The Empty Noose

Abstract

Although graphic lynching photographs have become a popular topic of academic study, today’s lynching iconography does not rely on spectacle. This essay explores how the shift to figurative representations of lynching affected anti-racist strategies. In particular, it examines how one organization and two authors of the Black Power/Black Arts Movement era—the Black Panther Party, playwright Ed Bullins, and novelist John Edgar Wideman—responded to this change. The Black Panthers and Bullins employed empty and cartoon noose imagery to retaliate against White power. They put the noose into the hands of a Black mob and made it into a tool of revenge. However, this strategy backfired, replacing one vision of mob violence with another, glossing over the costs of revolutionary violence, and allowing White culture to deny the racist meaning of the empty noose. John Edgar Wideman’s 1973 novel The Lynchers illustrates this, demonstrating that the empty noose image, even reclaimed for anti-racist purposes, has not been useful for African American liberation. Early anti-lynching activists like Ida B. Wells-Barnett were right in their insistence on gruesome spectacle in the fight against lynching, and their strategy remains necessary even in the 21st century, long after the era of frequent lynchings.