AUTHORS/ACADEMIC EXPERTS

An informal expert advisory panel consisting of leading scholars specializing in the history & sociology and perceptual aspects of lynching has already been assembled. These include:

Monte Akers -  is the author of Flames After Midnight: Murder, Vengeance, and the Desolation of a Texas Community. Over a 12-year period, he interviewed witnesses and participants in the numerous lynchings that occurred in and around Kirven, Texas in May-June 1922, which included the triple burning of three black men accused of murdering a young white girl. An attorney for the Texas Municipal League in Austin, his research examined the mindset of the lynchers, the role of lynching in the culture and politics of the period, the effect of the Kirven incident on the local and national scenes, and revealed the identity and motives of the probable murderers -- white brothers who went unpunished.

Lonnie Athens - a full professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Seton Hall University, has served as a consultant on numerous murder cases. He is also the author of two books: The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals and Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited. The noted American author, Richard Rhodes, recently published a widely acclaimed book about Dr. Athens' life and work titled: Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. Athens will enlighten our audience about the indispensable role that "violent" and "ultra-violent" individuals play in igniting lynch mobs.

Alwyn Barr -  Professor of history at Texas Tech University, is the author of the lynching-related article "The Texas Black Uprising Scare of 1883" and has also served on the advisory committees of several former students who wrote dissertations on the topic of lynching in Texas.

Pervis L. Brown - is associated with the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso as a visiting assistant professor of history and African-American studies. As a University of Michigan Ph.D. student, he is currently researching same race lynchings in Texas. As a private study, he is examining the small number of Texas lynching events featuring non- white perpetrators. Both areas of study will inform our work.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage -  is professor and director of graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A noted scholar on the topic of lynching, he is the author of Lynching in the New South, Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 and editor of Under Sentence of Death: Essays on Lynching in the South.

William D. Carrigan -  is a specialist in the history of race, ethnicity, and violence in the Southwest borderlands. He wrote the classic dissertation Between South and West: Race, Violence, and Power in Central Texas, 1836-1916, and with co-author Clive Webb of the University of Sussex, he is writing Muerto Por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons Unknown): Mob Violence Against Mexican Americans, 1848-1928. He is an advisor for our segment dealing with "Hispanic-American" lynching violence.

Robert Cvornyek - is assistant professor of history at Rhode Island College. He is a former student of Dr. Robert L. Zangrando, associate professor of history at the University of Akron and author of the definitive work The NAACP Crusade against lynching, 1909-1950. Dr. Cvornyek's subject area of US history assumes additional relevance because post-Civil War and segregation era studies are specific areas of his expertise and are particularly germane to the film's content.

Dennis B. Downey - is professor of history at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania. He is the co-author, with Raymond M. Hyser, of No Crooked Death: Coatesville, Pennsylvania and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker (1991), a work that was awarded the outstanding book award from the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights in 1992. He has also published articles about several other lynching events occurring north of the fabled Mason-Dixon line and is well-versed in areas of historic preservation, race relations, and lynching as religious-sanctioned ritual -- all crucial to our film's conceptual core.

Michael Fedo - is a former folksinger, college teacher, and contributor to the New York Times.  His books include: The Lynchings in Duluth, The Man From Lake Wobegon (an unauthorized biography of Garrison Keillor), One Shining Season and a novel, Indians in the Arborvitae.

Crystal N. Feimster - is assistant professor of history at Boston College. Her dissertation completed at Princeton University in 2000, Ladies and Lynching: The Gendered Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South, 1880-1930 will be published as a book in 2003 and is complementary to her current research which examines the roles of black and white women within the narrative of southern lynching.

Kenneth E. Foote -  is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado in Boulder and the author of Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy. His pioneering book explores how and why Americans have memorialized -or not - the sites of tragic and violent events. In examining sites where people have been victimized by lynching, Dr. Foote's research should prove invaluable by helping to determine where and under what conditions healing and reconciliation are likely to occur. 

William B. Gravely - is professor emeritus of religious studies in the department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. His publications include "Race, Truth, and Reconciliation in the United States: Reflections of Desmond Tutu's Proposal"(especially those reflections introduced to human consciousness in Tutu's recent book No Future Without Forgiveness) published in the Journal of Religion & Society, Volume 3, 2001. Dr. Gravely's experience includes a childhood encounter with events surrounding the 1947 lynching of African-American Willie Earle in Pickens and Greenville, South Carolina.

Grace Elizabeth Hale - assistant professor of American history at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, is the author of Making Whiteness: the Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. She will clarify vital aspects of the Southern experience to be examined by the film -- especially as relates to the crucial period when "spectacle lynchings" were a virulent form of American entertainment. 

Trudier Harris - professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. She will inform those parts of the film dealing with lynching as a ritual and also those protions emphasizing aspects of the African-American experience. 

Martha Hodes - professor of history at New York University, is the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South and The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the 19th Century.  Her expertise and knowledge about sex and race roles in the 19th-Century South, and how these factors influenced the practice of lynching will prove invaluable.

Sherrilyn A. Ifill - is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, Maryland and represents minority and low-income communities in cases seeking environmental justice and equity. After serving as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. in New York, litigating voting rights cases on behalf of African American voters throughout the South, Ifill came to Maryland to research race and the justice system. Her article, "Creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Lynching," will be published in the Third World Law Journal this year, and she is currently writing a book about the 1930 lynching of Matthew Williams on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Robert Ingalls -  is professor of history at the University of South Florida and is the author of Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882-1936 and other studies of mob violence and lynching in the South. He is an expert on anti-labor radicalism -- especially as the labor movement and lynching events as a phenomenon coalesced.

Benjamin H. Johnson -  teaches history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.  He is author of Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003), the story of a regional rebellion at the southern tip of Texas in 1915, one of the most intense and protracted episodes of racial violence in United States history.

Leon F. Litwack -  of the history department at University of California at Berkeley, is an expert scholar, writer, and lecturer on African-American lynching, slavery, and related historical topics. Like scholar/advisor William D. Carrigan, he served as a consultant to the James Allen project that was featured at the New York Historical Society and was also involved in Without Sanctuary -- Allen's controversial book featuring lynching postcards.

Richard A. Lobban -  is professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College. He specializes in ancient African civilizations and lectures on comparative slave systems.

Jonathan Markovitz - is a lecturer in the department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego, where he received his PhD in 1999. He has published articles on race relations in the United States, collective memory, film, gender, and popular culture. A 2002 research project involves an investigation of racially based self-defense claims in criminal trials. Perhaps most pertinent to our project, the University of Minnesota Press will publish his forthcoming book, Legacies of Lynching: Collective Memory, Metaphor, and Racial Formation.

Neil R. McMillen -  a member of the history department at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the author of Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow(1989)--the winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, the McLemore Prize, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for 1990. He has served as the Charles W.Moorman Distinguished Alumni Professor in the Humanities and will assist our project with advice and guidance and provide leads to research regarding lynching-related matters in historical Mississippi.

Christopher Metress - is an associate professor of English at Samford University, is the editor of The Lynching of  Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. His essays on southern history and literature have appeared in numerous journals, and he is currently working on a study of the 1921 Klan-sanctioned murder of Father James Coyle in Birmingham, Alabama.

Orlando Patterson - is John Cowles professor of sociology at Harvard University; is the author of Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries and also of an intriguing essay about lynching from that book entitled "Feast of Blood". During his initial meeting with Gode Davis on April 1, 1999, Dr. Patterson demonstrated a willingness to help shape the factual basis of the film by stressing crucial thematic elements related to the African-American experience.

Kathy A. Perkins - is associate professor of theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she heads the lighting design program. She is the co-editor of Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women and will lend crucial expertise as elements of lynching plays will be incorporated into the film. 

Michael J. Pfeifer - is professor of history at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He is currently writing Rough Justice: Lynching in American Society, 1875-1967, the first national study of lynching and criminal justice in American history. He is also the author of "Lynching and Criminal Justice in South Louisiana, 1878-1930" for the Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association.

F. Arturo Rosales -  is professor of history at Arizona State University and is the author of Pobre Raza!: Violence, Crime, Justice, and Mobilization Among Mexico Lindo Immigrants, 1890-1936 and Chicano! A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement - companion book to the PBS series of the same name. He is an advisor for our segment dealing with "Hispanic-American" lynching violence.

John R. Ross - teaches history and government and is the academic dean at Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, Texas. More pertinent to our documentary, he authored a 1983 dissertation entitled At The Bar of Judge Lynch: Lynching and Lynch Mobs in America for his Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. He draws many original insights about the topic in this seminal work.

Judith L. Stephens - associate professor of speech communication at Pennsylvania State University, Schuylkill, serves on the executive board of the Black Theatre Network and is the co-editor of Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women. Her expertise will also be valuable as elements of lynching plays are incorporated into the film's content.

Margaret Rose Vendryes - professor of art history at York College, which is affiliated with CUNY -- City University of New York; is the author of Hanging on their walls: an art commentary on lynching, the forgotten 1935 art exhibition from the book Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century. She will be an excellent resource in the selection of visual images for the film, while also qualified to address their significance and implications. 

Christopher Waldrep -  has published extensively about the different meanings and elasticity of the term 'lynching' and about pertinent pre-Civil War events. He is the endowed Pasker Chair at San Francisco State University. His ground-breaking 1998 book on vigilante justice and lynching titled Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-1880 looks at how the criminal justice system in Mississippi played a role in shaping the attitudes that encouraged vigilantism.

Michelle Wallace -  is professor of English, Women's Studies, and Film at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center and is also the author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and Invisibility Blues. She recently completed her dissertation, "Passing, Lynching, and Jim Crow: Race and Gender in United States Visual Culture, 1895-1928" in Cinema Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/New York University. She will assist in areas of film study, and especially silent film study, as these areas relate to lynching footage and visual images. 

Clive Webb - is a lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex in England and author of Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights. He is currently researching the lynching of Sicilian immigrants in the American South and with William D. Carrigan the lynching of ethnic Mexicans.

William Wei - is professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, specializing in modern China and Asian America. His major works are Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period (1985) and The Asian American Movement (1993). He is an advisor for our segment on violence against Asian Americans.

Robert R. Weyeneth -  is professor of history and co-director of the public history program in the department of history at the University of South Carolina. An account of his effort to use the National Register of Historic Places as a vehicle for acknowledging a dark chapter of local history in a small town in Washington state -- the Centralia lynching and massacre of 1919 -- appeared in 1994 in The Public Historian. His 1995 report on historic preservation and the civil rights movement pointed the way for subsequent national efforts to commemorate the complexities of the modern African-American freedom struggle. One of his current projects examines the trend of apologizing for the past -- and especially the potential of apologies to contribute to a process of historical reconciliation and healing.

George Carlton Wright - Vice President for academic affairs and Provost at the University of Texas at Arlington is the author of Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule and "Legal Lynchings" among his numerous publications.


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