Race, Remembering, and the Dialogics of Oral History in an Arab American Tragedy

Evidence from the Margins

I first encountered a reference to the killing while working on my dissertation at the University of Chicago. It was the late 1990s and I was deep in the research on Syrian racial prerequisite cases—legal proceedings to determine the racial eligibility of Syrians to naturalize as US citizens in the early twentieth century. I was consulting The Syrian World, an English-language journal, published in the 1920s and 1930s out of New York with a largely acculturated Syrian American readership. A small notice caught my eye, pulling me into something macabre and unfamiliar. On the same page as a “Readers Forum” addressing racist comments against Syrians made by Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, a small caption read: “Has the Syrian become a Negro?” Under this title sat the translation from an article in the Arabic-language paper, ash-Shaab, published in New York. The article was sparse on details but chilling nonetheless. It told the story of the killing of “Nicholas Romey and his wife,” noting that “the details of the lynching of this Syrian are revolting. . . . From whatever angle we view the case we can find no justification for the barbarous treatment visited by the police and the mob on this Syrian family.” The article continued with a call for action and a thorough investigation “so that . . . those responsible should reap the reward for their cruelty.”10

I wondered why I had not heard of this atrocious event in all the reading I had done in Arab American and US immigration studies. There was obviously material in the English- and Arabic-language newspapers. Why was this story not more widely known?

Centering Race in Middle East Studies

I did not have the time to do extensive research on the Romeys then, as I was soon to have to submit my dissertation, but the killing became the major project I turned to while at my first academic job at Loyola University New Orleans in 2000. Over the next five years, I conducted research using printed and microfilm newspapers, secondary literature on lynching in the United States, and Arab American archival material. This research supported my writing of a first short paper that I titled “Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South.” The title referenced the 1939 Billie Holiday song, with lyrics drawn from a poem written by Abel Meeropol. The opening stanza spoke of “Southern trees bearing a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”11

I placed a question mark after the title (“Strange Fruit?”) to invite discussion and to signal the Romeys’ proximity to the violence inflicted on the bodies of Black men and women by Southern white people. I was not saying that the experience of violence was the same. The question mark at the end of my title was an interjection, the presentation of a problem. It was intended to elicit exploration of a range of questions: How had the Syrian community responded? Where did the lynching sit in the complicated history of Arab racialization in the United States? How could we deepen our understanding of what happened and why?

I presented the paper at a conference on the Lebanese diaspora in Beirut in 2001 and published an expanded version in Arab Studies Quarterly in 2004.12 The article drew on the historiography on lynchings in the United States and on the extensive microfilm collection of the NAACP. The research had left me immobilized at times, crying quietly in the cold reading room of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago. To study the history of lynching in the United States means coming face-to-face with grotesque and gratuitous violence, a psychopathic celebration of white supremacy. To study lynching is also to be moved by the radical refusal to be defined by this violence and be altered by the painstaking efforts of those who challenged supremacist hate. Ida B. Wells’s meticulously researched 1895 study of lynching, for example, laid bare white women’s complicity in the assault on Black men, as well as the imbrication of this violence in a system intent on crushing Black self-determination and prosperity, be it in terms of access to the ballot or pursuit of economic independence. Six decades later, Mamie Till-Mobley’s insistence on leaving her son Emmett’s casket open at his funeral, his disfigured, brutalized teenage body on view, exposed the savagery of his lynchers while reclaiming a celebration of Emmett Till’s life. Her decision also served as a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement.13

My work on the Romey killing was, at the time, part of a larger project on Syrian migration to the United States, one that centered race as a category of analysis in Middle East history and in Arab American studies. Undertaking this work had been a rather challenging endeavor and required that I unhinge myself from dominant paradigms in my discipline. The nationalist historiography in Middle East studies focused largely on the emergence of nationalism in Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It did not account for race or racialized discourses in the formation of nation-state projects or of the role of migrants in these projects. But my reading of documents—including well-cited ones like the “Documents of the First Arab Congress”—encouraged a theorizing of migration as a process that brought Syrians into contact with other racialized groups in the United States.14 Race, and claims to whiteness in particular, were important elements of diasporic identity formation.

At the same time, there was very little written in US immigration history about Arabs, and the historical work by Arab American scholars seemed to uncritically accept the assimilation paradigm—a celebratory writing of success narratives, ascent to the mainstream, and embrace of whiteness. I therefore turned elsewhere. Much of my early theorizing around race and Arab American history was inspired by the writings of James Baldwin. His 1984 essay “On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies,” published in Essence Magazine, sits within a long tradition of Black writers writing about the pernicious working of whiteness. It is a searing two-page condemnation of white supremacy, crafted in prose that calls out the unexamined privileges of whiteness by European immigrants and their descendants in the United States. “It bears terrifying witness,” Baldwin writes, “to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become ‘white.’ No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.”15

Baldwin delineates how incorporation into whiteness allows for a kind of festive ethnicity of the Irish, the Italians, and of American Jews, and he insists that this incorporation relies on justifying Black subjugation. Baldwin gave me the language to theorize the Syrian racial prerequisite cases, to understand the “lie” of whiteness, and the ways that upwardly mobile Arab immigrants had clamored for participation in it, distancing themselves from responsibility of this “moral choice.” Baldwin’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s work shaped the ground from which I could see that Arab nationalist claims for independence had often harnessed the language of “civilization” that was racialized, informed by unacknowledged supremacist logics.

I kept working, carving out spaces of connection where I would be seen not as a historian of the Middle East doing American history but as a scholar of Syrian migration focused on the problem of race and racism in Arab America. Those who best understood my work were feminist allies, many of whom gathered for a panel at the Middle East Studies Association conference in 2002. Organized by Michelle Hartman, the interdisciplinary panel brought together scholars working on Arab American racialization. We were energized by this experience, and the panel became the basis of the publication Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11, edited by Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber.16 We were also made aware of the skepticism in the broader field of Middle East studies on the importance of race as a category of analysis and of the ways that anti-Blackness was embedded in the social formations of the field. A canonical history of modern Syria, for example, explained the revilement that Syrians displayed toward the Senegalese troops used by the French Mandate authorities to police them in supposedly commonsense terms—the troops’ Blackness, and colonized status, being a particular afront to Levantine sensibilities.17 Histories of Ottoman slavery, in attempts to distinguish its forms from American plantation economies, tended to minimize its horrors.18 Graduate students contended with assertions that racism was not indigenous to the Middle East. It was not until 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that the leadership of the Middle East Studies Association publicly committed to addressing anti-Blackness in our fields of study.19

Scholarly encounters outside Middle East studies were doubly fraught, steeped as they were in Orientalism and racism. Anti-Arab animus permeated the academy, and young scholars whose work made Arab migrants agentic, complex human subjects in American history were isolated in departments that focused on European and Anglo-American histories. Often it was our categories of analysis that came under fire—we focused too much on gender, too much on race, not enough on class. At a 2005 job talk, for example, I was told by a senior male, white Americanist in working-class history that Nola Romey’s lynching wasn’t really about race but about what he called “garden variety” violence in a place accustomed to it when people stepped out of line. Compulsory Zionism so shaped the culture and politics of the academy that analysis of the systemic racism making Arabs vulnerable to premature death was met with derision.20

There were gatekeepers at every turn, defending their privileged hold on ossified canons. Fortunately, in 2005, my new academic position was supported by an emerging program in critical ethnic studies where the analysis of race and inequality were central to its mission. I took on my first graduate students and my scholarship on the lynching developed new lines of inquiry.

Finding “Romey” in the State Archive

In the summer of 2006, the research intensified, and I got closer to finding Emeline. My mentor had connected me to a contact in Florida who was active in the Southern Federation of Syrian Lebanese American Clubs. A lovely man, Kelly (Kalil) Aide, the son of a “traveling salesman” from Syria, took an interest in my project and began to introduce me to elders, giving me names and phone numbers. We agreed that I would visit him at his home in Orlando and then make our way to the federation meeting in San Antonio, Texas, at the end of June. But first I would stop to visit the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee.

I went to Tallahassee presupposing that I would find something in the voluminous set of documents entitled “Records on Lynching.” I found nothing on the Romey case, but I was able to contextualize Nola’s and Fannie’s deaths within the framework of “lynch-prone” Columbia County, which had more multiple lynchings than any other county in the state. I decided to try the “Correspondence” files of Governor Doyle Elam Carlton, who had been in office in 1929, surmising that there might be something there. There was. Several folders into box 16, I saw a small piece of paper clipped to a top sheet of a stack. It read in red pencil “Romey.” I remember thinking, “Here he is.” The folder contained letters typed in stale bureaucratic language, telegrams from the governor to Lake City’s sheriff, and impassioned pleas from Syrians in Valdosta, Georgia, asking for protection of the eldest Romey child, Esau (a.k.a. Icer), written the day Nola was killed. George J. Lahood spearheaded the latter effort in a telegram in all caps:

representing number of syrian citizens here we ask that you have esau romey removed from jail tallahassee for protection his mother killed by chief police last night lakecity his father removed from jail and killed this morning we do not uphold the wrong but simply ask that this young boy who is innocent be removed as to be protected from probably mob violence understand no charge against the boy whatever please answer21

The folder also contained handwritten letters sent to the governor imploring him to do something about police corruption in the town. The writers knew who killed the Romeys. Letter after letter named each member of Lake City’s police force in a damning rebuke of that preposterous Jim Crow lie that lynching victims came to their deaths, as the coroner’s jury impaneled to hear the investigation of the Romey lynching had claimed, “at the hands of persons unknown to us.”22 The letters were unsigned, out of fear of reprisal, but they nonetheless formed a chorus of refusal of Florida’s reign of terror.23

After Tallahassee, I went to Lake City to the courthouse and looked up the probate records. I found a large, bound ledger showing that the Moses family—the other Syrian family in Lake City at the time of the Romey killings—had taken in the four Romey children after Nola and Fannie were killed.24 I went to Valdosta, Georgia, where the Romeys had lived before moving to Lake City and where they were buried. In the courthouse there, I found an arrest record for Nola. As punishment for his running a “game of chance,” he had been sentenced to work on a chain gang.25 The connections to African American history—to carceral labor, police brutality, and impunity—were clear. It was not only the way Nola died that aligned him to communities of color but also the way he lived—eking out a living in an era of prohibition, challenged by his probationary citizenship, trying with his wife to protect his children from those who called him “dago” and “wop.”26

I began to make phone calls to the names on Kelly Aide’s list, and I met with a number of Lebanese Americans at the federation meeting in San Antonio. On July 17, 2006, I called Philip Moses (of the Moses family that took care of the Romey children after the death of their parents). He spoke to me with some reticence, moving between precise details of the day of the killings and reluctance to make the story public. He remembered the six blocks he ran with his mother from the movie theater when they received word of a shooting at the Romey store, and he emphasized the goodness of the doctor who attended to Fannie after she was shot. But he added that his grandchildren “didn’t even know about [the killings].”27

Philip Moses gave me Emeline’s phone number, and I called her on July 26, 2006. I had naively expected her to be immediately interested in speaking with me. Her response was something quite different. She seemed baffled, upset, intrigued, and angry all at the same time. I had no training on how to cold call someone whose father had been lynched. I explained that I was a historian interested in understanding more about the tragedy that shattered her family. Emeline spoke in an Alabama-accented, gravelly voice and wanted to know how I had found her name. We talked more and got on a better footing. I understood her concerns. She didn’t want the story being told without the family’s permission and didn’t want someone profiting off her story because she entertained the idea of making it into a book or a movie. She was angry that the family never received compensation from the state of Florida for the murder of her parents. In the 1940s her husband had approached a lawyer to see if he could take the case and, as Emeline said, ensure that “those bastards rot in hell.” Nothing ever came of it.

I told Emeline during that first phone call that I was not intending to make money off of her story. I explained that I had read a lot of material that was in the public domain and wanted to write a piece that would acknowledge and name the crime as part of Arab American history. Over the course of the conversation, her pain became palpable. She recounted lighting candles every year to commemorate her parents’ deaths. “This year,” (2006) she said, “the date fell on the same day as in 1929.” Over the course of the next few months, we spoke several more times. I sent her copies of newspaper articles and other materials that I had gathered. Our conversations weren’t always about the lynching. She asked me about my life in Los Angeles, and we spoke about our families. In January of 2007, she agreed to have me visit her at her home in Mobile, Alabama. I flew from Los Angeles to New Orleans, rented a car, and drove the two hours to meet her.

Looking Beyond the Logics of the Archive

Perhaps out of nervousness, but also out of recognition of her initial unease, I left the tape recorder that I had brought with me to Emeline’s home in my bag. I had made this decision within a few minutes of sitting down with her, pivoting to an interaction that was not a formal interview but a conversation. I would be guided by this conversation, and while I took copious notes, I never cited from them. It wasn’t that she told me not to, but I felt it necessary to echo her reticence, to hold something back. My decision, or improvisation, stemmed from a reluctance to make the conversation with Emeline overly extractive—a showcasing of what one of my teachers called the “golden nugget”: a rich discovery that propels an argument, serves as evidence, and helps establish credibility for the historian. I did not feel right pressing “on” on the recorder, nor did it seem ethical at the time to impose a citational apparatus on the information she shared with me. Rather, I sat, I listened, and I affirmed the way Emeline was telling her story.

She had placed her manuscript on the table in front of me and told me that I could read it. The first paragraph stopped me in my tracks. It began: “Summer days, golden days, where has my pretty world gone? As I stroll down memory lane everything that has happened during the last forty years comes back to me as if it was just yesterday. I feel so alone without my husband. . . . I wake up screaming after these nightmares. There is no one here to console me. Will these nightmares ever stop I ask?” I looked up and said, “This is devastating.” She nodded and asked me if I liked the title. I said yes, adding that perhaps she wanted to consider a plural: “The Killings”? We spoke for two more hours, and when I left her home, I pledged to stay in contact with her. Our correspondence in the form of letter writing and phone calls began soon thereafter.

The conversations I had with Emeline on that day and on subsequent occasions oscillated between the poles of revelation and concealment, anxiety and release, trepidation and assurance. She wanted to tell her story, and she wanted justice for her family, but she was afraid that those responsible for the murder of her parents would harm her. Indeed, the last page of her manuscript contains both an insistence “to let it be known how [her parents] were killed” and a naming of the terror she feels: “All of my life I still live in fear,” she writes. “I look over my shoulders thinking are they looking for the survivors of my family?”

This residual terror may explain why Emeline called me at 5:30 in the morning after our meeting asking me not to publish the photo that I took of her parents. I did not. And while the first meeting with Emeline and subsequent conversation powerfully shaped my research and my interpretation of the murder of her parents, they remained a largely hidden source in my published work. The cultivation of care and trust was the primary goal of my interactions with her—the process part of oral history, not the product. This sustained relationship became, to use Crystal Mun-hye Baik’s formulation, “embodied forms of archiving.”28 This embodied archive served like a compass pointing me in other directions: to large and small archival repositories, to newspaper collections, census records, court houses, and cemeteries, and to phone calls with Emeline’s relatives.

I did not render Emeline’s request for silence around the photos into an absence. Rather, I followed poet Adrienne Rich’s assertion that “silence may be . . . the blueprint to a life. It is a presence / it has history a form. Do not confuse it / with any kind of absence.”29

What had once been a problem of paucity of sources was becoming for me an issue of how to ethically address painful abundance. I had newspaper articles, letters, photos, and, after the meeting with Emeline, the recollections, written and oral, of a witness. But ethical citation of these recollections confounded me so long as she wanted to be the caretaker of the narrative.

Throughout all our conversations, it was clear that Emeline wanted to be involved, to see herself as the author of her story. She called librarians and did follow-up research, revisiting sources related to her father’s and mother’s deaths. Her desire for supporting material had been obvious early on. In a letter written to me on February 9, 2007, less than two weeks after our meeting in Mobile, Emeline requested copies of newspaper articles I had collected on the killing of her parents.

At the top of this letter is a burn mark. It was made by ash from Emeline’s cigarette. A fragment I had once seen as ancillary, I look at it now as the mark that captures the affective register that resided within her body, nearly eighty years after her parents’ deaths. She writes at the bottom of the letter, “Excuse cig. burn at top! I am a bit nervous tonite.”

Other letters to me were packed with quotidian details and updates on her health expressed with her characteristic wit and humor. After describing the pain of her injured rotator cuff, for example, Emeline wrote that the doctor looked at her x-ray “and asked me if I was using a push lawn mower!” The tone in her letters reminded me of her manuscript where she wrote about eating bologna sandwiches and playing with her friends at school, only to move in the next paragraph to the sting of being called a “dago and wop” by a classmate.

In the fall of 2008, while my mother was dying, I typed Emeline’s manuscript for her and encouraged her to send a copy to the Library of Congress (which she did). I made some inquiries to publishers about publishing the “The Killing” but did not get positive responses. Emeline also approached a company called Dorrance, but she scoffed at the idea of having to pay to self-publish her story.

In 2009, the University of California Press published my book Between Arab and White, which contained a chapter on the lynching of Nola Romey. I opened the chapter with three epigraphs. The first from Richard Wright on white brutality being “a more effective control of [his] behavior than that which [he] knew.”30 The second, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s definition of lynching as “a specie of mob violence which results in the death of a man whose guilt has not been judicially ascertained.”31 And the third epigraph pulled from Emeline’s manuscript: “All of my life I still live in fear. I look over my shoulders thinking are they looking for the survivors of my family?” Emeline’s words, her insights on the impact of the killing of her parents, her use of the active word looking to register her fear that the murderers could still harm her family thus set the tone of the chapter. I positioned her within a genealogy of Black writers on lynching to underscore that what connected them was knowledge of the workings of white supremacy: the calibrations of behavior, the hijacking of the judicial system, the lingering effects of violence, and the intergenerational traumas. I labored over how to tell the story with nuance, anchoring the narrative in the extensive newspaper coverage of the lynching in both Arabic and English and the material I had found in the Tallahassee state archives. The chapter was a forensic reconstruction of the killing of Fannie and Nola Romey as well as provocation to readers to think through the ways that Syrians responded to the killing by reasserting claims to whiteness.

I amplified the letters from the State Archives of Florida pointing to the police officers. One letter stated that “they are to pertect us and it is a plain case they killed Romie for nothing.”32 I cited material from three Lake City women’s clubs condemning the lynching for violating the “peace and dignity of the community.”33 My aim was to convey the intricacies of the history and, importantly, to protect Emeline, citing her only as the “surviving daughter.” This chapter propelled Ismail Khalidi to write the play Dead Are My People in which he constructed a way to rise up from the carnage of extralegal violence and affirm legacies of interethnic solidarity and love.34 The play revolves around the friendship between an African American resident of a small southern town and a newly arrived Syrian migrant, piecing together the story of his uncle who, the audience learns, was lynched years before his arrival. Khalidi and I spoke at length as the play developed and I advised on the dramaturgy.

In 2010, my son was born and I entered into the chaos of new parenthood. I spoke with Emeline, who was happy about me being a mother, and our discussions of the murder of her parents were put on hold. In August of 2012, Emeline’s nephew Stewart Giardina left a message on my voicemail informing me that she had died and that he and his cousin had buried her in Birmingham, where “she wished to be.” He wanted to speak to me about an idea he had for doing something about her story, and we spoke a few times on this topic.

Coda

In November of 2019, I received a mass email from the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies located at North Carolina State University. The email had the subject line “The Romey Lynchings.” When I clicked to open the link, the photos of Emeline’s parents were there front and center on the page. I remember gasping and feeling faintly sick.

The Khayrallah Center email announced the constitution of a digitized archive of material related to the “Romey Lynchings.” The site included a narrative of the lynchings that drew extensively from my book, although it did not cite the chapter on the lynching, crediting instead my “pioneering work” on the lynching in an acknowledgment. The archival material from the state archives that I footnoted in my book had been digitized and uploaded on the center’s site. There were several aspects of the email announcement, and the archiving project, that troubled me. It felt odd that my scholarship was so poorly cited and that the acknowledgment implied my consent or collaboration, but it was the very public dissemination of the photo of Nola and Fannie that unsettled me in ways that were visceral. I felt as though the trust I had established with Emeline, that I had kept even after her death, had been broken. The center, I assume, had undertaken standard steps to secure the photos from surviving family members, digitize them, and release them publicly. There was an acknowledgment on the center website to the Moses and Giardina families.35 But there was something unsettling about the way the photos leaped out on the first page, the first click, decontextualized, disaggregated, and doing the salacious work of showing the faces of the victims. The narrative of the lynching on the website returned the reader to the “scene of subjection,” to the bullets and the blood and the bodies hanging from trees with jubilant mobs underneath.36 The website curated an abundance of archival material, an abundance that was itself a departure from the archival silences that distort the full-fledged lives of the victims of American racial terror. Yet, the easy dissemination of the photos of Nola and Fannie Romey seemed to flatten their histories.

I knew there could have been another way. Why not an opening slide that pulled from Emeline’s narrative? Why not an introduction that encouraged the viewer and reader to pause, to say the names, to understand that they were going to learn about lethal violence inflicted on the body of a pregnant woman, her husband, and, by extension, other lynching victims, most of them Black men? Why not suggest resources such as Ida B. Wells’s numerous antilynching publications (and not just a mention of the death threats she received)?37 Why the choice to champion acquisition and rapid dissemination over process? Why did I feel as though Emeline had been evacuated from the telling of her family’s story in the rush to digitize her letters, her photos, and her manuscript?

The silence—or perhaps the better word is reverence—and the holding of the image of Nola and Fannie Romey close in familial hands, in hands shaped by grief, were gone. Did making the photos so easily viewable advance the field of Arab American studies? I’m not sure. Their presence in the center’s digitized archive seemed to satisfy an almost prurient interest in the question “What did the lynching victims look like?”

Yes, we can see them easily now, but we cannot feel Emeline’s reticence, the ambivalence, and the anguish involved in speaking about the violence inflicted upon Nola and Fannie Romey. We cannot know the co-constitutive process through which the archive of the lynching, in its different iterations, came to be. We have clarity on one aspect of the Romey story but an obfuscation of others.

This obfuscation—even if unintentional—makes it harder to grasp the parallels between the murder of the Romeys and the murder of other Arab Americans. The parallels are too often collapsed into the category of ethnicity or the supposition that Arabs are targeted as Arabs, but it is the structure of impunity that fuels the violence. In the case of the assassination of Alex Odeh, West Coast director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, in 1985, for example, his killers and their associates, who early police reports suspected were members of the Jewish Defense League, had already carried out a campaign of bombing, terror, and harassment against spaces of Arab collectivity in Los Angeles.38 Thus, when lead suspect in the Odeh assassination Irv Rubin boldly proclaimed that “he had no tears for Odeh, he got exactly what he deserved,” he was echoing, parroting even, the threat of lynching directed at Icer Romey (Nola and Fannie’s son) when he was dragged off to jail “because that is what is going to happen to your father.”39 And just as the Romeys’ killers evaded any kind of accountability, despite being known and named by the courageous letter writers who demanded a different racial order, Odeh’s killers scurried off to a different settler colonial space, shaped by the US-Israeli imperial alliance. In the spring of 2024, one of them was seen obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gazans at the Karem Abu Salem Crossing. This history, Esmat Elhalaby reminds us, “cannot be extricated from the history of the United Sates more generally or indeed the history of the Palestine that lies on the Eastern Mediterranean.”40

It’s taken me many years to speak, to figure out a way to help give Emeline her due, to craft a way, however small, to honor the conversation we first had while sitting at her table, cigarettes in hand, finding a way to talk about grief. In one sense, I’m glad I waited because my deliberate slowness allowed me to understand different ways of “listening” to the photos of her parents. As Tina M. Campt writes, this listening “is constituted as a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register.”41

In a gesture of reparative work, of remembering the desire to tell her story in her own way, I share the photos of Nola and Fannie Romey as they came to me on that day Emeline and I met. I kept the photos out of my book, respecting Emeline’s request to not have them shown publicly. It is the photo of the photos that I turn to now, remembering the way they came into my hands, conjoined in a 4 × 6-inch decorative metal frame. They were shown to me by Emeline during the course of a conversation where pain was fused with love.

The frame has a hinge at the center so that it holds two separate photos, one of Emeline’s mother and the other of her father. I remember looking at the photos, drawn in by Nola’s eyes, the close-up of his shoulders and face, his broad forehead topped with a shock of wavy brown hair parted to the side. The photo of her mother was different in composition and tone. Posed, as if taken in a studio, Fannie stands with one hand clutching a crocheted white bag, the other a small bouquet of flowers. She is wearing a high-waisted skirt and a lace-rimmed blouse, suggesting a date somewhere in the 1910s. She looks young, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties. Her face is round, her eyes wide, her dark hair lush and elegantly coiffed. I can see the similarity with Emeline.

The event of this photograph that might restore Emeline’s agency to the archive is not the date at which they were originally taken but the day I sat with her at her kitchen table and she quietly retreated to her bedroom to retrieve the conjoined photos of her parents. It is this photo—the photo of the photos—that conveys a different meaning, not disarticulated images, proof of the likeness of Nola and Fannie Romey, but an image infused with haptic silence, passing from Emeline’s hands to mine and returning to her bedroom that night, where thoughts of the photo tormented her as had nightmares of the lynching throughout her life. The photo of the photos came into being because of a process of what Zeynep Devrim Gürsel calls “looking together”—reviewing documents, family archives, and photographs with descendants to understand the past and the resonance of an event in the present.42

To share the photo now is to share the exchange between historian and interlocutor and to collapse the distinction between the two. To share the photo as it came to me is to tell the story of the enduring reverence of a daughter who loved and longed for her parents. To share the photo now is to offer my answer to Emeline’s question: “Who will dry my tears?”

Because, as she writes: “The pain passes, but the memory remains.”43

Sarah M. A. Gualtieri is professor of American studies and ethnicity, history, and Middle East studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two books, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora and Arab Routes: Pathways to Syrian California, which won the Arab American National Museum’s Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Award as well as the Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies. She is a historian who specializes in Arab America, racial formation, and archival theory and praxis. She holds a PhD in Middle East history from the University of Chicago.

Notes

I thank an anonymous reader with Critical Ethnic Studies and participants in Georgetown University in Qatar’s Women and Academic Writing Group for valuable feedback on this article. Dorinne Kondo and Evelyn Alsultany also provided writerly support.

1. 1. Most of the written archival sources consulted for this article use the term Syrian to describe the Romeys, reflecting dominant designations of the people of the Syrian lands that in the late Ottoman period included what are now the states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. Nola is an Anglicized version of the Arabic name Niqula (pronounced Ni’oula in Levantine dialect). In some sources, Nola’s name appears as “Nicholas,” which is the English equivalent of Niqula. Emeline called him “Nola” in conversation with the author. “Romey” is Anglicized from the Arabic Rumi. In Arabic-language sources, Fannie’s name is Hasna.

2. 2. Emeline Romey Stewart, “The Killing, Let the World Know: The True Event That Occurred in 1929 of a Pregnant Mother of Four Children Killed in Cold Blood and the Father Lynched in Florida,” 1968, manuscript in author’s possession.

3. 3. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (University of California Press, 2009).

4. 4. For a review of lynching historiography, see Michael J. Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown? The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship,” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (2014): 832–46.

5. 5. Emeline Romey Stewart, phone conversation with author, July 26, 2006. She uses the term Lebanese, following the adoption of a specifically Lebanese identity among diaspora communities after independence from French colonial rule.

6. 6. I am thinking along with many scholars in this article. Arab American feminists have deeply engaged with “theories of the flesh,” which center lived experience and reciprocity in scholarship and activism. See, for example, Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds.,Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Syracuse University Press, 2015). More specifically, Amira Jarmakani argues that silence can be a strategy within oppositional consciousness when “speech will simply reinforce the false binary that frames so much of the public discourse about SWANA and gender” (“Arab American Feminisms: Mobilizing the Politics of Invisibility,” in Abdulhadi, Alsultany, and Naber, Arab and Arab American Feminisms, 240). I am also drawn to Tina M. Campt’s powerful insistence to “listen to” rather than just “look at” images in order to challenge the equation of vision with knowledge (Listening to Images [Duke University Press, 2017]). My contribution may resonate with this wide-ranging scholarship but seeks also to engage explicitly with practices of archival constitution and with methods that are improvised.

7. 7. Crystal Mun-hye Baik helpfully notes that “sustained relationships are embodied forms of archiving” and the “cultivation of care and trust is the primary goal.” Crystal Mun-hye Baik, “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis,” Oral History Review 49, no. 1 (2022): 7. On how oral sources are generated in a dialogic exchange between the historian and narrator, see Alessandro Portelli, “A Dialogical Relationship: An Approach to Oral History,” Academia.edu, 1985, https://www.academia.edu/65652418/A_Dialogical_Relationship_An_Approach_to_Oral_History.

8. 8. See, for example, Sarah Moawad Muftah, “Ismail Khalidi’s ‘Dead Are My People’ Examines White Supremacy and Immigration in America, Then and Now,” Arab America, October 8, 2016, https://www.arabamerica.com/ismail-khalidis-dead-people-examines-white-supremacy-immigration-america-now/; Dima Alzayat, Alligator and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2020).

9. 9. In this regard, I am drawn to Maisha S. Akbar’s use of the term critical lynching studies. While Akbar’s focus is on plays written by African American women, her definition of lynching as “extralegal, complex, cyclical and cross generational practices of white supremacist terrorism which ultimately functions to unjustly deny (primarily) African American victims their full wealth as United States citizens” is resonant for my discussion here. See Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays (Routledge, 2020), 8.

10. 10.Syrian World 3, no. 12 (1929): 42. “Nicholas” is the English translation of the Arabic name Niqula.

11. 11. “Strange Fruit (1939)—Billie Holiday (written by Abel Meeropol),” in Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, ed. Steve Sullivan (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 46.

12. 12. Sarah M. A. Gualtieri, “Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2004): 63–85.

13. 13. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States (1894) (Donohue & Henneberry, ca. 1894), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-8dbd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99; Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (Random House, 2003).

14. 14. al-Lajna al-‘ulya li-hizb al-lamarkaziyya bi misr, Al-mu‘tamar al-‘arabi al-awwal [Documents of the First Arab Congress] (Matba‘a al-Busfur, 1913).

15. 15. James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984, 90–92.

16. 16. Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Syracuse University Press, 2007). There were other scholars working on Arab American racialization too. Lisa Suhair Majaj, for example, published “Arab-Americans and the Meanings of Race,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritijit Singh and Peter Schmidt, ed. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt (University of Mississippi Press, 2000).

17. 17. Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (Princeton University Press, 1987), 79.

18. 18. For a nuanced engagement with the literature on slavery in the Middle East, see Beeta Baghoolizadeh, The Color Black: Enslavement and Erasure in Iran (Duke University Press, 2024).

19. 19. See “MESA Board Statement in Solidarity with the Uprisings Against Systemic Racism and Anti-Blackness,” Middle East Studies Association, June 29, 2020, https://mesana.org/advocacy/letters-from-the-board/2020/06/29/mesa-board-statement-in-solidarity-with-the-uprisings-against-systemic-racism-and-anti-blackness. See also Eve Troutt Powell, “Black Lives Still Matter,” which credits past MESA president Dina Khoury with establishing the Committee on Anti-Racism and Anti-Discrimination within MESA. Eve Troutt Powell, “Black Lives Still Matter,” Issues in Middle East Studies 44, no. 1 (2022): https://mesana.org/pdf/IMES2022_May_final.pdf. There is an emerging body of scholarship on histories of anti-Blackness in the Middle East and their imbrications in the British colonial order. See, for example, Sherene Seikaly, “A Matter of Time,” American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (2019): 1681–88.

20. 20. Umayyah Cable argues that “compulsory Zionism operates discursively to naturalize and privilege Israel as an ethnonational state and further subjugate Palestinian existence” (“Compulsory Zionism and Palestinian Existence: A Genealogy,” Journal of Palestine Studies 51, no. 2 [2022]: 66–71). In the fields of life writing and trauma studies, the special issue of Life Writing (21, no. 4 [2024]), published during the genocide on Gaza, exemplified compulsory Zionism with its complete erasure of Palestinian victims.

21. 21. Administrative Correspondence of Governor Doyle E. Carlton, 1929–1932, Series 204, box 16, folder 5, State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee.

22. 22.Lake City Reporter, May 24, 1929. See also W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (University of Illinois Press, 1993), 76.

23. 23. They further supported what was printed in the Valdosta Daily Times on Saturday, May 18, 1929, “Funeral Service to Be Held Sunday for Lynch Victim.” This article reported that Esau (a.k.a. Icer) knew the killers: “He says that three men whom he knew came to the jail and told him that they were going to lynch his father who was in the city prison. He says that he told them that his father was already nearly half dead and that he did not know why they should want to lynch him. He says that he knew the men perfectly well and they did not wear masks and did not try to conceal their identities.”

24. 24. “Application for Letters,” June 6, 1929, Book H, Lake City County Court House.

25. 25. The State v. N. G. Romey, “Indictment for Misdemeanor,” December 2, 1916, and August 25, 1922, Superior Court Criminal Disposed of Docket, County Court, Valdosta, Georgia.

26. 26. Romey Stewart, “Killing,” 23.

27. 27. Philip Moses, phone conversation with author, July 10, 2006.

28. 28. Baik, “From ‘Best’ to Situated and Relational,” 7.

29. 29. Adrienne Rich, “Cartographies of Silence,” in Collected Poems, 1950–2012 (W. W. Norton, 2016), 457. This withholding approximates a “methodology of refusal,” which Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue, drawing on Audra Simpson and Ken Gonzales-Day, “regards limits on knowledge as productive, as indeed a good thing.” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Sage, 2014), 239.

30. 30. Richard Wright, Black Boy, as quoted in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia University Press, 1979), 136.

31. 31. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Race Relations in the United States, 1917–1947,” Phylon 9, no. 3 (1948): 236.

32. 32. Unsigned, undated letter to Governor Carlton, Administrative Correspondence of Governor Doyle E. Carlton, 1929–1932, Series 204, box 16, folder 5, State Archives of Florida, Tallahassee.

33. 33.Lake City Reporter, May 24, 1929, 1.

34. 34. Ismail Khalidi, “Dead Are My People,” in Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).

35. 35. Emeline and her siblings had gone to live with the Moses family after the murder of her parents. Her nephew, Stewart Giardina, is the son of Emeline’s sister, Lucille. The center thanks the Moses and Giardina families here: “The Romey Lynchings,” NC State University Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, https://lebanesestudies.ncsu.edu/explore/publications/projects/romey-lynchings/.

36. 36. I take the idea of the “scene of subjection” from Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 4.

37. 37. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York Age Print, 1892). This is the first of several antilynching works written by Wells-Barnett.

38. 38. Esmat Elhalaby, “Los Angeles Intifada,” Michigan Quarterly Review 59, no. 4 (2020): https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2020/10/los-angeles-intifada/; Sarah Gualtieri et al., “Researching Middle Eastern and North African American Histories in the US National Archives: A Reflection on Method,” Journal of American Ethnic History 45, no. 1 (2025): 6.

39. 39. As quoted in the Syrian World, June 1929, 47.

40. 40. Elhalaby, “Los Angeles Intifada.”

41. 41. Campt, Listening to Images, 11.

42. 42. Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “Looking Together as Method: Encounters with Ottoman Armenian Expatriation Photographs,” Visual Anthropology Review 39, no. 1 (2023): 200–29.

43. 43. Stewart, “The Killing,” 28.