The title of Kidada Williams's new book is taken from the words of a Georgia freedwoman named Mary Brown who testified before Congress in the early 1870s about the whipping she received from the Ku Klux Klan. “They left great marks on me,” Williams argues, referred not only to the physical scars on Brown's body but also the psychological wounds of trauma imprinted upon the lives of rural southerners in the decades after emancipation. The book traces the considerable efforts African Americans made to speak publicly about the violence they experienced, and in turn, give meaning to it in ways that would transform the arid “death spaces” of the post-emancipation South into the fertile seed ground for the civil rights movement of the Twentieth Century (7).

The subject of white violence against African Americans is hardly new, but Williams breaks new ground by focusing on how representations of racial violence shaped a sense of collective identity among American blacks during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to the study are the voices of the victims themselves, from ex-slaves in the Reconstruction Era to early civil rights agitators and intellectuals in the Progressive Era. The testimonies African Americans gave to the Freedmen's Bureau; congressional investigating committees; newspapers and print media; and perhaps most important, to each other as part of the vernacular history of the black experience form, according to Williams, “an underappreciated form of … direct-action protests against racial violence“(6). In the process, victims of violence formulated a collective identity and sense of embodiedness that shaped the civil rights struggle as it developed in the twentieth century. Williams joins a growing literature on the “long civil rights movement” that analyzes the role of violence in creating black political subjectivity. Alongside recent works by Hannah Rosen, Leigh Raiford, and Danielle McGuire, They Left Great Marks on Me reframes debates within civil rights historiography, placing issues of violence, trauma gender, and the body at the heart of the movement's intellectual and strategic raison d'etre.Footnote ¹

The book's first chapter on black testimony about Klan violence in 1871–72 offers an important window into the lives of black victims as they struggled to come to terms with systematic racial terror in the years following emancipation. Williams does not limit herself to the particular context of Reconstruction, where the government created special venues that elicited black testimony, thereby providing ex-slaves with a national stage on which they could articulate not only their fear but also their hope for a better, safer tomorrow. In the annals of American history, there is nothing to compare to this treasure trove of everyday black voices weighing in on the meaning of freedom and citizenship. Yet the sheer volume of documentation in the Freedmen's Bureau and Klan testimony can be overwhelming. Williams devotes only two chapters to them, leaving this reader wanting more. In particular, Williams's insights into the way in which freedpeople framed their testimony to white interlocutors invite further consideration. Williams describes how freedpeople testifying before Congress carefully constructed family narratives of bourgeois respectability as a way to counter white racial prejudice that placed accountability for violence on black shoulders. When deponents began their testimony by stressing how hard working they were; how conventional their home life; and in many instances, how uninterested they were in “politics,” they acknowledged the limits of white sympathy to their plight (36). While Williams argues that black testimony in these venues made whites “co-owners” of their trauma, it is not clear the extent to which they were successful in this endeavor (6). Not all Freedmen's Bureau agents or congressional investigators, even the most ardent Republicans among them, were entirely sympathetic. Where Williams sees strength, nineteenth-century whites were as likely to see inferiority, degradation, and dependency. Thus, the triumphant narrative Williams wishes to write is harder to come by than she imagines, since freedpeople's ability to capitalize on their testimony was, in many ways, constrained by the same venues that made the testimony possible.

Subsequent chapters move forward in time and shift focus to how the “race men” and “race women” of the nascent civil rights movement represented racial violence and its centrality to their activism. The pages detailing the interracial rift between rural southern migrants—the so-called Exodusters, and black public intellectuals who worried that they were abandoning the South and any hope for civil rights, provide an illuminating discussion on how varied the response to racial violence was among African Americans. However, Williams's later discussion of public leaders’ “duty to relate” the experiences of voiceless rural blacks assumes a unity of purpose across regional and class divides. Of course the NAACP and other activists wished to use stories of violence to strengthen race consciousness among northern blacks, to rally the troops, and ultimately to put an end to racial violence in the South. But one wonders how the old narrative trope of respectability, put to work to engender “racial pride” in the early 1900s, shaped representations of rural suffering for both urban, middle-class black audiences and white ones alike. In the 1960s, civil rights groups such as SNCC and SCLC cultivated particular images of racial violence, often centering around children and other “innocents” so that the respectability of the movement appeared unimpeachable, while at the same the time, the savage brutality of white southerners was equally undeniable. One imagines, therefore, that black public leaders made similar choices about which testimonies they ought to relate. In other words, there might not be a single “vernacular” history at work here but several.

They Left Great Marks on Me is an ambitious book that asks important new questions about the long-term effects of racial violence on black consciousness.