Our nation remains invested in sending a powerful message, that denigrating and/or destroying people of color will bring no consequences for perpetrators. (In fact, it will often bring rewards.) While we can’t help but get that message, Americans somehow see those under attack as primarily male. Besides underscoring the ongoing importance of movements like #WhyWeCantWait, this tendency reminds me of how much the suppression of Black and Brown women’s voices within my educational experiences led me to pursue the PhD.

In Part 2 of the interview, Pablo and I talk about my years in graduate school and the research interests that eventually produced Living with Lynching. These include my interest in what Black women were writing between 1870 and 1920 (the year Black men gained voting rights and the year women did); why post-Reconstruction proves to be a crucially important time period; why photography matters; why so many of the lynching plays are one-acts; and my insistence that black-authored lynching plays are not primarily protest plays.