Unlearning Racism: What Roles Can Works By Mark Twain Play in An Anti-Racist Pedagogy?
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay originally appeared in the 2023 volume of the Japanese journal, Mark Twain Studies, a quadrennial English-language print journal published by The Japan Society of Mark Twain. It is reproduced here with permission from both author and publisher.
In her essay, Dr. Fishkin discusses ten works by Mark Twain. A few, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, will be familiar to most readers and are readily available. But many are more obscure and difficult to find. To aid teachers and students, The Center For Mark Twain Studies has linked to open-access versions of all the texts Dr. Fishkin mentions and has embedded several of them either in the text of the essay or at the bottom of the page.
What roles can works by Mark Twain play in an anti-racist pedagogy? I continue to be surprised and excited by the powerful and generative questions and insights his work can spark in the classroom. In every course I have taught over the last decade, Twain’s works have been central to the project of helping students understand both how systemic racism works, and how people perpetuate racism on an individual level.
In this essay I’ll note the ways in which specific works help prompt students to think about these issues in a range of courses I’ve taught at Stanford over the last ten years. The ten Twain texts that have figured most prominently in an anti-racist pedagogy in my courses are “What Have the Police Been Doing?,” “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy,” “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again – Letters I-VII,” “Only a Nigger,” “A True Story,” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, “My First Lie and How I got Out of It,” “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” and “The Stupendous Procession.”1I should add that these days when several of these pieces appear on my syllabi, they are accompanied by a “trigger warning”—“*Please be aware that some of this week’s readings contain offensive racial epithets.” My syllabi also include this comment: “As you may know, there is a difference between being triggered (in the sense of post-traumatic stress disorder) and feeling uncomfortable. Feeling uncomfortable (and sometimes even angry or offended) is part of intellectual growth. Feeling uncomfortable by being made to think about challenging issues that you may normally avoid is part of what an education can and should entail….” The six courses in which I have taught these texts at Stanford over the last decade are: “Mark Twain and American Culture,” “The American West,” “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” “Reimagining America: Cultural Memory and Identity Since the Civil War,” “Race in American Memory,” and “American Literature and Social Justice.” Although the same work may appear in many of these classes, the broader issues students address in the class as well as other texts students read alongside it shape the role that the work plays. The chart that follows shows which classes include which texts:
| Mark Twain & American Culture | The American West | Race & Reunion | Reimagining America | Race in American Memory | American Literature & Social Justice | |
| “What Have the Police Been Doing?” | X | |||||
| “Only a Nigger” | X | X | ||||
| “Disgraceful Persecutions of a Boy” | X | X | X | |||
| “A True Story” | X | X | X | |||
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | X | X | X | |||
| The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson | X | X | ||||
| “My First Lie & How I Got Out of It” | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” | X | |||||
| “The Stupendous Procession” | X |
An often-neglected text by Twain that I like to teach in my “Mark Twain and American Culture” class is “What Have the Police Been Doing?,” which Twain published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise on January 21, 1866. It is Twain’s earliest exploration of police brutality and anti-Asian violence in San Francisco. It is also his earliest stab at using satire to attack racism. At a time when the topic of police brutality is unfortunately still salient and pressing in America, and when there has been a shameful spike in violence directed against Asians in the US, this piece is more timely than ever. Mark Twain’s strategy of crafting a narrator who is supposedly the greatest defender of the police makes the piece memorable and effective. It may be sarcastic and heavy-handed — apprentice work — but precisely the heavy-handed nature of the satire here makes it a good introduction for students into the potential and pitfalls of satire for undermining racism. The piece condemns the police for the fact that a Chinese man (“an infernal stranger” who “had no vote”) who is alleged to have stolen some sacks of flour has his head split in two by the police and is left to die in police custody. It reminds us that that Twain had to turn to satire to get into print at all when it came to the subject of the racism of the police in San Francisco. (He spells this out in a note that accompanies the next piece he wrote in this vein, “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.”)
Although I teach “What Have the Police Been Doing?” only in my Twain seminar, I teach “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” (Galaxy, May 1870) and “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again”(Galaxy, Oct.-Nov. 1870) in two other classes in addition to my Twain seminar: “The American West” and “American Literature and Social Justice.”2These two works, as they originally appeared in Twain’s “Memoranda” column from Galaxy magazine, are embedded at the bottom of this page. While “What have the Police Been Doing?” focuses on the police alone, the “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again” letters and “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy” examine the ways in which the courts, the medical profession, and the press all conspire to defraud the Chinese in America of basic human rights. In “Disgraceful Persecution,” for example, the boy learns that a double standard of justice is the norm throughout his society, while “Goldsmith’s Friend illuminates in detail the racism that shapes every aspect of the Chinese man’s sojourn in America. The phenomenon that all of these pieces illuminate is institutional racism — a situation in which multiple social institutions conspire to perpetuate racist practices. But the larger context of each class shapes the impact these pieces have.
“The American West,” the most interdisciplinary course at Stanford, is a class that I co-teach with a political scientist (Bruce Cain), a historian (David Kennedy), and a hydrologist (David Freyberg). I teach “Disgraceful Persecution” and “Goldsmith’s Friend” in a unit on “Peoples” of the American West. I precede the lecture dealing with these pieces by one devoted to the history of Chinese immigration to the West, and particularly the role of the Chinese in building the Transcontinental Railroad, a venture that created the fortune with which Leland Stanford founded our university. I expose students to the hugely important role the Chinese played in developing the Western United States and in the creation of the institution in which they are all enrolled. I encourage them to delve into the wealth of material gathered and produced by the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford, a venture that I co-created and co-directed.3In addition to producing books, articles, exhibits, and digital visualizations, the project conducted over 50 interviews with descendants of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America, many of which describe the racism encountered by these workers’ children and grandchildren, all of which are available on the Stanford Library’s website.After they are exposed to this material, the history of the anti-Chinese movement in the West (culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 19th century and in the creation of the Angel Island Immigration Center – a place in which thousands of Chinese were detained – in the early 20th century) takes on particular significance. I teach these works by Twain alongside a story by Wallace Stegner called “The Chink,” published in September 1940 in The Atlantic and an excerpt from Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, China Men (1980). Stegner’s remarkable story describes how a young boy learned the hard way about the toll that racism could take: it probes the personal torment he undergoes after a heedless, racist prank he played on a Chinese man whom he counted as a friend ended up leading to the man’s death. The excerpt from Kingston’s book, a chapter called “The Laws,” fleshes out in detail the history of racist anti-Chinese laws in the West and the country as a whole, making Twain’s satires on these laws all the more meaningful.
In my “American Literature and Social Justice” class, “Disgraceful Persecution” and the “Goldsmith Letters” appear in a section dealing with “Social Justice in Communities.” I teach them alongside the recently re-discovered letter that Wong Ar Chong, a Chinese immigrant shopkeeper in Boston wrote William Lloyd Garrison in 1879 protesting the impending Chinese exclusion law. In this letter Wong invokes the ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence in ways that uncannily resemble the use that Twain’s fictional Chinese immigrant, Ah Song Hi, made of that document in “Goldsmith’s Friend.” These pieces also take on different nuances of meaning in the “Social Justice in Communities” section when they are taught in the same class meeting as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “To the South on its New Slavery” and W. E.B. Du Bois’s article in Crisis in May 1919, “Returning Soldiers.” The texts by Dunbar and DuBois highlight other moments in America’s past when double standards of justice were widely accepted as simply the way things were—despite the fact that when held up to the light they were betrayals of all the ideals of equality to which Americans paid lip service.
“Only a Nigger,” which ran in the Buffalo Express in 1869, is a text that is central to “Mark Twain and American Culture” and “American Literature and Social Justice.” In both cases, Twain’s satire about a lynching in Memphis stands as an early example of Twain taking aim at the kinds of self-justifying logic that Southerners used to think well of themselves despite their barbaric behavior when it came to Black people. But when I teach it in my “American Literature and Social Justice” class, it takes on additional importance. Twain’s daring and risky strategy of inhabiting the voice of a lyncher in “Only a Nigger” is the same daring and risky strategy that the great Chicana poet and essayist Gloria Anzaldúa deploys in her stunning poem, “We Call Them Greasers,” that appeared in her landmark book, Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987. When we read the Anzaldúa poem the week after we discuss Twain’s “Only a Nigger” students are struck by the similarities in the authors’ approaches to challenging racism in the two cases. Anzaldúa writes the entire poem in the smug, confident voice of a rapist and a lyncher who is proud of how easily he has stolen some land in South Texas from Mexicans who had lived on it for generations. Much as the cadences and language of Twain’s proud defender of Southern honor ring true and sound horribly familiar (justifications like these have abounded for generations to justify the travesty that justice has been for many Black Americans, especially in the South), the cadences and language of the disgusting narrator of “We Call them Greasers” ring true and are credible. Twain recognized in his 1869 article — and later when he crafted the repulsive character of pap Finn in Huckleberry Finn — that if you want to unmask racists for the abhorrent miscreants that they are, you have to show them as they are — in all their ugliness, speaking in their own voice. Gloria Anzaldúa’s similar insight led her make the narrator her poem about a land grab, a rape, a murder, and a lynching the man who perpetrated these crimes — who did so without the slightest hesitation or remorse.
“Only a Nigger” takes on additional meaning in the “Social Justice in Communities” section of “American Literature and Social Justice” when taught as perhaps the earliest entry into a disturbing but important body of anti-lynching literature in America. It heads a procession of texts we read in the class that includes nonfiction excerpts from Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record (1895), Richard Wright’s article “Negro, Who Escaped Lynch Mob in South, Ordered to Return by Harlem Relief Officials” (1937), and two moving and disturbing pieces by David Bradley: “100 years of isolated incidents” (1998) and “To Make Them Stand in Fear” (2002). The procession also includes two short stories by Paul Laurence Dunbar: “The Tragedy at Three Forks” (1899) and The Lynching of Jube Benson” (1904).4 Both are reprinted in Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley. New York: Modern Library, 2005. This body of anti-lynching texts helps prepare students to understand the sheaf of poems we read about the lynching of Emmett Till the following week: “For Emmett Till” by Mary Parks (1955), Anthony Walton’s “The Lovesong of Emmett Till” (1996), and Renée Watson’s “A Psalm for Emmett Till” (2020). It also helps prepare them for Lynne Thompson’s startling “Sonnet Consisting of One Law” (2014).
The anti-racist critique embodied in “A True Story” involves the introductory comments in which “Misto C—” asks Aunt Rachel, who is always laughing and singing, how it is that she never had any trouble in her life. Aunt Rachel — the character based on Mary Ann Cord, the cook at Quarry Farm, where Clemens and his family spent summers — can hardly believe how naïve her employer is.5This story, as in appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1874, is embedded at the bottom of this page. She tells him the story of being separated from her last child on the auction block and being reunited with him after the war, and educates Misto C—showing him just how much trouble and joy she has actually had. She teaches Twain — and Twain teaches his reader — to reject the stereotype of the “happy darky.” Frederick Douglass unmasked the same stereotype when he wrote that because slaves are often singing, their masters assume they are happy. The complexity of the emotions of an enslaved person was important to Douglass. And it was important to Twain, as well, as “A True Story” makes clear. While I teach “A True Story” as a key point on the road to Huck Finn my Twain seminar, it plays a different role in my courses focused on race and American memory.
My three courses on race and the Civil War are all closely related, having been taught at different times over the last decade. “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory;” “Reimagining America; Cultural Memory and Identity Since the Civil War;” and “Race and American Memory” are all courses that I co-taught with historian Allyson Hobbs, and all of them were variations on the same themes. In these classes, I taught both “A True Story” and Huckleberry Finn — and on occasion Pudd’nhead Wilson, as well — as part of a section we called “Hijacking History: The Lost Cause and the Plantation Tradition” or “Talking Back to the Plantation Tradition.”
In “Race and American Memory,” “A True Story” and Huck Finn appear on the syllabus in close proximity to pieces of classic “Plantation Tradition” writing like Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” (1884) and Irwin Russell’s “Mahsr John” (1877). Twain’s efforts in “A True Story” and Huck Finn to give the painful realities of the slave South center stage fly in the face of the uses to which the Plantation Tradition put scenes of slavery. In my lecture I quote an anonymous “South Carolinian” who published an article in the Atlantic Monthly two and half years after “A True Story” ran there. Contrast Twain’s images of the slave past in “A True Story” with those painted in this piece by the anonymous “South Carolinian”:
The old plantation days are passed away, perhaps forever. My principles now lead me to abhor slavery and rejoice at its abolition. Yet sometimes, in the midst of the heat and toil of the struggle for existence, the thought involuntarily steals over me that we have seen better days. I think of… visits to the plantation with its long, broad expanse of waving green, dotted here and there with groups of industrious slaves…of the ‘Christmas gif’, Massa,’ breaking our slumbers on the holiday morn; of the gay devices for fooling the dignified old darkies on the first of April; of the faithful old nurse who brought you through infancy, under whose humble roof you delighted to partake of an occasional meal; of the flattering, foot-scraping, clownish knowing rascal to whom you tossed a silver piece when he brought up your boots; of the little darkies who scrambled for the rind after you had eaten your water-melon on the piazza in the afternoon—and,…I feel the intrusive swelling of the tear of regret.
“South Carolina Society” in Atlantic Monthly (June 1877)
In the section of “Reimagining America: Cultural Memory and Identity Since the Civil War,” called “Talking Back to the Plantation Tradition,” we taught “A True Story” and Huck Finn alongside works by major Black writers who talked back to the Plantation Tradition, as Mark Twain did, as well. These included stories by Charles Chesnutt (“The Passing of Grandison”) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (“The Ingrate”). Particularly useful was Paul Laurene Dunbar’s landmark poem, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,”6All works by Dunbar cited here are found in Fishkin and Bradley, eds. Sport of the Gods and Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Modern Library, 2005. which uses sly satire and “signifying” to talk back to the Plantation Tradition. Seeing Twain, Chesnutt, and Dunbar all engaged in tilling parallel fields helped spark students’ understanding of the uses of satire to expose the lies of the Plantation Tradition.
For many years, I hosted what I called a “Huck Salon” for students in both my Twain seminar and my course on “Race and American Memory” (or variations thereof) when I taught them the same term. The “Huck Salon” was a lunchtime discussion of a hour and a half or so (with lunch—I’d order pizza) at which the key focus would be the challenges to Huck Finn since the 1950s over a range of related issues involving racism. I’d outline the key reasons Huck Finn has been challenged in schools and libraries since the 1950s and we’d discuss them. We would also watch the 60 Minutes segment about the New South Books edition of Huckleberry Finn, and students would act out a kitchen-table reading of a scene from Ralph Wiley’s screenplay, “Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn.” The student have a lively debate and don’t often all agree with each other — but they leave with a deeper understanding of the novel’s fraught place in our culture.
During those years when I included Pudd’nhead Wilson in my “Race and American Memory” classes, the context of lectures on the Plantation Tradition that students heard me give prior to reading the book helped frame their understanding of the novel. Students learn about the campaign and national lecture tour of Mildred Rutherford of the Daughters of the Confederacy, who was active in forty-nine different historic, patriotic, and other women’s organizations. A dynamic speaker, she went on a crusade across the nation giving speeches to women’s groups in 45 of the 48 states in the nation with titles such as “The Wrongs of History Righted” and “The Civilization of the Old South” One of the cardinal “truths” on which she insisted was that the North had Slavery all wrong. The old life was “a picture of contentment, peace and happiness.” The slaves “were well-fed, well-clothed, and well-housed.” It was so hard to make the North understand this. But if that version of history could be kept alive in the South, then the Lost Cause wouldn’t really be lost, Rutherford believed. After encountering Mildred Rutherford’s air-brushed version of history, students tend to view the early idyllic paragraphs describing Dawson’s Landing as a lush, blooming par- adise of gardens and white-washed houses as Twain’s tip of the hat to the tradition that his book would undermine at its core. In my Twain seminar, students have engaged the book in part by having a debate about whether Twain presents nature or nurture as ultimately more consequential in the novel.
Huckleberry Finn was often the key Twain text that we read in my “Race and American Memory” classes, where students also read slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and/or Solomon North- up. Their understanding of Slavery was deepened by these readings, and their grasp of the challenges Twain faced writing the novel that he did in the 1880s was enhanced by lectures we gave about the various ways in which the formerly enslaved Black people in the South were effectively re-enslaved in the 1880s through the convict lease system, Black codes, and other means. The history of the breakdown of Reconstruction precedes their reading of the book and informs it in key ways—as does their exposure to Thomas Nast’s satirical cartoons about the oppression of Black people in the post-freedom era. In “Reimagining America,” students gained perspective on the dire plight of runaway slaves by reading David Bradley’s masterful 1981 novel, The Chaneysville Incident, which also engages some of the forms racism took in the decades after Twain’s death.
When teaching students about Twain’s efforts to expose various aspects of racism towards African Americans or the Chinese, I am always sure to mention that he had some blind spots, the most troubling of which was the treatment of Native Americans. Kerry Driscoll’s book, Mark Twain Among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples, is very helpful to draw on when it comes to this topic. It is important for students to understand that being anti-racist in some contexts does not necessarily me that one is anti-racist in all contexts.
Two anti-racist texts that I teach in my “Mark Twain and American Culture” class alone are King Leopold’s Soliloquy, and “The Stupendous Procession.” King Leopold’s Soliloquy is a powerful critique of white European imperialism in Africa, and the photographs taken by what Twain calls “the incorruptible kodak” bear witness to the horrendous results of Leopold’s casual disregard for black African lives. “The Stupendous Procession” is a compelling and startlingly modern text that reads almost like a movie scenario, as “floats” in this procession pass by the reader. The floats put the perpetrators of imperialism, racism and anti-Semitism into the same frames as their victims. I have written that it prefigures the uses to which documentary film will be put in the 20th century. (It is also an excellent example of Twain linking imperialism, racism and anti-Semitism as kindred evils, a topic I have explored elsewhere.)7See Fishkin, “Mark Twain and the Jews.”
But by far the text that plays the most central role in my anti-racist pedagogy in every class in which I have the opportunity to included it is “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It.” In this piece, Twain coins the concept of “the lie of Silent Assertion”—“the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.” Twain relates the “Lie of Silent Assertion” to Slavery, to anti-Semitism, and to Imperialism. Students in my “Race and American Memory” class find it an enormously useful concept in dis- cussions of the Southern efforts to promote a history of the South that erases the pain caused by Slavery. Students in “The American West” find it helpful to understand white Americans’ insistence–during the 1969 centen- nial of the Transcontinental Railroad—that the railroad was a monumental achievement of white Americans, ignoring the role played by the Chinese. In “American Literature and Social Justice,” students find lies of silent assertion throughout all of American history contributing to the oppression of racial minorities and others. And in “Mark Twain and American Culture,” my students find lies of silent assertion an enormously useful concept to deploy in reading Twain’s entire body of work.
Teaching Twain’s own odyssey — the story of how this child of slaveholders became the author of key anti-racist texts — is also a central part of an anti-racist pedagogy. Students find Twain’s personal efforts to unlearn the racism he was taught as a child inspiring. They are intrigued by the role his father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, played in that education, and they learn with interest of the assistance Twain gave to black students — most notably Warner McGuinn, who would become a mentor to Thurgood Marshall. I hope that my efforts to expose my students to topics like those outlined in this essay will help them unlearn whatever racism may have shaped their own lives.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of 48 books, and over 150 articles, essays and reviews, much of it focused on issues of race and racism, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America’s past. In 2017, she won the John Tuckey Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mark Twain Studies from the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In 2022, she was awarded the Olivia Langdon Clemens Award for Scholarly Creativity & Innovation from the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 2023, she received the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies.
Works Cited:
A South Carolinian. “South Carolina Society.” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 39, June 1877, pp.670-84.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “We Call them Greasers.” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Bradley, David. The Chaneysville Incident. 1981. Harper Perennial, 1990.
—. “100 years of isolated incidents.” Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1998.
—. “To Make Them Stand in Fear.” When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories. Edited by Bernestine Singley, Lawrence Hill, 2002, pp. 111–37.
Chesnutt, Charles W. “The Passing of Grandison.” 1899.
Driscoll, Kerry. Mark Twain Among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples. U of California P. 2018.
DuBois, W.E.B. “Returning Soldiers.” The Crisis, May 1919.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley. Modern Library, 2005.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Mark Twain and the Jews.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 137-66.
“‘Huckleberry Finn’ and the N-word.” 60 Minutes. CBS.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. 1988. Vintage Books, 1989.
Page, Thomas Nelson. “Marse Chan.” 1884. In Ole Virginia, or Marse Chan and Other Stories. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895, pp.1-38.
Russell, Irwin. “Mahsr John.” 1877. Best Poems Encyclopedia.
Parker, Mary. “For Emmett Till.” The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Edited by Christopher Metress. U of Virginia P, 2002, p.301.
Rutherford, Mildred Lewis. “The Wrongs of History Righted.” Address delivered by Miss Mildred Rutherford, Historian General, United Daughters of the Confederacy. Savannah, Georgia. 13 November 1914.
Stegner, Wallace. “The Chink.” The Atlantic, Sept. 1940.
Thompson, Lynn. “Sonnet Consisting of One Law.” 30 Nov. 2014.
Twain, Mark. “What Have the Police Been Doing?” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 21 Jan. 1866.
—. “Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy.” Galaxy, May 1870.
—. “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again, Letter I-IV.” Galaxy, Oct. 1870.
—. “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again, Letter V-VI.” Galaxy, Nov. 1870.
—. “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again, Letter VII.” Galaxy, Jan. 1871.
—. King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of Congo Rule. 1905.
—. “Only a Nigger.” Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express: Articles and Sketches by America’s Favorite Humorist. Edited by Joseph B. McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg, Northern Illinois UP, 2000, pp. 22-23. Originally published in Buffalo Express, 26 Aug. 1869.
—. “The Stupendous Procession.” 1901. Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine American War. Edited by Jim Zwick, Syracuse UP, 1992, pp.42-56.
—. “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.” Nov. 1874. The Atlantic.
Walton, Anthony. “The Lovesong of Emmett Till.” 1996. L. A. Times Archives.
Watson, Renée. “A Psalm for Emmett Till.” Emmett Till Project, 28 Aug. 2020.
Wells, Ida B. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States. 1895.
Wiley, Ralph. “Spike Lee’s Huckleberry Finn.” Unpublished screenplay, 1997.
Wong, Ar Chong. Letter to William Lloyd Garrison. 28 Feb. 1879. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
Wright, Richard. “Negro, Who Escaped Lynch Mob in South, Ordered to Return by Harlem Relief Officials.” 27 December 1937. Richard Wright: Articles from the Daily Worker and New Masses. Edited by Earle V. Bryant. Byline, U of Missouri P, 2015, pp.63-64.