I'm way out of the NCPH loop, but I so appreciate Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro (she/zie) is not leaving. and her vision for a more ethical, equitable field and her courage in speaking up about it.

love my colleagues, but why does every male faculty member here wear a university branded performance polo everyday? did i miss my allocation? is it a BIG FOOTBALL CONFERENCE thing?

I actually don't doubt that the noose in the garage at Talladega was repurposed as a door pull. That kind of usage is completely in line with the way objects of lynching have been normalized in American culture. But we should also be clear about several things.1/?

The person that tied it knew it was a noose. As Jack Shuler's Thirteenth Turn suggests, nooses are a difficult knot to tie and are virtually in a category by themselves. They are not something you produce by accident. 2/?

More important is the intentionality behind this repurposing of a noose. The terror of lynching was distributed through the objects associated with it. The formulaic nature of lynching's signs and symbols were precisely the point 3/?

their meaning was obvious to everyone that saw or even heard about them, regardless of the particular details of time, place, and situation. Average white citizens knew this and used it to their advantage. 4/?

I haven't written about nooses in particular, but all of the other material objects associated with lynching were used just like this, in quotidian situations where white people could deny their power if they were questioned about it. 5/?

Memory resides in these particular objects and object forms (indeed, I've written a whole book on it.) The only reason we deny this is to pretend that the pervasive racial terror of American life was an era, rather than an ongoing pattern 6/6

Pretend that whoever tied that noose and left it in the garage, whenever they did, didn't know what they were doing. But that's a profoundly ahistorical assessment that flies in the face of hundreds of years of evidence about the use of objects as instruments of racial terror

This is the full statement released earlier by Henry. "Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame."

‘Objects, Memory, and Place: The Background of Gruesome Looking Objects', a new blog by Elijah Gaddis author of GRUESOME LOOKING OBJECTS ☑️ ow.ly/TsZs50M9Ow2 #blackhistory #africanamericanhistory

Making its conference debut at #AHA23—this powerful study of lynching, told through the examination of everyday objects by Elijah Gaddis Cambridge University Press - History