Telling Stories of the Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching

Mari Crabtree, associate professor of African American Studies at the College, joins us on this episode of Speaking Of… to talk about her latest publication, My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching. 

The book, which was published by Yale University Press, provides an intimate look at the aftermath of lynching as seen through the personal accounts of Black victims and survivors who lived through and overcame the trauma. Crabtree speaks with Matthew J. Cressler, associate professor of religious studies at the College, about her research.

“I wanted my book, to be kind of resting on the foundation of that work (from the Equal Justice Initiative), and focus on stories of individual people, because those lives are the reason the numbers matter, ultimately and that was something I didn’t want to lose,” says Crabtree. “So that’s why I wanted to invite the reader into these particular communities, and kind of weave these communities, these stories, these families into the book. (…) I wanted people to feel the full weight, or as much of the weight as they could carry, of the personal side of these of these lynchings.”

Featured on this Episode:

Mari N. Crabtree is a writer and an associate professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston. Her research seeks to excavate Black life beyond the binary of suffering or resistance by exploring how culture provides a lens for understanding the struggle for Black liberation but also Black ingenuity, joy, and love. Her book, My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, was published in 2022 by Yale University Press as part of the New Directions in Narrative History series. She also has published essays in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Rethinking History, Contemporaries, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Matthew J. Cressler is associate professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migrations (NYU Press, 2017) and has written for America, The Atlantic, National Catholic Reporter, Religion News Service, The Revealer, Slate, U.S. Catholic, andZocalo Public Square. He is a member of the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, a grassroots coalition of more than thirty congregations coming together to make the Lowcountry a place that is just and equitable for all. 

Resources:

My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale University Press, 2022)

Mari Crabtree's Website

Review in The New Republic of My Soul Is a Witness: 

James Baldwin’s collected essays, The Price of the Ticket

Transcript

Unknown: 0:14

Hello, and Welcome to Speaking of College of Charleston. I'm Matthew kressler, associate professor from the religious studies department. And on today's episode I'm speaking with Mari Crabtree associate professor of African American studies about her new book, My soul is a witness the traumatic afterlife of lynching published by Yale University Press this January. The book is an intimate look at the afterlife of lynching through the personal stories of black victims and survivors in the South who lived through and beyond its trauma. And first off, I just want to thank Marty for being in conversation with me, this is such a powerful, it's actually hard to come up with the right words, because it's powerful and beautiful. It's troubling and disturbing. It's deeply insightful. It's provocative, and I'm just really grateful to be in conversation with you about it. So thank you. Well, thank you for doing this with me, I, I'm really glad that you're the person I get to talk to about my book. So I told you this before, and I'll say it again, I have a thing about first lines of books, I love to see how authors how writers kind of invite kind of the, you know, make the first impression and invite readers and I was particularly struck, by the way you open your introduction. So the way you open your book, particularly because it struck me as a really interesting place to start specifically a book on the trauma of lynching and memory. So I was wondering if we could maybe begin the conversation with you reading for us that opening paragraph and then I have a question, I'd love to ask you about it. Sure. The artist has much to offer the scholar, beauty, pleasure, and certainly a dexterity with language and sound and images, but also a gift for reflecting the world back onto us and revealing the nuances and mysteries of the human condition. Art the good stuff anyway, compels us to pause and think more deeply. It demands the self reflection that prompts us to ask who we are, and what we can become, and and urges us to abandon stale questions and imagine new ways of seeing the world. Much of my own writing has been refracted through art, especially as I worked through this project on the traumatic legacies of lynching in the US South. A turn of a phrase and a use of common yaka poem provided a flash of insight into the impulse to trap painful memories inside and the costs of carrying the burden of that pain to the grave. A scene from a Toni Morrison novel prompted me to wonder if a place a tree a courthouse, the land itself can really hold the memories of the dead. A blues lyric, and the slow bending of a blue note from a Lightnin Hopkins song made me feel just for a moment, the desperation of searching for relief when faced with the limits of otherworldly justice. Who thank you so much for that. So I you know, I am friends with you, I know your work well. And I knew that this book was about the trauma of lynching, not just kind of as acts of violence, but as kind of memory carried in the body, in the soul. And so then when I read that first line, right, the the artist has much to offer the scholar, you know, beauty pleasure. Those are words that I you know, was kind of surprised to read as the opening line. And I was wondering if you could speak more about why you chose to open this book on the afterlife of lynching, you know, this book on history and memory of horror and trauma, with a meditation on art and beauty, which I thought was a really powerful way to begin. Well, there are a couple reasons for this. I think the first is that so much of my work is really refracted through the work of artists, especially other writers, but also visual artists, musicians and other folks. And so I wanted to pay homage to the people who inspire me who provide me with a lot of the ideas at the core of my of my work. And the other part of this too is that I think, on a book about lynching, which necessary really is going to be a book about violence is necessarily going to be a disturbing book to read. I wanted to prepare readers for the other things that I'm doing in this book, because as much as this is a book about lynching, it's really a book about black southerners how black southerners made it through and beyond lynching and the real beauty that is revealed in such a study, you know, when you actually asking a slightly different question from what we tend to ask about lynching, we tend to ask, why did people do this? You know, what were the consequences for white and black southerners of lynching? And those are all legitimate questions to ask them that have been asked, I think in answered quite well by a lot of other scholars, but I wanted to send your black people I wanted to center the black cultural tradition. And I wanted to center the grace and beauty that issues forth from black people, black communities, and that cultural tradition. Yeah, and I think that that's one of the things, one of the many things that I love about your book so much, is precisely what you were just saying about how you're taking this, the subject that in some senses, those of us who are awake to the world and our past, feel like we know so much about but giving it to us, inviting us into an entirely different way of approaching that right. And so actually, my my second question kind of dovetails very well with that kind of first one, because in the first chapter, so chapter one is titled an anatomy of a lynching. There are these two remarkable moments that I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like in a work of history, because so the book, or sorry, the chapter is an anatomy of a lynching. And you kind of to start off the book breaking down for us kind of how lynching kind of in broad brushstrokes operated in history, so you're breaking down the mobs and the rituals and the myths that defined these horrifying spectacles in that moment, so as you're doing this, and as you're kind of leading us through these really, really difficult, disturbing kind of descriptions of, of, of lynching, you have a paragraph break. And then you literally instruct us as readers breathe. You know, when I was reading it, it was like, almost like having you turn to the camera. If this were a movie and insisting that we pause and go no further. You even say like, at one point, this is a quote, you say breathe, and then you say, let our, let your eyes lose focus, let them wander from the page, you're reading this book, you know, I was reading this book, and then you as author are telling me, now you need to stop reading. I don't want you to go any further yet. Which just totally blew me away. And so I was wondering if you could talk. And I think again, this kind of like rhymes with that first question about art and the artist and what the artist has to say. But he talked more about this choice you made as an author, and how it connects to the ethics that you are kind of insisting that we take up as readers and that you are taking up as scholar and writer because I think that this is a kind of narrative choice. It's an authorial choice. But it's, it's one that's deeply informed by the ethics of your work as a scholar and writer. So yeah, the first chapter is, was a very difficult chapter to write because of the extended descriptions of violence. It was I imagined very hard for someone to read as well. And I did get some feedback and one of my book manuscript workshops about how hard Chapter One was to get through because of the not because I was unnecessarily talking about violence. It's kind of unavoidable in a book on lynching. But that it was unrelenting in some ways. And so I wanted those linebreaks those pauses, the instruction to breathe, to be there for the reader. And to also recenter the focus away from what the lynch mob did because that's what those sections that preceded them. Were talking about. I think it was because the book is really about black communities in the South. I wanted to talk about black families, black communities. I wanted to talk about them again. And, and remind the reader as they were pausing and breathing, that that's what this is really about. I had really good advice from Tara Hunter, my mentor at Princeton, who said that you shouldn't be writing for the very worst reader out there. So you don't need to be writing this to convince someone who's the worst person you can imagine, who doesn't think lynching was that bad or needs to see every little bit of gore on the page, and instead to think about what you need to convey about the gravity of this act, in order to set the stage for the analysis that you're doing. And so that was also part of that kind of thought process. And the writing was, how do I achieve that balance where I am imagining a reader who I want to stay with me, who I don't want to hurt while they're reading. While I also want to not minimize the true harm? The true terror, the true trauma that issued from lynchings. Yeah, yeah. And I think to say a little bit more about it, like it just and it's so this is in chapter one. So you're still early on as a reader, you know, you're still early on in the book. And it almost kind of I think one of the reasons that it was so striking for me is it almost kind of not almost it did insist that this isn't that you shouldn't engage this book, as you perhaps we're kind of conditioned to engage it right like that we're conditioned, you know, when we're reading a scholarly work working condition to kind of particularly a work of history, to approach it as a kind of text through which we absorb new information, right, that we are learning about, you know, the facts for lack of a better term, right? And it and those brief moments really insisted that like, No, we're not dealing with facts. I mean, we are but but but like that, what you really, as you were just saying, like, what you're really doing is kind of inviting us to, to inviting us into the lives of these black families, these survivors, often of lynching or the threat of lynching. And inviting us to kind of be with them almost right there is there's a kind of, I'm kind of failing for words on it, but it's a kind of meditation, you know, there is a kind of, I'm a religious studies scholar, so I'll just go there, right, there's a kind of like spiritual kind of like, component to that part of the book, which I thought was really powerful. And, you know, for the, for the listeners, this book is part of a series called net new directions and narrative history. And so I felt like that was a moment in particular, among many others, where I felt you kind of, in a sense, saying, like, you know, inviting us, you know, of course, to think about lynching in particular ways, but also to kind of think about what we're doing as historians or as scholars, or as just readers of history, like you're kind of insisting that we relate to the past in ways that are different than how we're accustomed to. I don't know if you have more thoughts on that. But yeah, because again, there's been wonderful work, wonderful scholarship done. Wonderful work by the Equal Justice Initiative in compiling names and numbers, places of or lynchings took place. And that work is absolutely indispensable. I want in my book, to be kind of resting on the foundation of that work, and focus on stories focus on individual people, because individual people lives are the reason why the numbers matter, ultimately, right. And that was something I didn't want to lose. So that's why I wanted to invite the reader into these particular communities, and kind of weave those communities these stories, these families into the book, instead of it being an attempt at like covering every single lynching that happened in the south, which would be impossible, really diving into these stories because I wanted people to feel the full, full weight or as much of the weight as they could carry of the personal side of these of these lynchings Yeah, and speak I guess I'm this whole podcast is speaking to listeners, but directing this to the listeners. You know, this is like one of the real gifts of this book and why I'd really encourage you to read it the lives that that materi that you bring to the page, or lives that you really feel like you come to know. And correct me if I'm getting the name wrong. James Pennington is a Jesse Jesse Jesse Pennington is one of these people who survives a lynching. escapes to Chicago. And so I kind of get to know him in this early moment in his life. And then later in the book, he shows back up again, because he, he ended up because he was in Chicago attending the funeral for Emmett Till. And it was this moment where, you know, if you are familiar with African American history, you've you've heard, you know, the funeral of Emmett Till, you know, described in so many ways in so many times. But there was this kind of very human connection where it's this this person, I feel like I now know so many of the people that you that you describe in the book and understand that that's a real a real gift and why, you know, one of the many reasons that I'd encourage people to really pick up my soul as a witness and, and sit with it. So I'm going to take us to a different moment in the book now, the middle of the book, Dara is, you know, again, we're friends. So we've talked about this. So I was gonna say, dare I say, maybe both of our favorite chapters if we have to choose a favorite chapter, which is chapter three, the title of which is haunting. And in this chapter, you tell ghost stories, in a sense, you tell ghost stories, but ones that very much challenge the kinds of romanticized ghost stories that you might hear on a kind of ghost tour in downtown Charleston, right? You and this is a quote from the book you note that throughout the South African Americans have told stories about haunted courthouses, inexplicable afflictions, mysterious deaths, and agonized deathbed confessions that resurrected the ghosts of local lynchings. And I just, you know, I was so kind of captivated by this chapter haunted by this chapter, that I was wondering if you might tell us a ghost story. If you if you might just choose maybe one of your favorites, or a one one moment that really stands out to you to give again, you know, listeners a sense of how this book is, you know, doing something a little different in the ways that we think about lynching and memory. Yes, the one I'll talk about then is the one that James Reed told me and the way I even found James Reed is interesting, because I had been working on my dissertation, talking to my district, one of my dissertation committee members, Robert Harris, and he was like, Oh, well, you know, my brother in law, James Reed, has this ghost story, he told me that about a haunted courthouse where a man had been lynched. And so that's how I came across. It was very much kind of by accident. But this is what how I describe it, at least in part in the book. From a second story window of the small brick courthouse in Pickens County, Alabama, a face etched onto the windowpane piers out onto the tiny town of Carrollton. For the locals, that pane of glass has become the stuff of legend, or to be more precise legends. Most explanations for the apparition in the courthouse involve the lynching of a black man. But the differences between black and white memories of the haunting, reveal how these disparate memories of the apparition in the window served very different purposes for each community. Growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi during the 1940s and 1950s, James Reed hurt his great aunt Maggie, Maggie rose Barnett, read, tell all kinds of stories about living in rural Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow. When the extended family came over to visit, they talked about everything from Klan violence, the daily humiliations of segregation. But one story in particular stuck out a story about a face that would appear in a courthouse window, remembered it this way, quote, growing up, my great aunt who raised me used to tell me of a story of a situation that took place back in the oh, I guess, early 20s of an African American being lynched in some part of Alabama, which was actually it was right across the river. Let's see. Noxubee county is where we were our family was, and it was right across the river. So it had to be the Tombigbee River in Alabama. So whatever is close to Noxubee County in Alabama is where this took place. The story goes, there was this African American that was allegedly dating a white woman, and he was arrested and killed. And he said that he was not guilty of anything. He hadn't raped. It was a rape situation. They had not raped this woman. But they took him out and killed him anyway. The story goes is that he said, quote, you will see my face in the courthouse window once a month or something to that effect. And according to the way it was told to me They tried changing out the window and everything. And regardless of the number of times they tried to change out the window, his face would appear, as he predicted. I so I have a few things I want to say. The first is that I remember you giving a presentation on this chapter before well, before it was a book chapter, when it was still in progress. And you had an image of that front of the courthouse. And I'm, as you're reading the story, I'm seeing the image like that, that has never left me like that has stuck with me that face. And so I'm just, I'm blown away by that. But I also, you know, as you were reading that particular story, I was struck by kind of one of the, I think signatures of the book, which is that it's a storytelling book, or it's a book where you are allowing kind of, or inviting all of these people to tell their own stories. And the way you're doing that is very much, you know, not like what will happen in post production of this podcast, where arms and ands and you know, coughs are taken out, but you're really attentive to the silences, the pauses, the kind of stop start nature of these stories, and, and, you know, so not only do you keep them in the book, but you attend to them as kind of moments that demand that we listen, right? Not that they're just kind of like someone who hasn't quite got the words, right, but that we can actually learn something about those ellipses, you know, those things that might in a normal text just show up as an ellipsis. Right. And so I'm wondering, like, you know, in that, you know, since you read that story, and you've brought him into the room, if you could maybe say a little bit about that kind of choice, because I think that that is, again, a kind of distinctive way that you bring these people's lives into our lives through the book. Yeah, I think it was really important in both the transcription process for oral histories that other people recorded, and the transcription process for my own oral histories that I did, to think not just about what they were saying, but how they were saying it. Trauma is something that operates by having some traumatic episode, return, often on by uninvited. And yeah, like, of course, you never know when it's going to show up. And the ways in which people were recalling stories. So often, we're most easily understood through the the framework of like, what trauma is on in terms of psychology, right? Like, what does a post traumatic stress response look like? And so as much as I was obviously interested in, like, how did the face appear? Or what did they do to the Windows or, you know, what did the town do in the aftermath? Those details are obviously really important, but also the ways in which people told stories, especially stories that were from their own direct experience, was just as important as what they were saying, really the how they're saying it. And I kind of close Chapter Three with a close reading of an interview that Paul or tease as a historian of Florida, did with many Weston, this black woman in Mississippi in the 1990s, through Duke University. And I am very attentive to what she's saying about, you know, lynchings that happened in her family and her town, but also, her reluctance to return to some of those horrific memories, and also the ways in which she was able to compartmentalize those memories from the rest of her life as a way to just continue to live. And that's just as much of the story as what happened to her, like, how does she come to terms with or if she can't come to terms with how does she handle and survive this? Yeah, and many Weston along with Jesse Pennington are two of the the people like the the the human beings that you can bring into our lives through the book that like I'm never going to forget, like that moment at the end of chapter three is one of my favorites. And I actually before I want to transition to another question, but before we leave, I have to chime in as the religious studies professor, because one of the things that I love and it's throughout the book, but it's specially there in this haunting chapter is how you let the stories be there and be true and not kind of immediately start to psychoanalyze or like, offer some kind of explanation of what's actually going on. So you open you know, and I won't read the passage, but you open chapter three with the story of a theodicy of kind of God and kind of coming down through in the form of a tornado to kind of like rip through this town where waco where there's been a lynching and you you share these stories and then the last line in this opening part is or So the story is went right, like as a wait, like, as a way of I hear you saying like, and I'm not going to comment on like whether God actually sent a tornado down but like, this is what they say and like, we need to hear what they say, Right? Which I just love. And again, you know, in I think much of history as a discipline kind of like if you're not attuned to kind of religious studies scholarship, you might be inclined to be like, well, this is what, you know, they said, but like, let me tell you what's actually going on. And you're just like, you know, this is what they say, and why don't we sit with this? Yeah, yeah. Because I'm I'm much less. As well, I'm not trained as a historian to figure out which ghosts are real. But also, I don't care in a certain way, because I care much more about why the ghosts appear. Like, why do they tell the ghost story? And that's a much more interesting question to me than like, was there? was God's hand right at play in this tornado? Or was the face in the window? The face of this? This man, you know? So I have, I have two more questions. One is for one is for our students, and one is for me. So this one goes out to all our students, you know, both of us teach classes and African American Studies. And I think, you know, and you can, you know, share a little bit if you if you think differently, but you know, I think a lot of our students come to African American Studies and stay because they find in African American Studies, this tradition of critique of resistance, and of protest, right to systems of oppression, that so much of the world ignore us, right? They find in our classes, this kind of refreshing recognition of the dominance of white supremacy, and anti blackness and colonialism and the ways that they shape our world that are so often ignored, right. And so that's, you know, what I think draws a lot of our students to our classes, maybe even what keeps a lot of our students in our classes. And yet, you know, in your book, you're offering an important critique of the dominance of the resistance paradigm, as you call it. And you're drawing on the works of other scholars as well, who really want to challenge this assumption that the end all be all of African American life and living is resistance, right? That we always have to read African American history through the lens of resistance. I'm thinking especially about your your chapters on protest, and the blues where you kind of push us to kind of move beyond thinking that protest is just a synonym for the civil rights movement or a social movement. And yeah, so I'd love to hear you reflect a little bit on on why you think it's important to challenge this dominant paradigm and how challenging it kind of invites us to reframe how we think of African American life. Yeah, I think that the, the kind of focus on protest has to also be historically situated. So within us society and within academia, there for a very long time was a truly distorted narrative about black life. If focused on kind of black facility, it was one that kind of played up the Sambo or other kinds of caricatures of blackness, that denied resistance existing. It was one that criticized African Americans for not having the same forms of resistance that you saw in places like Haiti, or in Jamaica, which had, again, also much larger black populations percentage wise than, than the United States. And so the focus on resistance was initially especially like in the 1960s, let's say, in academia, and also in, you know, our social movements was a reflection of a desire to show that no, people are not okay. With Jim Crow. No, people were not okay with slavery, no, people are not okay, with oppression, and therefore we have to do something about it. So that's where a lot of that is coming from. And I think that's where a lot of the students are also coming from is that they have seen an absence of really talking about not just the fact of the injustice, but what we should do about it. And that's what I do agree, you know, the students come to our classes to learn about. I also want However, my students to appreciate that black people's lives are not just about suffering, or resistance, that there are so many other facets and nuance senses of black culture and kind of black communities that don't have to do with what white people are doing to you, right. And so I wanted to leave room for in the book. And I hope I do this in my courses to, to think about what it means to have a fuller understanding of black life that's not simply reactive to white supremacy. And so I think that it's important to then on the one hand, have a broader definition of protests and not just think about, you know, people in the streets, protesting and marches or just people boycotting or people making political speeches, but to also think about it and some of the everyday ways that people resist and even resistance through or protest through mourning, right, affirming the the value of the person who has you have lost is a form of protest, even though it's not public. It's not directed by white people, it is directed within right within the community, and to yourself. But I also think, again, like the book is about a kind of beauty and grace, that can't be reduced to just what white supremacy forced to be created. And that's also just an important lesson for all of us to be reminded of when we're thinking about black people's lives. There aren't only two stories, it's not only suffering, or resistance, there's so many more things we should be talking about, even in a book about lynching. That's right. That's right. Well, I mean, and I actually think that this dovetails perfectly with my last question, which again, is the question for me, because, you know, we began this conversation talking about your opening sentence, right, your opening paragraph and about how you kind of invite us into this conversation on the trauma of lynching through the artist right through beauty through pleasure. And there are countless poets, novelists, musicians that you're quoting throughout your book, in other words, like artists are all over the pages. But one artist in particular, who you and I, you know, adore and have learned so much from is James Baldwin. Right? Baldwin looms very large. He's there in chapter epigraphs. He's there in quotes, but of course, he's you know, if your first sentence is, the artist has much to offer the scholar, the first words that anyone will read, are actually Baldwins. The title of your book comes from a Baldwin quote, as you know, near the quote is my memory stammers. But my soul is a witness. And so, you know, I actually think you're probably touching on this a little bit in that last answer. But I was wondering if you could reflect kind of as a final question on what insights Baldwin offers you, in particular, you know, why his voice is so singular? You know, which is not to say that like over and against other artists, but there seems to be a particular thing or set of things, we're way of saying things and thinking about, you know, race and violence, and memory and trauma and the blues and these things. And just like what it means to be human, that that Baldwin offers you. And so I just, your title opens with Baldwin. And so maybe we can fit in that we close with him as well. So, yeah, we're actually right now I'm teaching a seminar on Baldwin, which I will be teaching next spring, if any one of my students have any students are interested in taking it. And he's someone who was a real seer. You know, he wrote in the middle of the 20th century, late 20th century, but was but has written things that very much speak to the President continue to speak to the present. And he's also someone who's alive during a lot of the period that my book is about. And I think both of those things make him such an important thinker for me to think with and through. The idea for the book came in many ways from him, I read a short story called going to meet the man, which is about a white deputy sheriff in the south, who is made to feel something is has changed because of the civil rights movement. And to reassure himself of his place as a white man in the south, goes back to this memory of a lynching that he attended as a child. And so even though my book is Not about white Southerners, although they are in chapter four, and in parts of chapter two, two, it's really a book that is thinking about memory, how does that memory continue to shape who we are? And how do we go return to memories as a way of kind of positioning ourselves. And so it was through his short story that I came to ask the scholarly question about the afterlife of lynching for black Southerners. And also, in part through his and others, work on the blues, his that that got me to thinking about the centrality of the sensibility of the blues, in understanding black responses to trauma. And his essay, the uses of the blues is a really beautiful job of articulating what it is that the blues are about, right? You know, life is hard, you will suffer. There's no way around that. But you have to make a way for yourself to get through that. And that's what that sensibility is right. And it's one that he thinks that is often not a part of the more general American consciousness, right? We try to avoid thoughts of suffering and death and try to live in like this happy place without the reality that life does involve suffering. And we have to still find a way even though it seems impossible to get through it. And so there's so many of these kinds of insights from Baldwin. I love what he can do with language. I can't do what he does with language. I don't think anyone can. But I do appreciate what he can do with language. And for me, he's always been the model for what it means to be a good writer, a good thinker. And as he would say, a good man, too. Yeah. And I think that if I can say one last thing about your book is that, you know, this thing that I keep saying over and over again, about the kind of the beauty and poetry of your book, on this kind of horrifying subject is very Baldwin in in that sense, I think that he has this gift of kind of making life come alive in words, and you've done that as well here. So I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful for this beautiful and brilliant book. And I'd encourage everyone again, listening to really pick it up and discover it for yourself. This book is my soul as a witness, the traumatic afterlife of lynching. Thank you so much, Marty. Thank you for having me. This is a great conversation. So thank you for listening to this episode of speaking of College of Charleston with today's guest Professor Marty Crabtree. For more episodes and to read stories about our guests, visit the College of Charleston official news site, the college today at today dot c of c.edu. You can also find episodes on all major podcast platforms including Apple podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave a review. This episode was produced by Amy Stockwell from the Office of marketing communications with recording and sound engineering by Jesse Collins from the Division of Information Technology. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.