The reuseable past

This dissertation examines protest memory in the literature of the Long Civil Rights Movement. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, anti-lynching and desegregation writers and artists found in abolitionism a reusable past. Used in anti-lynching literature, used again in desegregation literature, abolitionism was an activist muse. I examine explicit invocations of abolitionism and show writers' and artists' deep familiarity with 19 th -century abolitionist literature and history. Anti-lynching and desegregation artists and writers turned abolitionism into a living protest legacy. But they also adapted the protest aesthetics of literary abolitionism. Identifying an abolitionist "politics of form," I trace two elements of that aesthetic across the literature of anti-lynching and desegregation, arguing that writers and artists fused protest memory and the politics of form. Part One theorizes the abolitionist aesthetic in anti-lynching literature and art. It argues that writers and artists adapted the messianic martyrdoms of Nat Turner and John Brown, re-performing the crucifixion in order to counter both the religious ritual of lynching itself and the image of a passive, all-forgiving Uncle Tom. In its series of black Christs, anti-lynching literature and art offered new Passion Plays for the Jim Crow South. I examine abolitionist literature and art, then anti-lynching fiction and non-fiction, visual culture, poetry and drama, asking whether different mediums generated different modes of martyrdom. Part Two theorizes the abolitionist aesthetic of spatio-symbolism in desegregation literature and art. It argues that this literature expressed and challenged segregation by drawing on an abolitionist fusion of concrete and abstract boundaries. Like the abolitionists, desegregation writers re-imagined civic space as physical space. I examine abolitionist literature and art, then numerous well-known and forgotten desegregation texts, before focusing on the four individuals who used spatio-symbolism most extensively: Jacob Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Charles Moore, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Protest writers and artists rejected the notion of activist discontinuity. Through their protest literature, with its shared revision of abolitionist protest aesthetics, we see anti-lynching and desegregation emerge as two phases of a century-long Civil Rights Movement.