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When Wilbur Little, an African American soldier, returned to Blakely, Georgia from service in World War I, a group of white men met him at the train station and forced him to strip off his uniform. A few days later he defied their warning not to wear the uniform again in public, and a mob lynched him (Dray 248). His lynching sent the message to all African American soldiers returning from the war that their sacrifices for the cause of liberty in Europe would not lead to racial equality in America. A number of literary texts by African American writers published between 1919 and the 1930s, however, inverted that message by invoking the trope of the lynched soldier to make the case for civil rights. Carrie Williams Clifford's poem "The Black Draftee from Georgia" (1922), for example, alludes to the lynching of Wilbur Little:
What though the hero-warrior was black?
His heart was white and loyal to the core;
And when to his loved Dixie he came back,
Maimed, in the duty done on foreign shore,
Where from the hell of war he never flinched,
Because he cried, "Democracy," -was lynched. (219)
After World War I racial tensions in the United States became severely strained. The massive migration of southern African Americans to northern cities, the widespread emergence of segregation in the North, the regeneration of the Ku Klux Klan, race riots in several cities, and a new wave of lynchings in the South all contributed to a sense of racial unrest. At the same time, new works of literature by African American writers - the movement known as the New Negro Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance - projected an image of defiant racial identity. In this social and artistic context, African American writers invoked the trope of the African American soldier, the person who incontrovertibly deserves equal citizenship, in juxtaposition with images of lynching, the radical denial of human rights, to make a case for civil rights. This juxtaposition leads to an aesthetic of lynching images that pushes a progressive agenda, fusing the artistic and social ends of the New Negro movement and demonstrating literature's value as a weapon in the struggle for racial equality.
Lynching is deeply embedded in America's racial psyche. Grace...