Table of Contents:
  • Violence, victims, and heroes in the antebellum slave narrative
  • Prototypes in the antebellum novel
  • Search for the hero, 1865-1900 : Black warrior, forgiving Christ
  • The truth about lynchings, 1892-1922 : Harper, Hopkins, Griggs, and their contemporaries
  • The limits of the hero : Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition and Johnson's Autobiography of an ex-colored man
  • Art and lynching : the Harlem Renaissance and the 1930s
  • After World War II : lynching, history, and the source of identity
  • RIchard Wright and Bigger Thomas : grace in damnation
  • The rebel stirs : temporary insanity and creative riots
  • The rise of the Black revolutionary : the making of an image
  • The fall of the revolutionary : the image dismantled
  • It ends in brotherhood : Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.