Community Activities Featured

As I have shared on this blog before, my scholarly work benefits from my running. Because running has been so good to me, I try to share it with as many people as possible. The local newspaper recently featured some of what I've been doing that has inspired more women to take notice! Story archived here: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2012/05/04/club-for-black-women-becoming-a-fitness-force.html

Boston University

Before my lecture at Boston University, Linda Heywood, director of the African American Studies program, called for a moment of silence for Trayvon Martin. This was Thursday, March 22, 2012 and I had just torn myself from the latest insulting press conference on CNN about the case. Silence was observed for a full minute and it changed the energy of every word I spoke that evening, almost as if I had never said those words before. I will never forget this lecture or the energy in that intimate space.

During the intense, intimate Q&A, a black male graduate student shared his experience of being beaten by a spontaneous mob and barely escaping with his life. At least he wasn't turned away at the hospital, he shared. I responded with (among many other points) my belief in the importance of community conversation, as articulated in Living with Lynching.

University of Delaware

I lectured at the University of Delaware on Wednesday, March 21, 2012. The event was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Diversity, which had recently hosted Claude Steele and featured his research on stereotype threat.

Listening to a thoughtful audience member during Q&A.

Reviewed on H-NET, Humanities & Social Sciences Online

A traditional historian provides a substantial review of Living with Lynching for H-Net, covering nearly every chapter in some detail. Highlights include:

"...Living with Lynching provides an emphatic push to change how we understand, write about, and teach the phenomenon of lynching."

"Living with Lynching does many things well. Historians will note that Mitchell has joined Davarian Baldwin (Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life [2007]) in geographically decentering the Harlem Renaissance. Her emphasis on a cadre of Washington DC playwrights makes clear the national flourishing of black arts and letters in the interwar period. Moreover, Mitchell’s choice to focus on lynching dramas as a product of the black community that reaffirmed its values and goals pushes historical analysis away from a simple interpretation of black cultural production as a 'protest art' in response to white oppression."

"Living with Lynching is a well-written, well-researched piece of scholarship that will hold great value for historians studying black life in the interwar period, the Harlem Renaissance, and the phenomenon of lynching. It pushes beyond the frozen in time image of the mutilated black body to the impact of lynching on the black household. Living with Lynching makes clear how African Americans in this period combated stereotyped images by reinforcing and performing 'how they saw themselves' and 'who they believed themselves to be' (p. 199)."

Full review HERE.

Interviewed by ColorLines Magazine

Short piece on Trayvon Martin case, the racial violence examined in Living with Lynching, and the importance of community conversation.
http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/03/koritha_mitchell_living_with_lynching.html

ColorLines is a publication of the Applied Research Center (http://www.arc.org/)