era of American history.  African Americans were not the only group in America lynched and subject to other practices of social control.  Native Americans, Mexican migrant workers and women, among other groups, have been lynched throughout American history.

In the early twentieth century and still today, lynching and violence are employed in the context of mob rule and under the auspices of the American police state.  We want lynching and other forms of organized, institutionalized violence to stop.  We believe that one means of intervening in these phenomena is education and understanding.  As you explore our website you will see how lynching, rape, sexism, racial stereotyping, anxieties about American jobs, and xenophobia, among other things, are all connected.  Too often, in our American culture, we are encouraged to think in terms of single issues or more personal concerns that affect this group or that.  Hopefully, as you browse through our website, it will be difficult for you to see the lynching of Native American (Sioux) activist, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash as distinct from the lynching of white gay male, Matthew Shepherd.  One lynching centered around land rights and FBI infiltration of the American Indian Movement and the other centered around gay hating and heterocentric aggression and ignorance.  Both of these lynchings were rooted in prejudices and misconceptions maintained within the dominant sector of American culture.

In the short essays that follow we lay out the facts (with plenty of references for those who want to do additional research) and paint a broader picture.  We challenge ourselves and you to translate this information into new models, new understandings and new paradigms of equitable social interaction.

Yours Truly,

Drs. Chandra Tyler-Mountain and Vincent Woodard
Dillard University-University of Colorado Educational Technology Partnership
Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York