Condemning Racial Terror Appropriately? A Critique of an Anti-Racist Mural in Elgin, IL

What I plan to discuss during my presentation at the Center for “Race” and Social Justice colloquium invites readers and listeners to consider the questions, “Is there a bad way to condemn race terror?” and “Who is allowed to condemn it in what ways?” My essay Blame, Shame and Race Terror considers these questions, albeit narrowly. More precisely, my project looked at epideictic rhetoric, or what is often described as ceremonial rhetoric, to interrogate what can be learned in an incident involving a white opponent of racism who produces a publicly commissioned mural featuring the mob at a Marion, Indiana lynching in 1930, during which Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were murdered. In sum, I maintain it certainly wasn’t what the artist had to say with the mural, but how he “said” it. His mural failed both in terms of muraling’s conventions, but also the conventions of epideictic rhetoric.

On May 17th, 2016 two young men walking through a pocket park in Elgin, Illinois recognized the mural to be the crowd featured in an infamous photograph of the Shipp and Smith lynchings taken by Lawrence Beitler. One of the men found the Beitler photo on Google with his phone, combined it with a photo of the mural, and posted it to the Facebook group What’s Happening in Elgin, IL. A controversy ensued leading to a protest, and the mural’s eventual removal to the basement of Elgin’s Hemmens Cultural Center. During the controversy, several important facts were realized. First, the town had no record, short of a receipt, of the mural’s commissioning. Second, the mural appeared to have a name intended to mislead the public; the artist named it “American Nocturne, 1932.” Third, there was no artist statement explaining what it meant. Upon its discovery, there was little available to counter the conclusion that the artist was a bigot who surreptitiously mounted an 8’x16’ racist image in the town’s core.

While in my interviewing I found convincing evidence that the artist, David Powers, had no racist intentions, that doesn’t absolve him of a lack of tact. It required more precision, however, to understand why a mural intended to condemn racism was ultimately interpreted as racist. To explain, it helped me to first identify the kind of rhetoric Powers was employing as epideictic. Think of rhetoric as persuasion that is further subdivided into types: forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. Forensic rhetoric establishes through argument what happened in the past. Deliberative – the future. Epideictic, by contrast, is persuasion that happens in the present – making us feel during a eulogy, for instance, or making a light go on in a student’s mind during a classroom lesson. In public speaking handbooks, epideictic is often reduced to speeches of praise or blame. In Communication Studies, we tend to focus most heavily on the praise: eulogies, inaugurations, graduation speeches, nominating speeches, state of the union addresses. We neglect communication that focuses on blame.

Public blame isn’t easy. Elizabeth Church writes of blame rhetoric:
…the respect for a subject and/or the audience is evident in the laudatory words. Rhetoric of blame, however, carries with it a more critical tone, one which the audience may be expecting or bracing itself against. It therefore requires the rhetor’s more persistent efforts to show respect and gain the audience’s trust that the discourse is meant to be a sincere exchange. (34)

There aren’t many instances of blame rhetoric in public art. There are paintings and memorials, including Picasso’s Guernica (1937) condemning the Nazi bombing of the Spanish town by the same name, and Hungary’s Memorial to the Victims of the German Occupation (2014). In the United States we have, for instance, the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial in Duluth, Minnesota. The Duluth memorial displays friezes of the murdered, while accompanying text amplifying the virtues of forgiveness, love, and protest. On a much larger scale, we have the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Note that the memorial is named for the virtues it seeks to amplify and not for what it condemns. The physical memorial itself is only suggestive of the act of lynching, without displaying it outright. The memorial is an interactive edifice designed to promote reconciliation by way of memorializing lynchings with historical markers in the very counties in which they took place. These instances work well as examples of blame rhetoric because their condemnation is subsumed by the exhortation of universal values.

American Nocturne, 1932, by contrast, offers the viewer little more than the crowd at a lynching. Centered in the mural is a man pointing to where the bodies would be in the photograph. Sutured into the painting is the likeness of a young boy inspired by another lynch mob photo of the 1920 murder of Lige Daniels in Center, Texas. If we take Powers artist at his word, the image was meant as a condemnation of white racism. Powers told me, “I'll absent the dead people, because that's grotesque,” and added, if you don't exhibit what might not be the finest moments of your time as a country or its people, you're gonna reproduce them. That's a cautionary tale. That's why you identify the murderers. (Powers)

He added, “You don’t want to be on that wall with these monsters. Anywhere. In any town” (Walker, 2016). Powers continued:

So, I’m gonna take out the bodies and show ‘em murderers as a cautionary tale. Not to provoke. To illustrate. To make a statement. A declarative statement. And not to throw it in their face, this is this. It’s here. It’s now. It’s always here. It’s the light. It’s the dark. It’s always here. It’s always a fight. (Powers)

His point, he added, was to have the viewer “look at and identify murderers that look like your neighbors” (Powers).

Epideictic rhetoric works, in theory, when it 1) amplifies community values, 2) is skillfully executed, and 3) fits the rhetorical situation. Powers’ mural fails in a number of ways. First, it does not amplify community values. Taken at his word, and after ten years on display, we finally learn that this mural was intended to counter racism. Other than its ostensive opposition to murder, there is no clear value being amplified. In terms of skillful execution, I withhold judgment of his art per se, though I do consider his mural through the conventions of muraling. Jane Golden’s Philadelphia Mural Project advises that, at a minimum, the artist consider both the location and the perspectives of the surrounding community. Despite a warning given to Powers’ by Outside Exhibition Group partner and friend Milton Evans, who is Black, his mural was produced with no particular space in mind other than the city of Elgin and with the refusal to work with the community; painted on four 4’ x 8’ panels, Powers explained, “There was no community here. I wasn’t using someone’s side of the building” (Powers). Additionally, the subject matter being one of a murder scene necessitated funereal curation. That children, for instance, could unknowingly play in a park beneath the portrayal of a crowd gleefully gathered beneath the bodies of two dead men is profoundly disrespectful. The misleading name and absence of an artist statement also worked to doom this mural. Finally, the mural doesn’t fit the rhetorical situation. The artist depicted an Indiana lynch mob from 1930 in early twenty-first century Illinois. As one protester told me, “It ain’t happening to African Americans like that today. Number two, it’s not happening in the city of Elgin” (Tashlyn Davis).

Given the mural’s contents and statements by Powers, it becomes evident that Powers’ rhetoric functions more to shame than to blame, thus exceeding the tolerances of blame epideictic. The mural intends to shame whites for race terror. It wasn’t for an audience so much as it was directed at an audience. Shaming, by contrast, functions by exposing the flaws of the target before an audience of critics about whom the target for shaming cares. This breaks down when the subject and manner of the shaming is determined by a white artist with a narrow and dated perspective of race relations. In my interview with him, he detailed a litany of actions and allies that burnished his claims of his and his family’s interracial bona fides. But he also talked like a revolutionary -- about fighting, guns, changing the world, and being executed for art. All of it led me to suspect his audience was much larger than Elgin, Illinois. His art brought a metaphorical sledgehammer to a problem necessitating tools and expertise of various kinds. The length of his anti-racist past left him circumspect regarding the altered fronts of the struggle to reverse the various, insidious forms of racism that people of color presently experience.

Philip Dalton, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Public Advocacy in the Department of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University, where he is also the director of the Center for Civic Engagement. His teaching and research focus on political communication, argumentation, deliberation, and public controversy.