Lynching Photographs 9780520941250

Citation preview

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Lynching Photographs

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Defining Moments in American Photography Volume 2 of a series edited by Anthony W. Lee

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Lynching Photographs

d ora a pel s hawn m ichelle s mith

Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

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Contents

introduction / 1 anthony w. lee The Evidence of Lynching Photographs shawn michelle smith 10

Lynching Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming dora apel 42

notes / 79 works cited / 91 index / 97

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Introduction

anthony w. lee

in january 2000, a small photography exhibit opened at the Roth Horowitz Gallery on East Seventieth Street in New York. Called Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen, it assembled and displayed some sixty photographs that Allen, an antiques dealer from Atlanta, had collected over the course of fifteen years. Discovered by Allen in family albums, attic trunks, and flea markets, the photographs showed the victims and occasionally the perpetrators of lynchings from different times and places, from the end of Reconstruction to 1960, and from the Deep South to the Far West. The majority of the photographs, like the majority of lynchings, concerned African American men in the Jim Crow South. The images were mostly blackand-white and small, no more than a few inches long and wide; in fact many were postcards or had been mounted on card stock. They were laid flat on long display tables or assembled in tight groupings and tacked to the light-colored walls. The secondhand quality of the photographs—their images and card stock tattered, faded, or worn (some photographs, in fact, had been written on and used as postcards)—was evident, for they had been neither retouched nor restored. Nor were they framed, matted, or extensively captioned. Instead they were offered as artifacts rather than as fine arts objects. That was unusual enough in an Upper East Side commercial gallery. Even more unusual, none were for sale.

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The Roth Horowitz Gallery might have seemed the least likely place for such an exhibit. According to one early observer, Allen and his associate Jack Woody had initially approached the large and well-established International Center of Photography (ICP), a logical venue for an exhibition of historical photographs in New York. It had refused them.1 Unlike the ICP, with its spacious upper and lower galleries in midtown Manhattan that could accommodate large crowds, and with its experienced security staff, the Roth Horowitz Gallery had a single room, about 25 by 25 feet, where crowd control and security had never been required. Andrew Roth, described as a “slight, bearded man who speaks with the measured care of a scholar,” and his partner, Glenn Horowitz, primarily a rare book dealer, had a long-standing interest in photography and had previously exhibited photographs. “I am photographically literate,” Roth declared to a reporter. But even as the exhibit opened, there was a sense that Witness would tax the resources of the small gallery. “I hope we don’t have crowds here,” Roth said.2 They arrived, however, almost immediately. Long lines formed outside the gallery during the exhibition’s brief run, some visitors waiting three hours on the wintry sidewalks for their turn inside. As men and women jostled elbowto-elbow, overwhelming the small room, Roth and Horowitz issued tickets to manage the throngs and limited the number of visitors to two hundred a day. Enthusiasm grew ever wider. Soon the nation knew of the photographs. CNN sent correspondents and posted videos of their reports on its Web site; the Today Show televised a segment from the gallery; the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer filmed an impassioned report by one of its lead journalists, Roger Rosenblatt; Stevie Wonder and Oprah Winfrey arranged for private (though well- publicized) tours. After the show closed at Roth Horowitz, it reopened almost immediately, in March, at the New-York Historical Society to even larger crowds. Renamed Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which was also the title of an accompanying book assembled by Allen and published by Woody, the exhibition included not only Allen’s photographs and postcards but also materials from the society’s collection to provide a histori-

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cal context missing for the images at Roth Horowitz. The society also organized weekly sessions and symposia so that visitors could discuss their responses to the images. Fifty thousand attended the exhibition in its first four months. A national tour began soon after. The show opened in 2001 at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, in 2002 at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site in Atlanta, in early 2004 at Jackson State University in Mississippi, later that same year at the Charles H. Wright Museum in Detroit, and in 2005 at the Chicago Historical Society. At each new venue, the exhibition added more and more components, some large, some small, the most elaborate additions taking place in Atlanta. There, the exhibition’s curators offered a counterhistory to the gruesome story the photographs suggested. Making use of the large space, carefully arranged glass cases, a video documentary, and mournful spirituals piped into the gallery, they produced an elaborate display of words, images, music, magazines, and posters documenting the efforts of Ida B. Wells, the African American journalist and social reformer; the NAACP; early twentieth-century leftist groups, including the Communist Party of the United States; the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching; and the American Crusade to End Lynching—in effect, a multimedia narrative that traced a persistent antilynching campaign in the Jim Crow South. With these materials they offered a less well-known story of activism and resistance among African Americans, a stark contrast to the history suggested by the helplessness of the victims pictured on the postcards. In a sense, the added materials competed with, or gave a proper sense of gravitas and perspective to, the photographs with their seemingly irresistible power. Perhaps because the Atlanta site had a charged history—Georgia and Mississippi were among the states where the largest number of recorded lynchings had occurred—or perhaps because the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site focuses on the controversies and legacies of the civil rights era, or perhaps because James Allen ran into countless difficulties in trying to secure a venue in his hometown (“Most of the institutions weren’t even willing to look at the images,” he

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recalled), CNN, NPR, and the NewsHour, among many other national news agencies, sent more reporters for another extended round of coverage.3 What began as an exhibition in a small New York gallery—modest, even reticent in its original display; unaccompanied by texts or argument or by informative documentation; its presenters unprepared for, even a bit startled by, such intense local and national interest—became the basis for a serious and strenuous national conversation. These photographs seemed to address the concern among scholars, repeated at each venue, that for too long there had been a collective amnesia about the gruesome yet all-too-common practice of lynching. Here was an antidote to forgetfulness, a challenge to those individuals or communities who preferred to deny these grim chapters in American history. The discussion about lynching and its photographs continues to this day. Yet almost as soon as the crowds appeared to see the photographs in New York, another set of concerns came to the fore: how does one understand pictures that are ripped from their original places and times and assembled in an almost unrelieved display of murderous violence? What attitude is proper when viewing and making sense of them? What is the basis for our curiosity, or rage, or moral revulsion, or feelings of loss, or demands for righteousness? The title of the original exhibition at Roth Horowitz offered one answer, in that Witness might be likened to “bearing witness,” a form of honoring and mourning associated with the attention paid to the victims of the Holocaust. But that association, an effort to link atrocities from different times and places, has struck most observers as ineffectual in helping us understand the real historical meanings of violence and our responses to them. Perhaps most disconcerting were the photographs themselves, which so often pictured not only the mutilated and dangling bodies of the lynched victims but also, all too frequently, the proud, laughing, self-righteous crowds who attended and participated in the lynchings (figure 1). In an uncomfortable sense, the crowds that gathered at Roth Horowitz and, later, at the other venues replicated the crowds that attended the original events, both groups of onlookers brought to the scene because of the spectacle of the lynched body.

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Figure 1

Unknown photographer, Rubin Stacy, a lynching victim, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, July 19, 1935, 1935. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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The Atlanta exhibition, whose total number of visitors exceeded that of all the previous venues combined, attracted such numbers, not because of its careful and complex multimedia display of materials associated with the counterhistory of activism and resistance, but because of the horrific images in Allen’s collection. At the Roth Horowitz gallery, the similarities between the crowds in New York and those in the photographs must have been most acute. Because of that gallery’s intimate size, the postcards’ small format, and the modest table and wall display strategies, visitors often huddled together, hunched over the tables, or pushed their faces close to the walls in order to see the pictures more clearly. As they strained for a better view, they felt the warmth and nearness of the person next to them, jostling and angling their bodies this way and that as they moved past images of the victims. They appeared, and possibly felt, like the people in the pictures. “Viewers are left with an exhibit that is too close to the spectacle created by the lynchers themselves,” the historian Grace Hale lamented.4 One of the oldest conventions of photography—to include a figure as a surrogate for the viewer, to orchestrate that figure in such a way, pointing, laughing, smiling, gesturing, as to cue our own proper regard of the scene (figure 2)—is seemingly nowhere more disjunctive, nowhere less suitable. We refuse to have surrogates in that picture, if by that we mean giving ourselves up wholly to the irrationality of the mob and its violence. When we focus on the hanged body, we do so for reasons, we declare. And if we gaze with a special intensity, looking scrupulously and insistently at each detail of the lynching, we say that our scrutiny differs in kind from the attention of those who were present. But why do we look, and for what ends? Those are the questions that inform this book. This volume of Defining Moments in American Photography follows a course different from that of the other volumes in the series. Where those volumes focus on the work of a single photographer or that photographer’s most significant publication of images, this one focuses on pictures from different times and places that often have no known photographers associated with

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Figure 2

Lawrence Beitler, Marion Lynching, 1930. Indiana Historical Society.

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them. Where other volumes decipher the meanings of photographs during the historical periods in which they were made, this one looks at how the meanings and uses of photographs have shifted through time and, especially, at what those meanings and uses are today. Two scholars, one from American studies, another from art history, propose some terms to understand how and why we look and to interpret what we see. Both writers visited the original exhibitions, one waiting with the crowds in the cold outside the Roth Horowitz Gallery, the other traveling to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site. They agree that looking at lynching photographs is something not to be shunned. The alternative is not to look— to avert, avoid, deny, and repress. But they take different approaches in formulating frames of reference and offer up different goals. As Shawn Michelle Smith reminds us, we are not the first people to look at these photographs; after all, they were made for contemporaries and sometimes circulated extraordinarily widely. Those people looked too, often with a self-consciousness about familiarity and distance, recognition and misrecognition, like our own today, and their responses sometimes bear striking resemblance to ours. By charting how historical actors across time—the photographers, journalists, and the victims and their families—viewed and used the pictures, we observe how the function of lynching photographs may have been evidentiary, but in the most fluid, malleable, and partisan fashion imaginable. We observe how lynching photographs make manifest the gap between photographic evidence and photographic meaning. Or, to put it another way, we learn how lynching photographs became evidence, how evidence was made into meaning, and how meaning was, and still is, related to political desire. Smith’s essay focuses on one photograph, Lawrence Beitler’s picture of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (see figure 2), and follows its rippling effect through time, including its use in recent congressional debates. She presents an object lesson for future activism. Dora Apel also considers Beitler’s photograph, sees it in relation to other lynching photographs, and draws another conclusion about it. If pictures like

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Beitler’s have a political function, as in recent congressional debates, and can be used to oppose their original purposes, that is because they are tied to the workings of shame and the anxieties surrounding sexuality. As she shows, the potential to make the photographs politically unruly can be glimpsed if we chart how they obtained their “shameful” meanings as they moved from private to more public viewing—that is, to the kind of viewing that took place in Witness and Without Sanctuary. Apel places lynching photographs on a continuum with other pictures of torture, comparing them to the recent and extraordinarily controversial images of Rodney King and the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. As she argues, the protocols of power evident in photographs of lynchings continue to structure the making of these images, while the shaming effects of their wide distribution, reinforced by memory and photography, help structure how we view them. Together, Smith and Apel ask difficult questions about the dynamics and responsibilities of looking. Although they redefine the historical significance of early lynching photographs, as works that powerfully shaped the historical contours of American photography, they also push outward, in different directions, to suggest how these photographs touched and continue to touch the politics of spectatorship. Lynchings are defining moments in American history; how we define photographs of lynchings and measure our response to them will likewise leave an important legacy.

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The Evidence of Lynching Photographs

s hawn m ichelle s mith

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in the photograph, two very young African American men are hanging by ropes from a large maple tree (see figure 2). Their clothing is torn and bloodied, their faces and limbs marred and gashed. They have been tortured. One of the young men has lost his pants during the violence; his lower half has been covered with a white sheet by someone in the crowd, apparently so as not to “offend” viewers. The young men are surrounded by a mob of white people whose heads rise to the level of the victims’ dangling feet. Some in the crowd observe the hanging bodies; others talk to one another. Some of the men smoke. The photograph, taken at night with a flash, suggests something of the immediate and nightmarish, a moment close to the gruesome murders themselves. The photographer might have been roused from bed to make this image; or he might have been present during the torture and murder, anticipating that a photograph might make a good souvenir and earn him a nice profit. In the foreground, several onlookers turn from the bodies hanging in the tree to the photographer, thus acknowledging and highlighting how photography has become part of the event. A young woman no older than the victims looks directly at the camera, as if to meet the gaze of later viewers. She is dressed for a date and holds the hand of the grinning young man behind her, who wears a tie and has carefully slicked back his hair. A middle-aged woman near them looks over her shoulder at the photographer. Her face is somber, and her eyes

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reflect back the photographer’s flash. Just to the right of center, a middle-aged man engages the camera directly, aggressively. He points with his left arm at the victim on the right. His gesture and direct, wide-eyed stare, as well as his placement front and center, suggest that he worked with the photographer to arrange this view. Frozen in the camera’s flash, this man and those closest to the photographer are blanched by the artificial burst of light. The flash reaches beyond them to the young men hanging in the tree, highlights the branches from which they are suspended, and the full summer leaves on the old maple. The bodies of the young men are picked out by the flash against the deep darkness of the night. Just behind them, a few white faces and hats shine in the light, suggesting a larger crowd engulfed by the darkness. Indeed, this image, like all lynching photographs, is shocking for what it lets us see as well as for the unseen it evokes, the terrors the darkness hides. The flash has exposed a partial scene of night, illuminating the aftermath of a grotesque carnival. Just as we see only part of the mob, which fades into darkness, so the photograph shows only a glimpse of a longer ordeal. Though rare and terrifying before-and-after lynching photographs do exist, and a few images even document the process of murder, most lynching photographs are postmortem images. Most are taken after the victims have died, but while their bodies are still hanging. This photograph of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, taken by Lawrence Beitler, a local photographer, shows us the mob that gawks and stares and calmly considers its handiwork. A face or two may look dismayed or downcast, but no one grieves openly for the victims. Those in the crowd who may have cried or fainted or vomited have not posed for the picture. No one claims the victims. That will happen only later, after the mob has dispersed, when family members brave the night to cut down their loved ones and care for their remains. In the photograph we see only the community that has turned against the victims. The photograph functions as an extension of the pointing man’s commanding gesture, his demand to look. The image is made for the murderers, to represent their point of view.

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James Cameron survived the lynching that night, August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. He was the third young African American man taken by the crowd. Lynching photographs never represent the victim’s story, but Cameron, almost unique in the grim history of lynching, lived to tell of the ordeal. In his autobiographical account, A Time of Terror, Cameron describes how a mob of thousands gathered in front of the Grant County jail in Marion.1 He and Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were in the jail, accused of murdering Claude Deeter, a young white man, and of raping his companion, Mary Ball, a young white woman. Deeter had died of gunshot wounds earlier in the day, and police officers hung his bloodstained shirt from a window at city hall, a red flag for the men and women who gathered throughout the afternoon.2 In the crowd of men, women, and children, Cameron recognized neighbors and acquaintances, customers and schoolmates: “I recognized a few faces from homes near my own neighborhood. I saw customers whose shoes I had shined many times. Boys and girls I had gone to school with were among the mob. I saw people I often watched buying tickets at the interurban station ticket window; people who had sold me foodstuffs in stores and neighbors whose lawn I had mowed and whose cars I had washed and polished. These people populated the crowd around the jail.”3 Armed with pistols, shotguns, rifles, torches, bats, clubs, crowbars, ax handles, and sledgehammers, the mob beat down the steel door of the jailhouse, as uniformed policemen looked on. They found Thomas Shipp first, beat him senseless, and hung him from the bars of the jailhouse. Next they came for Abram Smith, beat him to death, and then hung him from a tree in the courthouse square. Returning to the jail, the mob cut down Shipp’s corpse, dragged it through the street, and hung it alongside the body of his friend. Apparently this second, postmortem, hanging of Shipp was performed to “get the picture right,” to produce the image of the lynching the crowd desired. Finally, the mob came for sixteen-year-old Cameron. They beat him with fists, clubs, bricks, rocks, a crowbar, and a pick handle. Children bit and scratched his legs. The police cleared a path through the crowd outside to the

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courthouse tree, where Shipp and Smith hung dead. A noose was pulled over Cameron’s head, the rope wound around a branch of the tree.4 Just before his impending death, before the mob suspended its fury and suddenly released him, Cameron took stock of the crowd around him. Standing under the tree where his two friends hung dead, a noose coiled around his own neck, he experienced his near lynching—astonishingly—in photographic terms. Abruptly, impossibly, silence fell over that raging mob, as if they had been struck dumb. No one moved or spoke a word. I stood there in the midst of thousands of people, and as I looked at the mob around me I thought I was in a room, a large room where a photographer had strips of film negatives hanging from the walls to dry. . . . A brief eternity passed as I stood there as if hypnotized. Then the roomful of negatives disappeared and I found myself looking into the faces of people who had been flat images only a moment ago.

In Cameron’s recollection the mob is transformed for a brief moment into “film negatives,” the faces of people into “flat images,” the terrifying summer night into a photographic darkroom.5 He remembers his near murder as a transportation to the world of images. Cameron’s recall, fixed and frozen in an image, is particularly compelling given that the mob murder he survived would produce one of the most famous and widely circulated lynching photographs in the history of American photography.

how should one understand Beitler’s picture and the many lynching photographs like it? They are a tool of the mob, used to determine how a lynching should be pursued, announced, remembered, and understood. Lynching was choreographed according to a sequence and pace that the crowds knew well.6 Photography was incorporated in that choreography, setting the scene for others to commemorate and follow. As Cameron’s story suggests, photography also informed his memories and offered him a means to organize, even manage, the traumatic experience of lynching. Both the mob’s and the surviving victim’s understanding of lynching is mediated by photographs.

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All photographs are vehicles of identification and disavowal. They provide a medium for imagining and contesting communities, for negotiating and transforming boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Photographs both exemplify and document social processes in flux. Because their meaning is determined by context and circulation and the interests of specific viewers, the evidence in them cannot be fixed. Even though they seem to offer a stable glimpse of the past, their meaning changes over time and according to who is viewing and to what ends. What is seen and not seen in photographs depends on the cultural filters through which they are viewed, and on the repertoire of images that have shaped looking. Viewers always see photographs through other images. Lynching photographs make the ambiguity of photographic evidence acutely manifest. If all photographs proclaim, in Roland Barthes’s famous words, “that has been,” 7 the contest over what “that” means in lynching photographs underscores the instability of photographic evidence. The meaning of whatever has been is open to debate, shaped by who and how and when and why one looks. In lynching photographs, photographic evidence is always a matter of visual culture, and visual culture can be a matter of life or death.

lynching is defined as murder committed by a mob of three or more. In the United States, however, lynching has been practiced and understood primarily as a racialized and racist crime: the majority of lynching victims have been men and women of color, and the largest number of them have been African American men. Their murderers have been predominantly white men, women, and children, often unmasked, and sometimes numbering in the thousands. Most lynchings in the United States occurred between 1880 and 1930, primarily in the South. In those years, there were 4,697 reported cases, but the actual number is almost surely higher.8 Scholars and activists have sought to explain lynching as a form of racist terrorism and racialized economic warfare, a means of consolidating white supremacist nationalism, and a way of reinforcing segregation.9 While people were lynched for a range of purported reasons, those who

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made up the mobs most commonly claimed they sought revenge for an African American man’s rape of a white woman. In the 1890s the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells documented the pervasiveness of this myth in the face of contradictory facts. According to Wells, the myth of rape was widely circulated (even in cases where no white woman was present) because it so effectively encouraged white people to turn a blind eye to the crime of lynching. Even white lawmakers who deplored mob murder might feel sympathetic to white men passionately avenging the honor of their women.10 As Wells and others demonstrated, however, there was never any similar white male fury over the rape of African American women. Lynching has always been illegal, but its perpetrators have traditionally gone unpunished. The cultural forces of racism (and sexism) have historically been strong enough to allow these crimes to pass unprosecuted.11 As lynching photographs make clear, white mobs have understood and even flaunted their power over lawmakers, police forces, and public opinion. The members of lynch mobs were often protected from prosecution by a cultural rhetoric and practice that simply refused to recognize them and proclaimed lynchings the actions of “persons unknown.”12 Perpetrators, so the common understanding went, could not be punished because they could not be identified. Beitler’s photograph, of course, belies that claim. No one in the Marion crowd is masked; people show their faces clearly, even proudly. Indeed, many seem to have positioned themselves precisely to be seen.13 Cameron’s story too belies the anonymity of the lynchers in an even more terrifying way. He recognized those in the mob that lynched Smith and Shipp as neighbors, customers, onetime friends. White acquaintances could, at any moment, become a volatile white mob, turning against other members of the community. Photography documented lynching but also played a role in orchestrating 14 it. Making a photograph became part of the ritual, helping to objectify and dehumanize the victims and, for some, increasing the hideous pleasure. Photographs were souvenirs of lynching, keepsakes that could be shown as proof that one was there. They expanded the domain of lynching to those absent, ex-

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tending the culturally divisive function of lynching beyond the purview of any particular mob so that both the threat of lynching and its flagrant proclamation of white supremacy could be seen and consumed by an ever more dispersed crowd. Reproducing the spectacle of lynching, the Marion mob situated itself in a larger national landscape of white supremacy. As Ashraf Rushdy has argued: “One group of white people, gathered around a burned black body, was communicating to another group in another county: they had done their part, asserted their place in the world.”15 As the mob affirmed its place in a larger white geography, it also remapped the terrain of Marion itself, drawing a hard color line to divide a once fluid community.16

what kind of evidence did the photograph provide for Cameron? While it is possible that James Cameron’s memory of his terrifying experience was informed by Beitler’s photograph, that photograph also confirmed a more general understanding gained from other representations. “I had heard of white people lynching Black people all of my life,” Cameron writes in his autobiography. “My mother, relatives, and friends used to tell me hair-raising accounts of this enigma. I had read of lynchings in the newspapers, magazines, and periodicals, and heard about the practice over the radio.” When policemen come to take Cameron from his bed, he seems to recognize them: “They moved about like the shadowy nameless creatures I had seen in some of my nightmares.” Bullied in the police car, he knows how to behave because of the many “gangster movies” he has seen. Once in jail, he notices “the steel bunks” he “often saw in motion pictures.”17 Cameron knows all too well the drama he is forced to enter. Lynching is a twice-told tale in his family. The scenes of his arrest and torture have already been projected, his role has been scripted, and he recognizes his place in the world of images. In fact, the images of lynchings (both verbal and visual) probably account for Cameron’s entire understanding and experience of lynching until the night of his own ordeal. As Grace Elizabeth Hale suggests, “Since southern blacks rarely attended public lynchings [for their own safety], their knowledge of all

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these extralegal killings remained paradoxically distant and perhaps fantastic even as their very effective networks of communication publicized the brutality that struck close at hand.”18 Cameron perceives his actual experience of lynching through the lens of the images that have shaped his imagination of lynching. It is as if he understands how he is about to pass into the realm of representation himself, how his life’s story is about to be stilled in the image of a hanging corpse, how he is about to take a place in the national imagery of racialized torture and murder.

as a photographer, Lawrence Beitler capitalized on the events in Marion. Carrying his cumbersome equipment—an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, tripod, and flash powder—he not only participated in the lynching but also profited from it, making souvenir copies of the image to sell for fifty cents apiece, and stamping the photographs to advertise his studio and affirm his credentials in a white community.19 His project was lucrative until Flossie Bailey, head of the local NAACP, convinced the state police to stop him from selling his photograph of the lynching.20 As the historian James Madison has argued, Beitler’s picture of the 1930 Marion, Indiana, lynching has become “the generic lynching photograph.”21 Reproduced and circulated in a variety of social and historical contexts, it has been harnessed to different arguments, some competing and contradictory. Indeed, the wide-ranging appropriations of the image support Susan Sontag’s famous claim that “photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses.” 22 The many renditions of this image and the disparate reactions to it demonstrate the malleable nature of lynching photographs. Although on August 7, 1930, several newspapers, alerted to the impending lynching in Marion, sent photographers to the scene, it was Beitler’s picture that was published. Many Indiana papers refused to run it, deeming it indecent and disgraceful, and perhaps too damning of their communities; 23 others, such as the Anderson Daily Bulletin and the Muncie Evening Press, reprinted it the day after the crime (figure 3). One of the detectives employed to protect

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Figure 3

“Marion Is Quiet after Double Lynching,” Anderson Daily Bulletin, August 8, 1930.

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Cameron thrust a local paper in his face the morning after the lynching, just before he saw the actual bodies of Smith and Shipp still hanging from the tree in the Marion courthouse square. He understood the image in that context as a threat, a demonstration of the power white men and women believed it their right to wield over him.24 In other papers, especially in the black press, the image was reproduced to critique that same white supremacy. The Chicago Defender ran the image on the front page of the August 16, 1930, issue under the title “American Christianity” (figure 4). “Pictures do not lie,” the article declared. “Although members of the mob . . . couldn’t be identified according to the officers, here is a picture which shows plainly any number of the guilty persons. . . . Christian America must know that all the world points with scorn at a country that spends millions to [C]hristianize other countries while at home the barbarians hold their lynching picnic at regular intervals.” 25 As the man in the photograph points at his victims, the Chicago Defender suggests, so the world will point at that man and his partners in crime. If the pointing man’s gesture invites viewers to read the photograph as an object lesson, the Chicago Defender inverts that lesson. On its pages the photograph is interpreted as evidence, not of vengeance, but of vicious murder. The brutalizing argument that deems African American men rapists is redirected at the white murderers of young men.26 For the NAACP, not only the Christian world but the entire civilized world would scorn the barbarity of America’s lynchers. The October 1930 issue of the Crisis reprinted Beitler’s image with the caption “Civilization in the United States, 1930: The lynching of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith at Marion, Indiana, August 7, ‘by party or parties unknown’” (figure 5).27 Like the Chicago Defender, the Crisis refused to accept the lie that protected white mobsters by insisting they could not be recognized. Beitler’s photograph, like so many others of lynch mobs, provides evidence that corrupt law enforcers, politicians, and other leading white citizens willfully disavowed what they saw, simply refusing to prosecute their own. It demonstrates the paradoxical evidence lynching photographs provide. These images testify to obfuscation, showing what has

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Figure 4

“American Christianity,” Chicago Defender, August, 16, 1930. Courtesy of the Chicago Defender.

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Figure 5

“Civilization in the United States, 1930,” Crisis, October 1930. The authors wish to thank the Crisis Publishing Co., Inc., the publisher of the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for the use of this image, first published in the 1930 issue of Crisis.

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been covered up and recording what has been emphatically denied. They document a deliberate cultural blind spot. They simultaneously make visible and proclaim invisible the lawless privilege of whiteness.28 If the black press used the photograph to unmask white privilege, the white press used it to champion that privilege, interpreting Beitler’s image as a justification of the mob murders, appropriate retribution for the crimes of murder and, especially, rape. The Anderson Daily Bulletin, for example, emphasized the alleged attack on Mary Ball, deeming the murders “vengeance” upon “colored men who shot boy and assaulted girl.” 29 Similarly, the front page of the Muncie Evening Press (August 8, 1930) declared in large bold capital letters: “Negro Killers Hanged in Courthouse Yard after Big Mob Storms Jail; Trio Accused of Attacking White Girl.” The Chicago Defender and the Crisis answered the accusations of rape promulgated by the white press. “Neither suspect had confessed,” the Chicago Defender (August 16, 1930) stated in its long front-page article with the Beitler image, “nor had the white woman who is alleged to have been attacked identified either [one of them].” W. E. B. Du Bois, in his editorial on the Marion lynching in the Crisis, condemned the “vile slander” that depicted black men as rapists, declaring, “The man was murdered and robbed but there is not a scintilla of evidence that the girl was molested in any way.” 30 As the white press played on the pervasive will-to-believe-in-rape that incited most lynchings, the black press repudiated it, drawing attention to the facts of the case and reminding readers that an allegation is not a verdict.

with the spectacle of lynching, the display of the mutilated body, and the circulation of lynching photographs, white supremacists sent different messages to white and African American viewers. The spectacle and the images of its aftermath instructed African Americans in the power of whites to manipulate and control the law, demonstrating that African Americans could not depend on legal structures for protection; they were vulnerable to the whims of the white mob. Lynched bodies were sometimes left in black neighborhoods, and lynching photographs and postcards were sent to prominent

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African Americans, warning them to “stay in their place.” But African Americans also appropriated these images, using them as evidence of white savagery and barbarity. Ida B. Wells published lynching photographs in her antilynching books, and as we have seen, the Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, and African American newspapers reprinted photographs and postcards of lynchings for a national audience.31 As Jacquie Jones notes, at the historically black college she attended, lynching photographs were displayed as evidence of a hateful and shameful regime.32 In these contexts, lynching photographs no longer function as weapons of fear and intimidation but become rallying cries for civil rights activism. Lynching spectacles, photographs, and postcards presented white viewers with a choice between the law and lawlessness and tested their willingness to identify with white supremacy. According to James Madison, at the Marion, Indiana, lynching, “Some in the crowd knew they were witnessing a great tragedy. At least two women fainted at the sight of the bloody violence. A 13year-old boy vomited, down on his knees on the sidewalk. An older woman prayed loudly, beseeching the Lord to stop the violence. Several adults, men and women, cried in anguish, dumbfounded and enraged at what their fellow citizens had done.” 33 E. Frank Turner, a witness to the Marion lynching, describes how members of the mob became demonic and wolflike, snarling and yelling as their victims died. And yet, “There were a few in that crowd . . . who looked at the picture before them in a different light, for I looked about me and saw several persons who were crying and condemning the actions of the mob.”34 While there were always some white people who denounced mob violence, lynching photographs almost uniformly present crowds committed to the performance of white supremacist solidarity. Some faces are serious, projecting righteous conviction as a continuing threat; others are exuberant, enjoying the display of their cruel work. Lynching photographs documented the consolidation of a white supremacist mob as they also performed it. When they circulated, they effectively increased the size of the mob and spread its reign of terror to a wider network of wit-

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nesses. A postcard in James Allen’s important collection of lynching photographs, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, demonstrates how the public spectacle of lynching could be used to reinforce familial ties. A Katy Electric Studio photographic postcard is inscribed: “This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your sone [sic] Joe.” 35 Joe has made a mark in ink just above his hat so that his parents will be able to find him in the crowd. Presumably the son imagines his mother and father will be proud of him for participating in the murder and burning of an African American man; they will recognize him as their son, doing their work in the world. Exchanged between son and parents, the card celebrates the intergenerational reproduction of white supremacist violence. It implies that a filial relationship will be strengthened by the dead body of an African American man, for as mother and father regard their son, the grotesque image of a mutilated corpse hangs between them, providing the object lesson through which their worldview coheres. In this postcard, the death of a black man enables whiteness to be shared.36

photographic postcards of lynching highlight the use of lynching photographs in public and private realms, those of commerce and of personal commemoration. Beitler’s photograph of the Indiana lynching, published by the newspapers, also found its way into personal archives. One of its most disturbing manifestations is double matted and inscribed “Klan 4th, Joplin, Mo. 33, Bo, pointn to his niga.” 37 The words Beitler Studio are printed in white on the dark area to the right of the hanging tree. Presumably this image is one of the many souvenir copies Beitler sold of the photograph, and it apparently made its way into the collection of a Missouri Klan member three years after the crime. Most shocking, the photograph is framed with strands of curly black hair. Disturbing on so many levels, this memorial utterly distorts conventional sentimental photographic practices. At the time it was made, family members and lovers commonly kept strands of a beloved’s hair in a locket that also held a photograph. As a manifestation of the material presence of the person photographed,

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the hair was meant to draw the beloved closer to the viewer, to make the absent subject more present. As memorial objects, such artifacts marked the continued presence of the subject, suggesting a kind of life beyond death.38 The Klan memorial inverts this dynamic. Perverse and macabre, inscribed with an intimate text and framed by a material trace, it celebrates a death. The hair that frames the image marks the presence of an absent one not loved but despised. The photograph marks the man who delivered the deathblow, the hair, the victim over whom he triumphed. As a memorial to Bo, then, this photograph edged with hair merges hunting-trophy logic with that of the photographic keepsake. It celebrates Bo’s life at the moment he has taken the life of another. The public circulation of Beitler’s photograph of Shipp and Smith that began with its publication in newspapers and magazines at the time of the lynching has continued in other forms. Jacquie Jones first saw the image “reproduced carelessly,” like an “afterthought,” in her eleventh-grade history book. For her, seeing the image “changed the way [she] looked at everything from that moment on.” 39 As the only African American in her Girl Scout troop and, for one year, the only African American student at a private junior high school, she was no stranger to “intense, personal racism.” She knew it as both an intimate and an institutionalized practice but had been taught that it “was cowardly and self-defeating, indicative of moral inferiority . . . a disease, one begotten of ignorance perhaps, but one that was also ultimately and inevitably punishable.” And she claims to have believed it an offense bound to be punished until the day she saw the lynching photograph, so “matter-of-fact,” in her high school history book. The photograph stopped Jones in her tracks, for it demonstrated that virulent and violent racism might not be punished—had not been punished—and that murderers need not flee; they could casually remain at the scene of their crime without fearing repercussions. Presented in the textbook without a caption, the image, Jones concluded, “was there just to say that lynchings happen, that when hateful crimes are committed against black people, no explanations are warranted. It was there to say that racism is casual and normal.” 40 Examining the crowd of white men and

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women and youths milling about unmasked, enjoying themselves at a public event, she understood that some of the people pictured might still be alive. They might even be living next door. She understood that the safety of African Americans, now and in the future, was not guaranteed. The evidence of the photograph changed her world.

beitler’s photograph has been called upon to represent not only the history of lynching, but also the larger history of race relations in the United States. In one of its most surprising iterations, the image has been reproduced in a French textbook for high school students learning English. In that book, New Flying Colours (1997), the image has been given the caption “A ‘Necktie Party’ in Marion, Indiana (1930),” and it has been cropped to focus on the white men and women of the mob.41 In New Flying Colours Beitler’s photograph is presented in chapter 9, on racial issues. The introduction to the chapter conveys briefly and succinctly the economic and social inequalities that characterize the history of American race relations. It includes a bar graph comparing the median income of white and black families, a pie chart from the Chattahoochee Study of the death penalty, an extremely abbreviated time line marking eight points from 1619 to today, brief notes on affirmative action, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Ku Klux Klan, and the state of Louisiana, and short biographical entries on Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. Connections between France and the United States are suggested in the note on Louisiana, the only state singled out for comment, which informs students that “the Cajuns are descendants of French-speaking Acadians; the Creoles are descended from the original Spanish and French settlers.” Framed by this introduction to the history of race relations in the United States, Beitler’s image is placed beneath a photograph of Billie Holiday and the lyrics to her famous song “Strange Fruit.” It is the only photograph of white people included in the chapter. Students are asked to engage the image in the following manner:

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1. Look at the picture of the “Necktie Party” and describe the scene as precisely as possible. 2. What can you say about the expressions on the people’s faces? 3. What type of party could these people be attending? 4. Skim rapidly through the song. What does the “strange fruit” refer to? Do you begin to understand what a “Necktie Party” consists of ?

The prompts aim to draw French students into the photograph, asking them to attend carefully to details of scene and expression. The gathering is described as a “party,” and students are asked to decipher what kind of celebration it might be. The photograph is thus presented as a coded message for the students to unravel, and the process of discovery and discernment is orchestrated to shock and surprise. The juxtaposition between the false register of the “party” and the actual lynching heightens the disorienting brutality of the smiling murderers. The guiding questions reinforce the dissonance and disconnect.42 The shocking presentation of the photograph encourages French students to denounce the white racist lynchers. It rends the ties between France and the United States initially suggested by the history of French colonialism in America, and forcefully dispels any sense of identification the French students might have felt with Americans. The lesson also underscores France’s image as a “color-blind” refuge for twentieth-century expatriate African Americans escaping the inhumanity of American racism. It subtly encourages French students to overlook their own nation’s “racial issues” by drawing attention to another country’s racist madness.43 As Beitler’s image circulates in this international context, it becomes the symbol and shorthand for depicting and decrying racism in the United States.

much of the power in the critique of American racism in New Flying Colours is effected by cropping Beitler’s photograph to focus on the white faces of the lynch mob. The contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall has pursued a similar strategy in highlighting the white faces in the image. In Heirlooms

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and Accessories (2002) Marshall enlarged and manipulated the famous picture, focusing on the faces of three white women who stare back at the photographer and later viewers (figure 6). Each of the three images is a 51-by-46-inch ink-jet print that reproduces the same background, a bleached and faded version of the photograph rendered in a soft greenish tint. In the shadowy figures we see the familiar outlines of the image: the hanging bodies of Shipp and Smith and the staring, pointing man standing to the right of center at the bottom of the frame. Just the barest outlines of the figures suggest the crowd and now recognizable faces in the photograph. Overall the whited image underscores the figurative whiteness that lynching and lynching photographs consolidated and made manifest. One woman’s face in each of the three prints is highlighted; it stands out in the black and white of the original photograph, framed by a vintage locket. A gold or silver necklace coils up from each locket around the body of one of the victims; a woman’s necklace becomes a man’s noose. And vice versa. Jewelry is both an “accessory” and an “heirloom” to pass on to one’s children. Marshall’s work also plays on the other sense of “accessory,” suggesting that these women have been accessories to a crime, and that this is the legacy they leave for their children; this is the heirloom their daughters will inherit. Marshall’s work reveals how lynching photographs participate in the history of racialized inheritance. White privilege has been maintained and reproduced in part through structural economic disparities that are reinforced as wealth is passed from one generation to another.44 Heirlooms and Accessories suggests that the means by which white women procured ornate lockets and necklaces to pass on to children and grandchildren depended on the social and economic prerogatives manifested in the unpunished practices of lynching. Lynching photographs vividly display the white mob’s power over legal, economic, and civil forces. But Marshall’s triptych also suggests something more subtle and elusive. It encourages us to ask what else might be passed down with material wealth, with necklaces and lockets? As a young woman puts the necklace that is Marshall’s symbolic noose around her own neck, is it not haunted? Does it not become a noose for her? What social and psychological effort goes into

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Figure 6

Kerry James Marshall, Heirlooms and Accessories, 2002. Courtesy of Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

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maintaining the necklace as adornment instead of trap? What must be repressed and hidden, made invisible and unspoken? As Heirlooms and Accessories literally highlights white women in the lynch mob, it compels viewers of Marshall’s work to consider further the role white women and the discourses of white womanhood have played in lynching.45 If one of the stories most widely circulated by white supremacists to justify the crime of lynching was that mob violence was the retribution of white fathers, brothers, lovers, and sons for an African American man’s rape of a white woman, it often obscured a romantic relationship between a white woman and an African American man, as Ida B. Wells learned. White brothers and fathers who discovered a daughter or sister’s illicit love affair might construe it as a crime. In this context, we might think of the lynching photographs of Rubin Stacy as a lesson for young white girls (see figure 1). The images themselves, taken on July 19, 1935, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, are unusual in that very young white girls seem to constitute a large part of the audience for the spectacle of the murdered man. In one photograph, five young girls stand in front of an equal number of adults, peering at the body of Stacy with equivocal expressions. Stacy was reputedly a homeless tenant farmer who approached the home of Marion Jones to ask for food. Seeing a black man at her door, Jones became frightened and screamed for help. Stacy was arrested, and six deputies attempted to escort him to Dade County jail in Miami. Their car was run off the road by a mob of approximately one hundred masked men, and Stacy was shot and hung from a roadside tree within sight of Jones’s home.46 Jones was the mother of three, and it is easy to imagine that some of the young girls represented in the photograph of Stacy’s lynched body are her daughters. The photograph itself has been carefully staged so that Stacy’s body hangs front and center, the largest element in the frame, extending from the top to the bottom of the photograph, dwarfing the onlookers, who seem only half his size. The image has been orchestrated to show the crowd looking at his stilled body; the onlookers who stand behind the tree on which Stacy hangs make

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the staged quality of the photograph especially apparent. Those to the left of the tree cannot see Stacy, whom the tree largely hides, though their gazes suggest they contemplate the body. The spectators are not able to see the body but nevertheless perform the act of viewing for the photographer. Only one onlooker stares directly out at the camera. The smallest child, a girl still plump with her toddler sweetness, stands in the shadows, behind the older girls, who might be her sisters. Too young, perhaps, to follow the photographer’s directives, she looks not at the body, but back at the photographer. Her emotionless gaze is haunting. Moving past the photographer, through the camera, it meets our gaze, reminding us that this whole scene has been staged not simply for the photographer, but also with later viewers in mind.47 But what does this image tell us? How does the performance instruct? It links the lynched African American man to the young white girls who look at his body. Stacy’s hanging corpse dominates the frame, but the girls have been positioned so that one sees them clearly as well. Perhaps one is meant to see in Stacy’s disproportionately large body a potential physical threat to white women. But Stacy’s body has been stilled and conquered. He has been murdered in the name of white womanhood. Therefore the girls (and by proxy later viewers) are schooled in the threat of black men as well as the power of white men. And while they might feel protected by the white fathers, uncles, and brothers who have killed Stacy, they might also be learning of the patriarchal wrath evoked by the mere sight of an African American man near a white woman’s home.

the racialized sexual logic that informed the practice of lynching has been evoked unwittingly by two contemporary uses of Beitler’s photograph. In 1992 the rap group Public Enemy reproduced the image on the cover of its single “Hazy Shade of Criminal” to condemn what the rapper Chuck D called the “lynching” of Mike Tyson earlier that year, as reported by the Indianapolis Star (figure 7). On February 2, 1992, an Indianapolis jury convicted the famous African American boxer of raping eighteen-year-old Desiree Washington, a

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Figure 7

“Public Enemy,” Indianapolis Star, October 2, 1992. Courtesy The Indianapolis Star.

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Miss Black America beauty pageant contestant. Through graphics and text Chuck D compares the legal prosecution of Tyson to the mob’s murder of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith sixty-two years earlier, situating Tyson in a long line of black male victims of white supremacy.48 The cover of the single presents Beitler’s photograph between two horizontal banners—“Public Enemy” and “Hazy Shade of Criminal.” The rap group’s logo, a silhouetted figure captured in the crosshairs of a gun, has been inserted into the image and floats to the left of the hanging bodies. Both the logo and the murdered bodies of Shipp and Smith underscore how African American men are seen as “public enemies” in racist U.S. culture. But the juxtaposition of text and image here also unsettles just who is the “enemy” of the “public” and who is the “hazy” “criminal” in this scene, an ambiguity emphasized by the lyrics of the song: “Who’s the criminal?” “What’s a criminal?” 49 On the back of the single, in white capital letters on a black background, Chuck D offers the following tirade: “The picture on the cover is of two black men in 1930 Indiana getting hanged for bullshit that they didn’t do based on cracker racism, jealousy, envy and greed. In 1992 by no coincidence in the state of Indiana a good friend of mine, Mike Tyson, was hanged in the same goddamn way. Some things never change.” Among the things that never change is the erasure of African American women as victims of rape in the outrages associated with lynching. Chuck D, while blaming racism for Mike Tyson’s conviction and sentencing, fails to see the racism and sexism that fuel his own disregard for Desiree Washington’s violation. Deploring Tyson’s conviction as a “lynching,” the rapper implies that Washington was not raped, that her accusations were false and misguided, that “she wanted it.” Evoking lynching to defend Tyson, Chuck D perpetuates the invisibility of African American women when they are victims of rape. An even more recent use of the image further recalls the sexual anxieties that informed lynching. The antiabortion group Justice for All reproduces the famous Beitler photograph on one of the fifteen panels of its eighteen-foot traveling exhibition (figure 8). This appropriation of the image demonstrates

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Figure 8

What is it called when the victims have no choice? Courtesy Justice for All.

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that as the photograph continues to circulate, its meaning becomes more mobile and more readily attached to radically different political projects. Justice for All has cropped the image into a square that highlights the hanging bodies of Shipp and Smith, and placed it in the upper-left corner of a five- photograph panel, with the inset caption “African-American Genocide.” Three other gruesome black-and-white photographs of dead and dying bodies complete a larger square layout, including “Jewish and European Genocide,” “Cambodian Genocide,” and “American Indian Genocide.” The bottom half of the panel is dominated by a large color photograph that shows a dime clutched by the tiny, dismembered arms of an aborted fetus. 50 Justice for All uses the Beitler photograph as an example of genocide, linking lynching to international crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. Paired with “American Indian Genocide,” the image and text powerfully condemn the history of American racial violence. But this is not really the point of this image campaign. Justice for All seeks to associate American women’s legal right to abortion with these crimes against humanity, equating the mob murder of black men with the medical termination of pregnancy and destruction of the fetus. The campaign transforms reproductive choice into mass murder. Unwittingly, Justice for All’s project evokes the anxieties about sexual reproduction that lie at the heart of lynching. Spectacle lynchings and lynching photographs were used to discipline African American men and women as well as white women by displaying white patriarchal control over race relations. Lynchers promoting mob murder as retribution for rape revealed their profound anxiety about interracial reproduction. Liaisons between black men and white women challenged white men’s exclusive access to the white female body, always at the expense of black women, and also threatened the imagined “purity” of the white race. The reproductive capacities of white women, the literal bearers of white racial identity, were closely monitored. And if controlling reproduction was central to lynching, it is also central to antiabortion platforms. Using Beitler’s photograph to condemn “genocide”

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in the name of challenging abortion, Justice for All inadvertently recalls the prohibitions against interracial reproduction that historically informed the practice of lynching. The appropriation of Beitler’s photograph by Public Enemy and Justice for All demonstrates how the famous image has been harnessed to markedly different purposes. These uses underscore the photograph’s continued power as a cultural resource and political icon and serve to emphasize, once again, the malleability of lynching photographs as evidence.

black classic press published James Cameron’s autobiography, A Time of Terror, in 1994, when Cameron was eighty years old. 51 The publication was noted in Newsweek magazine, March 21, 1994, with a brief mention under the banner “History,” and a title noting Cameron’s new-found fame in his adopted hometown of Milwaukee. A small photograph of Cameron (figure 9) shows him holding a huge enlargement of Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the lynching that he survived. This photograph of a photograph is arresting in several ways. It recalls Cameron’s account of the lynching, in which he remembers the mob frozen for an instant in time, faces fixed and flat, as if negatives of an image of racial terror. In his description of that moment, Cameron seemed to recognize the place he would assume in the realm of images, in a photograph like the one made by Beitler. Newsweek’s portrait of James Cameron is somewhat disturbing, then, because Beitler’s photograph seems to overwhelm Cameron’s body, mapping it as the territory of lynching. But the image also enacts a contest of gazes, confronting the observer with several discordant points of view. Here, as the white man points to the murder victims, he also seems to direct our gazes up, out of the frame of Beitler’s image, to Cameron. The pointing man’s aggressive gesture is undermined, then, for it serves to highlight Cameron’s direct and solemn gaze, which meets our own. The portrait reminds us that another witness to this lynching saw all its terrifying horror. The portrait commands us to view Beitler’s lynching photograph through Cameron’s eyes. Cameron made another appearance with the famous photograph in the

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Figure 9

“History: Milwaukee Is Talking . . .“ Newsweek, March 21, 1994.

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summer of 2005, when he attended the discussion of the historic Senate AntiLynching Apology Resolution in Washington, D.C. After more than a hundred years of African American protest, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for lynching, and for its own failure ever to pass an antilynching bill. 52 Mary L. Landrieu, of Louisiana, and George Allen, of Virginia, the senators who introduced Senate Resolution 39, the apology, have suggested that lynching photographs inspired them to act, and the resolution itself declares that the photographs collected in James Allen’s book Without Sanctuary “helped bring greater awareness and proper recognition of the victims of lynching.” According to Landrieu, “The impact of the pictures was overwhelming and proved to be a very educational and emotional experience for me.” 53 The senators’ statements, and the text of the apology, testify to the importance of photographs in the national understanding of lynching. In C-SPAN’s televised coverage of the discussion of the Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution, senators and guests stand around a podium, an array of flags behind them (figure 10). In one of the camera pans, part of a large photograph on display becomes visible. Much of it is blocked from view, but enough can be seen to identify it as yet another reproduction of Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith.54 As the senators comment on their apology, the image of Thomas Shipp’s hanging body seems to float in the background. It is as if this proceeding is haunted—and of course it is.55 The centrality of images to the Senate’s apology and its performance seems to suggest that powerful white men and women are finally seeing lynching photographs as evidence of murder, white supremacist barbarity, and national shame. But as Ulrich Baer has argued, the affinity between “traumatic memory” and the photograph suggests that images may block memory and comprehension as much as they enable recognition and understanding.56 Further, as traumatic images, lynching photographs can also function as fetishes, to which a viewer returns obsessively, refusing to see a bigger picture by focusing only on the smaller photographic one. The Senate’s apology might mark

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Figure 10

“Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution” C-SPAN, National Cable Satellite Corporation.

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a watershed if it underscores the importance of a national conversation about racial violence in U.S. history. The circulation of lynching photographs can impel us to examine what has been, until recently, a largely obscured national story. This is the effect the images had on Senator Landrieu, who declared at the discussion of the Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution that lynching photographs provide “indisputable evidence of what has occurred.” 57 But as I have argued in this essay, lynching photographs deliver neither univocal nor fixed evidence. Photographs as evidence are never enough, for photographic meaning is always shaped by context and circulation, and determined by viewers. Photographic meaning results from what we do with photographic evidence. Lynching photographs, finally, do not deliver testimony so much as they call us to it.

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why take photographs of atrocity and body horror? Who has the right to look at such photos? Is looking a voyeuristic indulgence, a triumphal act, or an experience in shame? The answers to these questions inevitably depend upon who is doing the shooting and the looking, and thus it matters how and where the pictures are presented. Such photos gain their power to produce profoundly disturbing glimpses into American culture and politics by making visible to broad publics acts and events that were originally meant to be viewed in safety by a sanctioning community. In the global media of newspapers, television, and the Internet and through museum exhibitions and books, these photos no longer function as they did in the smaller communities that perpetrated, approved of, or remained silent about the pictured acts. Spectacle lynching emerged in the antebellum and Jim Crow South when white landowners and their supporters began to fear an alliance between poor white and black workers. To prevent it, they drove a wedge between the races and discouraged race mixing of all sorts. Keeping the races separate meant preventing the romantic involvement of white women, who were held to be the carriers of “race,” and black men; indeed, “protecting” white women became the most common public rationale for lynching, although consensual relations or the economic success of black men was more often the reason. Quiet lynchings in the form of mysterious unexplained deaths also were common.

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Spectacle lynchings, however, transformed clandestine nighttime killings by men who disguised their identities into open murder in the public square. Spectacle lynchings, attended by small groups of people or crowds that sometimes swelled to fifteen thousand, often led by the towns’ most respected citizens, had become increasingly sadistic and ritualized by the 1930s. At the same time, their actual number decreased as southern landowners experienced heightened concerns over the loss of a million African Americans who went north in the Great Migration to enter the industrial workforce. Even as the southern elite attempted to stem the flow and make conditions more hospitable for blacks in the South, the racial terror of lynching offered evidence of the continuing climate of intimidation.1 Thousands of people were attracted and fascinated by the ritualized murder of the spectacle lynching. Sometimes lynchings were publicized in advance by local newspapers, supported by railroads that ran special excursion trains to the lynching sites or added extra railroad cars to bring people from surrounding areas, and by schools that let out for the day, not to mention communities that attended en masse. “Lynch parties” concluded with frenzied souvenir gathering and display of the body and dismembered parts. And finally photographs were taken, either by spectators with personal Kodaks or by professional photographers who turned their product into souvenir postcards, a huge industry by the early twentieth century that helped disseminate, heighten, and legitimate the rhetorical power of the white supremacist racial narrative that held blacks to be different in kind from and inferior to whites.2 Although there were many such photographs and postcards of these events and the black community was certainly meant to know about them, the events themselves were for “whites only,” and the photographs circulated chiefly in the delimited sphere of the white supremacist community in mostly southern towns. As mementos, however, they only hinted at the excitement and the complex social and psychological effects of the ritualistic murders in which the lynch mob had participated, including beating, torture, castration, mutilation, shooting, hanging, dragging, and burning.

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In time, however, these photos were published in periodicals unsympathetic to white supremacism and circulated in the larger northern cities where many white readers were repulsed by the racial violence represented. The NAACP published lynching photos before 1920, and soon thereafter artists began to produce images using such photos as departure points for their own antilynching representations. Left-wing and liberal black political organizations used them in national antilynching campaigns that reached their apogee in the 1930s and included two antilynching art exhibitions in New York City in 1935. Publicized photos of sensational lynchings in the 1940s and 1950s were met with national protests and condemnation in the international press, allowing the representation of racial narratives to be taken over almost entirely by radical and black artists in the following decades. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, lynching photos found a new arena in public exhibitions mounted at museums and historical institutions in major cities throughout the United States, drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers; they were also published in books, some selling tens of thousands of copies, that activated a national sense of shame and soul-searching. 3 This expansion from the limited arena of the white supremacist communities to the national and international sphere is what interests me here. How, as an effect of that widening circulation, did images that initially evoked white pride, affirmation, and entitlement come to elicit outrage instead, and even guilt and shame, polar opposites of the emotions of the supremacists? In this essay, I analyze five defining moments—five key cases—in the history of lynching photographs as they became more widely available and called forth new responses from those who saw them: those of Jesse Washington, lynched in Waco, Texas in 1916; George Hughes, lynched in Sherman, Texas, in 1930; Rubin Stacy, lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1935; Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched in the northern city of Marion, Indiana, in 1930; and Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 and whose mother turned the event into what might be called an unprecedented “spectacle funeral” of grief and mourning for a lynching victim.

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The tortured body/bodies in these photos are showcased and often surrounded by the mob that had murdered them, as if to prove that it had thus upheld “civilized” society, understood as founded on the political, economic, and social inequality of African Americans. Maintaining such inequality meant preventing blacks from voting or holding political office, from having equal access to education, housing, and jobs, and from forming with whites sexual liaisons and marriages (especially those of black males and white females), a ban that was codified in antimiscegenation laws. Lynching photos, like the acts they represented, were meant to demonstrate race-color-caste solidarity across classes, from rich to poor, to oppose black advancement and reaffirm a sense of white racial superiority against the pressures of political, social, and sexual equality for African Americans. In addition, as I will show, these images were meant to manage and control anxieties raised by gender and sexuality. I conclude with contemporary images of racial violence and their effects. Analyzing the visual operations and social implications of power, desire, and taboo in lynching photos can reveal that such issues are still with us today and inform our responses to more recent photos of the humiliated body in the public sphere.

lynching photos taken by witnesses/participants and local professional photographers were meant not only to consolidate white supremacist solidarity across class lines at a time when the gap between rich and poor whites was huge, but also to preserve a position of privilege and power for the white patriarchal elite. White men wished to maintain their social power as well as to claim exclusive rights over the bodies of white women (to keep control of inheritance) and rights to the bodies of black women who were raped and sexually coerced with impunity. While the children of white women and black men represented a threat to property claims because they could be considered “white,” the children of black women and white men represented no such threat because they were considered “black.” The signal role of the mother in determining race is thus crucial to understanding the central position of

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white women in the racialized narratives of sexuality, and the need for white men to “protect” their women and thus maintain social control. Although this myth of protecting white women was alleged in practice in less than a quarter of lynching cases—Ida B. Wells first established the common reliance on it as a provocation in cases of spectacle lynchings—it became the primary rhetorical justification for all lynchings and for the lack of restraint in torturing the victims.4 When Jesse Washington was killed in Waco, Texas, in 1916, fifteen thousand men, women, and children witnessed the burning of this seventeen-year-old boy (figure 11). Washington, who was illiterate, allegedly confessed to killing a white farm woman for whom he had worked. He signed with an X a confession he could not read in which he unknowingly admitted to raping her. The confession was published in all three Waco newspapers, although no evidence or suggestion of this rape was presented at his trial. A jury deliberated for four minutes before convicting him, at which point the sheriff fled the courtroom and a lynch mob seized Jesse Washington. Stabbed many times, he was then hung from a tree by an iron chain above a fire made of burning boxes. When he tried to climb up the chain, his fingers were cut off. Witnesses testified to his castration; his ears and toes were also cut off. He was further tortured by being lowered into the fire and hoisted out repeatedly. Later his burned remains were lassoed by a man on a horse and dragged through town until his head came off.5 Fred A. Gildersleeve, a commercial photographer, was tipped off in advance by the mayor and set up his equipment in the mayor’s office prior to the lynching. The mayor reportedly received a percentage of the profits from Gildersleeve’s postcards, which sold for ten cents apiece. Parts of Washington’s body and other elements associated with the lynching were sold like relics: links of the chain for a quarter and Washington’s teeth, extracted by boys after the beheading, for five dollars.6 Across Texas, a state all too familiar with lynchings, the reaction to the horror of these events was nonetheless one of outrage and revulsion. Papers in Houston and Austin spoke of “shame” and “humiliation,” as did other papers,

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Figure 11

[Fred A. Gildersleeve], Lynching of Jesse Washington, 1916. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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from the New York Times to the San Francisco Bulletin.The nation’s black press gave the events the most thorough coverage. Elisabeth Freeman, a white woman investigator for the NAACP posing as a friendly northern reporter who wanted to save the good name of Waco, found that the local townspeople and press approved of the lynching but not of the mutilation and dragging of the charred torso through the town. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote an article using Freeman’s report about the lynching for the July 1916 issue of the Crisis, published by the NAACP, which included a special eight- page supplement on “The Waco Horror” featuring a number of Gildersleeve’s photos, including one on the journal’s cover. A copy of the Crisis was sent to seven hundred newspapers, all members of Congress, and prominent individuals in the arts and politics, as well as to the journal’s forty-two thousand subscribers. The photographs that showed the burning of the body, surrounded by a huge mob of men in fedoras and straw boaters, provoked national and international condemnation. Taking the photos into the national public sphere shamed the nation by exposing a savage spectacle of sadistic white racism and exhibitionism in a city once known as the “Athens of Texas” and the “City with a Soul.” 7 It soon became known as “Barbecueville.” 8 Although the identities of Waco’s mob leaders were well known, no one was arrested. But exposure had an effect. As the historian William Carrigan argues, the local, national, and global reaction to the brutality of Jesse Washington’s murder was a turning point for civic leaders in the region, who were forced to reconsider their tolerance for racial violence in light of its effects on their economy and reputation.9 American black-white power relations, although institutionalized in segregation, were always unstable, so that whites compulsively reasserted their power by violating and defiling the black body over and over again. A photograph of the desecrated body of George Hughes, who was lynched in Sherman, Texas, in 1930, shows another burned body (figure 12). Hughes was a black farm laborer and newcomer to Sherman when the lynching took place. It appears that Hughes, like Jesse Washington, killed his employer in an argument over wages.

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Figure 12

Unknown photographer, Lynching of George Hughes, 1930. Courtesy Corbis.

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Despite a complete lack of evidence, he too was accused of raping the farmer’s wife. The allegation was meant to inflame the community of white farmers who had been forcing blacks off the land for a decade. The Great Depression had further exacerbated tensions between poor blacks and whites, causing increased resentment of blacks among whites whose economic situation was precarious. Thus when Hughes was arrested and placed in the city courthouse, rumors of rape began to circulate and events followed the predictable pattern. The mob, unable to get at Hughes, burned down the courthouse itself, dynamited the vault where he was hidden, and hauled him out while the police directed traffic. His body was chained to a truck and dragged through the streets, then hanged in a cottonwood tree in the Negro business section of Sherman. There his body was burned. Afterward the crowd looted and destroyed most of the black section of town, pressing employers to dismiss their black laborers in the months that followed and causing many black families to leave the area for good.10 Lynching, meant to terrorize all blacks and to increase the economic power and control of whites, was carried to its logical extreme when it escalated into an attack on the entire black community and drove out the black laborers who competed with whites for jobs. Although the photograph of Hughes’s lynching and others like it were meant for publication only in the southern white press, the picture of his burned body traveled north and appeared in the June 1930 issue of the Labor Defender, the newspaper of the International Labor Defense, an organization affiliated with the American Communist Party, which played an important role in fighting for the rights of black people in the 1930s. It also appeared in the northern liberal black press, including the May 21, 1930, issue of the Chicago Defender and the December 1934 issue of the Afro-American in New York City. The photograph of the lone figure, his limbs drawn up and immobilized by fire, moved left-wing antilynching artists such as Isamu Noguchi, José Clementé Orozco, and the littleknown Lin Shi Khan to respond in works of art to the haunting image, which effaces the mob and invites undistracted concentration on the body horror.11 The response of critics to Noguchi’s three-quarters life-size monel metal

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sculpture of the burned figure hanging from a real rope included some cringing at this re-presentation. Noguchi transformed the charred blackness of the body into a sleek, light reflective surface and arranged the drawn limbs into a graceful composition of positive and negative shapes that belies the texture of the burned body in the photograph and the downward pull of gravity on Hughes’s body (figure 13). One reviewer for Art News, ignoring Noguchi’s aestheticizing of the body, wrote, “The current trend towards rather tortured forms finds unrepressed outlet in the macabre possibilities of dark bodies twisted in the knotty agonies of death. . . . Noguchi’s sculpture, recently seen at the Marie Harriman Gallery, unfortunately dominates the exhibition. But this pendant mass of silvered realism is only a macabre commentary, closely approaching the bizarre.” The critic for Parnassus, the journal of the College Art Association, wrote: “If there is anything to make a white man feel squirmy about his color, he has it in this gnarled chromium victim jigging under the wind-swayed rope.”12 Both critics convey their sense of discomfort with the work and both attempt to distance the viewer from its implications.13 If we assume that both liberal critics opposed the practice of lynching, what would account for their equivocal response to the subject of the sculpture? It appears that viewing even an aestheticized representation of a desecrated body in a relatively large scale as a three-dimensional form was traumatic, the trauma residing in the viewer’s implication in what was a contemporaneous atrocity. In other words, as white viewers, the critics could not escape a sense of culpability, strong enough “to make a white man feel squirmy about his color.” Following the British political theorist John Keane, the British art historian John Taylor suggests there are two possible reactions to public pictures of violence: guilt and shame. Guilt is “self-regarding and unproductive,” while shame has the potential to raise questions and encourage some form of moral confrontation or political intervention.14 As a northern representation of the southern lynching image, Noguchi’s sculpture, displayed in both antilynching exhibitions in Manhattan in 1935, entered the sphere of national politics

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Figure 13

Isamu Noguchi, Death (Lynched Figure), 1935. © 2007 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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along with the publication of the lynching photo itself in the left-wing and liberal black press. In addition to the unproductive guilt evident in the response of the two art critics, the more productive response of shame, it may be argued, kept alive public awareness of crimes of racial violence, promoted moral confrontation, and encouraged social action. Psychoanalytic explanations of the workings of shame, which focus on feelings of the individual, do not adequately account for shame produced by a community’s identification with actions that are locally sanctioned but rejected in larger social contexts.The public shame of a community can be analyzed most productively using the literature of sociology, in which the withdrawal of the support or approval of the community has been shown as the central and defining characteristic of shame.15 Shame occurs when we evaluate ourselves in accordance with social conventions that are meant to channel aggression in morally acceptable ways. This response of shame, which anticipates the disapproval of the larger community, is thus distinguished from physical or sexual modesty. Public or moral shame extends the sense of disgrace or dishonor for a shameful act to an entire community that closely identifies with those who committed it. A community that feels publicly shamed thus suffers a form of ethical and political embarrassment that emphasizes the social component of human identity, choice, and responsibility. Its antithesis is often considered honor, which may be understood as fidelity to obligation or institutional codes as defined by the community, whether local or national.16 This kind of moral shame must have led some citizens of Waco to regard with disapproval the dragging of Jesse Washington’s corpse through town. The response was a defensive reaction in anticipation of criticism from the larger social community of the region and/or the nation. But victims may also feel the shame of helplessness simply for being unable to prevent their own victimization. Although representation is never fully adequate to the reality it is meant to convey, it can nonetheless produce a radical effacement of reality by omission—what is not represented—and also by the visual and ideological framing of what is represented. For white supremacists,

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lynching photos represented not suffering and death worthy of mourning but white power and black public shaming as necessary and constituent elements of the social order. Indeed the community spectacle of lynching was meant to teach the next generation its right to look at the brutalized and objectified black body. Exercising this right made the perpetrators more powerful, a status the photograph codified. No doubt this explains why members of the lynch mob pose so proudly with their abject black victims. As the sociologist David Shapiro notes, because torturers learn to feel contempt for the weak and helpless, it is the tortured rather than the torturers who usually feel shamed. “Feeling anything but weak and helpless themselves,” writes Shapiro, “secure in their identification with an authority of established power, and in a position to demonstrate and experience their own personal strength, what have they to be ashamed of ?”17 Such identification with established power helps explain the crowd’s reaction to the body of Rubin Stacy, lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935, for the crime of “threatening and frightening a white woman” (see figure 1). Bound and fully clothed, Stacy’s body hangs low to the ground and is surrounded by onlookers, including five young white girls. One girl smirks cruelly, demonstrating how well she has absorbed her lessons in race hatred. The photograph, which appears to contain only five children, has actually been cropped from a larger photograph showing fifteen figures.18 According to the New York Times, Stacy was being escorted to the Dade County jail in Miami for “safekeeping” when one hundred masked men ran the car off the road, overpowered the six deputies who accompanied Stacy, and kidnapped him. It was reported that “Stacy, a homeless tenant farmer, had gone to the house [of Mrs. Marion Jones, a thirty-year-old mother of three] to ask for food; the woman became frightened and screamed when she saw Stacy’s face.” He was hung from a tree within sight of the home of the woman who had identified him as her “assailant.” 19 Even among lynching photos, this image is remarkable for the large number of girls standing about and ogling an abject corpse. We must strain to observe

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the nuances of their attitudes because the focus is on the much larger body of the victim. Two of the girls on the left appear somewhat puzzled; the youngest seems to hide in the shadows and trains her gaze on the photographer instead of the corpse. It is possible that all of these girls, from the one at the right who scowls vengefully to the one on the left who just tilts her head in a carefully restrained glance, “look” but do not “see.” It may seem reasonable that this indoctrination into “looking but not seeing” began at the lynching site as a way of normalizing and domesticating terror, producing a numbing emotional effect, especially for the young to whom such horrific circumstances otherwise would be overwhelming. Yet the numbing effect would not have taken place in isolation, or even primarily in the form of episodic spectacle lynchings. It would have to have been an everyday habit of life for southern children, taught in hundreds of ways, large and small, that black people were far their inferiors. Such children not only witnessed the subordination of blacks to whites in public and private life, but also perpetrated that subordination daily, in ways appropriate to their age and station. The lynching scene was an extreme culmination of daily practice and made possible the acceptance of lynching itself. Children understood themselves to be implicated, some playing their part for the camera, while tacitly assuming their place in the larger white community, their only source of safety. This community was precisely constituted by those relations of power and subordination in which small white children understood themselves to be the superiors of grown black men. Thus the domestication and normalization of racial violence paved the way for the exercise of power over the very life of a black man, whose crime was to look a white woman in the face. Viewing the body of Rubin Stacy only deepened the numbing effect, which would already have set in with these children before the photo was taken. The right to look, having been co-opted into a triumphalist arrogance based on racialized inequality, was predicated on a counter-inability to “see” the full implications of what they were made to witness: the killing of a man who had committed no crime. Further, they were not permitted to acknowledge his suffering and death as a loss, a prohibition

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made easier when strangers to a town, like Rubin Stacy and George Hughes, were chosen as lynching victims. Their lives did not count as fully “livable” and their deaths did not count as “grievable.” 20 This inability to mourn the murder of another human being could only efface Stacy’s humanity, obscure the horror of racial violence, and numb all empathy. Still, we see in the photograph that the process is not yet complete and engenders contradictions. Two of the girls cross their arms, as if to insulate themselves from any unwelcome visceral effects. One covers her stomach; the other crosses her wrists in unwitting mimicry of the victim’s shackled hands, one hand grasping her dress. The awkward tension of this gesture intimates an unconscious identification with Stacy’s suffering in counterpoint to the expression on her face.21 As with the lynchings of George Hughes and Jesse Washington, there is another subtext to the lynching and photographic representation of Rubin Stacy predicated on the threat of his sexuality. For we must ask: How do the young white girls who regard the hanging corpse define for themselves, consciously or unconsciously, the nature of the white woman’s fear for which Rubin Stacy was lynched? In the scenario of a white woman terrified at the sight of a young black man at her door asking for food, the hysteria of the white woman is the implicit counterpart to the danger of the hypersexed black male. Both are “excessively saturated with sexuality,” to borrow a phrase from the film theorist Linda Williams.22 The very condition of the black male’s proximity to the white woman became an assault, not on her person but on her senses, causing irresistible feelings of panic, frenzy, and fear, which she presumably would not have felt had he been a white male stranger. Thus the position of the white male as protector and defender of the helpless white woman is legitimated. According to racialized sexual codes, the white woman’s hysterical body is integrated back into the social body while the hypersexed black body is publicly scourged and destroyed as inimical to the social body. At stake is the silence about and denial of interracial desire and sexuality, especially between black men and white women. Perhaps we can glimpse one possibility for the girls’ future sexual fantasies

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through the body language of the young couple pictured in the foreground of the most famous lynching photo, that of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were lynched in Marion, Indiana, in 1930 (see figure 2). In one version of the photo, the foreground couple smile and touch, illustrating the playful mood of the crowd. He smiles more broadly and self-assuredly than she, fairly beaming his joy. They both turn to the camera as he grasps her thumb with his hand. This is an intimate, flirtatious moment, in which the two hanged black men seem to become a third party to the pleasure of the white couple and the erotic tension between them. The implied threat of black sexuality is present but safely neutralized in the hanging bodies, with a white cloth wrapped around Thomas Shipp’s naked lower body, which bears a dark stain running down its center.23 Though we do not know for sure if Shipp was castrated—the most sexualized lynching ritual of all, with the genitals the most prized lynching souvenir—we do know that his bloodied pants were divided up among the crowd and Klan robes were wrapped around him. In fact, if we look more closely, we see a strip of dark cloth held in the hand of the young woman who is part of the smiling couple, as well as in both hands of the woman who stands behind her. We also see the satisfaction on the faces in the crowd, intimating for the men a shared sense of masculine superiority. The symbolic and/or literal emasculation of the virile black male alleviates the anxiety of sexual envy and jealousy. For the young couple, it is as though the myth of the hypersexed black male, now safely controlled, has become an invisible erotic power haunting their relation.24 The idea of a highly charged and racialized sexuality has persisted as a force of fear and excitement in society to this day. The taboo against and prohibition of interracial sex continues to incite desire and the pleasure of transgression. Although the issue is not often addressed openly in more polite cultural forms, it has become a staple of pornography, a multibillion-dollar industry that crosses all demographics in the United States.25 It is no accident that interracial pornography, well established since the seventies, often has an erotic charge that other forms of pornography do not. As Linda Williams suggests,

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“It is fear—the fear once generated by white masters to keep white women and black men apart—that gives erotic tension to interracial sex acts which in ‘ordinary,’ nonracialized pornography often become rote.” Because interracial pornography depends on the taboo, it reinforces the color line in the breach while presenting the complexities of interracial sexual attraction. Perhaps most important, as Williams asserts, interracial pornography has made manifest and endorsed the sexual desirability of the black subject, even if there is also “a kind of knowing flirtation with the archaic beliefs of racial stereotypes.” 26 It seems that the inability to destroy this desirability led to some of the hysterical excesses of spectacle lynchings, in which bodies were perforated with hundreds of bullets, stabbed, mutilated, and dragged through the streets while their bloody clothes were torn apart as prized souvenirs. Both the left-wing and liberal black press appropriated lynching photographs as part of their ongoing antilynching campaigns of the 1930s and transformed them into weapons against the terror of white supremacy. In a meeker antilynching propaganda strategy aimed at framing whites themselves as victims, the NAACP focused on the damaging effects on white children initiated into the practice of looking at the torture and killing of black people. A 1935 leaflet pointed out the destructive effects on the young white psyche, using the lynching photograph of Rubin Stacy (figure 14). The text instructs the reader, “Do not look at the Negro. His earthly problems are ended. Instead, look at the seven white children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle.” Such appeals had limited effect on lynching practice. But there are historical moments when opportunities for mass mobilization organized around emancipatory demands and a coherent leadership help to bring about important social change such as winning or defending democratic rights for the oppressed. Lynching was not defeated by moral appeals to white supremacists, or by passing federal legislation (none was ever passed), or by individual state laws, which existed but were never enforced. Instead spectacle lynchings were stifled by the mid-thirties in part by increasingly assertive public opposition to racial violence, exercised most effectively in mass protests led by the American

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Figure 14

“Do Not Look at the Negro,” NAACP leaflet, circa 1936. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Communist Party. The CP, whatever its weaknesses and failures, helped organize tens of thousands of people to march in the streets in response to the Scottsboro trials in the 1930s, among other causes, summoning worldwide condemnation of white supremacist ideology to shame the American South. The system of racial segregation and antimiscegenation laws persisted, however, supported by white liberals and conservatives alike in the New South, until the civil rights movement took to the streets in the 1950s and 1960s and helped force the end of these cultural practices. In addition, acts of race discrimination embarrassed the U.S. government abroad as it sought to present itself as a more democratic alternative to communism during the cold war. Black veterans of World War II also refused to submit to second-class status at home after fighting on the front lines for the United States abroad. In the context of these political pressures and the new assertiveness of blacks in the postwar period, the photograph of a brutally murdered fourteen-year-old boy, Emmett Till, played a pivotal role in repositioning the black subject in the American imagination and transforming the death of a black boy into a “grievable” event. Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. The lynching took place in the dead of night, and Till’s savagely beaten nude body was found three days later, weighted down by a one-hundred-pound iron gin fan in the Tallahatchie River. But Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, powerfully and effectively turned this quiet lynching in a small southern town into a national scandal. When the state of Mississippi sought to bury the body to prevent its release and exposure, Till’s mother insisted on the return of her son’s corpse to Chicago and pried open the sealed coffin for a four-day open-casket funeral at which she allowed the black press to take photographs. The most famous of these, a close-up of Till dressed in a tuxedo with his face mutilated beyond recognition, was taken by the Jet magazine photographer David Jackson (figure 15). An estimated 100,000 to 250,000 people waited in line for hours to view the body, and Till’s image circulated in national black magazines and newspapers such as Jet, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Crisis in addition to a four- page photo essay in

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Life only a week before an all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted Till’s accused killers, J. W. Milam and Ray Bryant, in September 1955. Three television networks aired nightly broadcasts of the trial of Milam and Bryant, which was also covered by Time, Life, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and other newspapers. Milam and Bryant later acknowledged their role in Till’s death in an interview with Look magazine, ensuring their ostracism by their own community for its public shaming before the world for rallying to Milam and Bryant’s defense.27 Ten thousand people, including organized-labor rallies, demonstrated in Harlem following their acquittal to protest Till’s lynching and race terror in Mississippi. As terrible as Till’s face was at the funeral, Till’s mother told a Chicago Defender interviewer decades later, “Mr. (A. A.) Rayner did a fantastic job of getting the face back together because when I saw it, the right eye was lying on his cheek. His tongue had been choked out by the weight of the fan and the barbed wire that was around his neck was still attached to the fan, parts of both ears were missing. The back of the head was practically separated from the face area. The mouth was wide open. You could only see two of the three remaining teeth.” 28 What was not acknowledged but has come to light in eyewitness testimony in the 2005 film The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till is that Till was also castrated, a shame so great it could not be spoken.29 Judith Butler, following the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, defines the public sphere as our exposure to others and their exposure to us. Such exposure implies an ethical responsibility to respond to the appearance of others, and, more explicitly, to their “cry of human suffering.” 30 The Jet photos of Till and his funeral represent such a “cry of suffering,” not of the boy, whose prolonged torture and agony were over, and not of the white woman whose alleged violation always stood behind such killings, but of a bereaved and heartbroken black mother. By politicizing the murder of her son on the national stage—and by her own anguished appearance mourning him along with thousands of others—Mamie Till Bradley shifted the emphasis of earlier white supremacist photographs of spectacle lynchings from the shaming of the black subject to a

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Figure 15

David Jackson, Emmett Till laying in a casket, 1955. Courtesy of Chicago Defender.

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black-controlled “spectacle funeral” that refused to derealize the horror and grief of racial violence (figure 16). The Jet photos arguably became the turning point for the representation of the black subject in lynching imagery, causing a far greater antiracist backlash than the publication of lynching photos in earlier decades. In the context of the postwar period, the publication of these photos had an emotionally explosive and transformative effect on African Americans in particular. It also left an indelible impression on the young southern blacks who became the vanguard of the southern student movement, initiating a massive social struggle and helping to institutionalize a change in American attitudes toward race. The photos of Emmett Till and his funeral, because the victim’s family controlled their production and circulation, remained outside the network of lynching photos that circulated among white supremacists. The image of the black subject as a subject violated the code of lynching photographs by which black bodies were always objects to be acted on by white subjects. Blacks appropriated the event and its representation in an unprecedented and thoroughgoing way. Not only Till’s mother but the national black “community” as a whole “owned” the photographs and could construct their meaning, in all their horror, including the simultaneous publication of Emmett Till’s photo as a handsome young boy (figure 17). They had effectively reclaimed and emphatically asserted the right to look in the larger public arena, where the humiliated black body was re-endowed with dignity and humanity in a different public ritual, one rarely performed for lynching victims, that of mourning. Mamie Till Bradley’s cry of suffering, made especially wrenching because she was an attractive middle-class mother with whom the country could easily identify, was heard as a cry by one of us that allowed the nation to grieve for the death of a lynching victim.31 Emmett Till’s life became a life that counted, a loss that mattered, and a death to be mourned, galvanizing the movement for black civil rights. Only three months after Emmett Till’s funeral, the antisegregation activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Afterward, she related her decision to the shock of seeing the photographs of Emmett Till.

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Figure 16

Unknown photographer, Mamie Till sitting in a wheelchair crying, 1955. Courtesy of Chicago Defender.

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Figure 17

Unknown photographer, Emmett Till as a boy (with hat), not dated. Courtesy of Chicago Defender.

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the desire for a public resolution to shame has met with equally determined resistance to such public acknowledgment. In the case of Jesse Washington, a 1998 resolution by a Waco city councilman that exhorted the city to denounce the lynching was opposed by officials who did not want to memorialize a “shameful” event. In a second attempt, in 2002, after money was appropriated to refurbish a mural in the county courthouse that included a hanging tree with a noose, a county commissioner introduced a resolution that offered “conciliatory atonement” for the lynching of Washington in the form of a commemorative plaque on the wall near the lynching tree in the mural. This resolution was not even seconded.32 The sociologist Thomas Scheff suggests that shame is the “premier social emotion,” which can bring people closer together when it is mutually acknowledged or tear a community apart when it is not.33 This potential to bind and tear explains not only the continuing conflict over publicly acknowledging the lynching of Jesse Washington, but also the retrial of the eighty-year-old former Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney after more than forty years, and the exhumation of Emmett Till’s remains for reexamination after fifty years.34 In the case of Killen’s retrial, the people of Neshoba County, Mississippi, who felt Neshoba County had never lived down the infamy of those murders, achieved a measure of public closure with Killen’s conviction on three counts of manslaughter and his sentence of sixty years in prison. In words that selfconsciously echo those made famous by Martin Luther King Jr., an ecstatic and hyperbolic editorial, “Our True Character,” in the Neshoba Democrat, on June 22, 2005, following the conviction, declared “a new dawn in Mississippi, one in which the chains of cynicism and racism have been broken and we are free, free at last, thank God Almighty we are free at last!”35 One senses, however, that the people of Neshoba have been freed, not from cynicism and racism, but from a long-standing sense of shame that finally has been publicly acknowledged.

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The consequences of the Shipp and Smith lynching for the city of Marion today are equally painful and divisive. In 2003 a group of ministers representing both black and white churches proposed a commemorative plaque for the courthouse square to foster “racial reconciliation.” City Commissioner David Glickfield, however, refused to support a plaque that mentioned the 1930 lynchings, arguing that more general wording would better help to heal contemporary race relations. The wording was revised to ask forgiveness for past violence without specific reference to the nature of that violence. Family members of the lynching victims then rejected it because it failed to refer directly to the lynching. Ruth Ann Nash, a niece of Thomas Shipp’s, read a letter to city commissioners opposing the plaque: “We resent the implications that this act will bring closure to us . . . being that the town is still very prejudiced towards blacks of any age, past or present.” Nash further asserted, “There is no closure of any kind to the horrible injustice done to these two black men that were hung on the Courthouse Square.” 36 For Nash, effacing the actual crime added insult to injury, while the watered-down commemoration did nothing to address continuing racism. The victim’s descendants rightly understood the failure to mention the lynchings as the community’s failure to meet its responsibility. A white minister, Mike Henson, raised the issue of responsibility from a religious perspective: “You can’t help but ask yourself the question, ‘Where were the white Christians when they were hanging those two black boys?’ I ask myself that question. Where were they?” Although it may be argued that organized religion has generally not acted to prevent the major atrocities of the past century, if not the past two millennia, Henson and other pastors at least felt the need for a public confession, which civil officials opposed. 37 Shipp and Smith never received due process, no one was ever convicted for their murder, and the Marion community never has taken responsibility for the crime. Yet for some blacks in the Marion community, the plaque also represented a permanent reminder of the shaming of blacks. Another family member, twenty-two-year-old Roberta Richard, told commissioners that she did not

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want to have to explain to her three-year-old nephew that his great-great-uncle had been lynched. Placing a plaque in a public place, she said, would make that moment inevitable for her family. “We’re the ones that are going to have to live with it until the day we die.” 38 For Roberta Richard, the commemorative plaque, by perpetuating the public humiliation and degradation of lynching, echoed the violence of the original act, just as the multiplication of lynching images in public exhibitions and in print causes pain. As rape victims and concentration camp survivors have attested, the condition of helpless subjugation itself can produce intense feelings of shame in the victims and those who identify closely with them.39 Many African Americans in the twentieth century feel shame at the enslavement of their ancestors, at their own inability to prevent the sexual coercion of black women by white men, at both the public murders and unexplained deaths of black men in their communities, at disfranchisement and segregation, at discrimination endured daily. Yet we, as a nation, cannot afford to remain innocent of lynching photos and the events they represent or we risk a still greater injustice to those victims who must be remembered and mourned, and whose victimizers must be held to account. The Shipp and Smith photo has by now become emblematic of spectacle lynching, capturing as it does the handsome youthfulness of the victims and the broad community responsibility for the crime, evident in the mixed crowd, estimated as high as fifteen thousand, of men and women, young and old, together in a festival atmosphere. The most frequently reproduced version is one in which the crowd has been partially cropped, emphasizing the bodies of the victims rather than the victimizers. This version appeared in the New York Times on June 19, 2005, to illustrate an essay about the U.S. Senate’s formal apology to lynching victims and their descendants, the first congressional apology to African Americans for any reason, motivated in this instance by the stain on the Senate’s history of its repeated refusal to make lynching a federal crime. (Nearly two hundred antilynching bills were introduced in Congress in the first half of the twentieth century.)40 This apology follows others Congress has made: in 1998, to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II; in

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1993, to native Hawaiians for the government’s role in overthrowing their kingdom; and in 1990, to uranium miners and others injured by the testing of the atomic bomb. Some would like Congress to apologize for slavery, but when President Bill Clinton did so, acknowledging the American role in the slave trade while on a trip to Uganda, Republican representative Tom DeLay of Texas ridiculed him for “apologizing for the actions of the United States.” 41 Although such apologies are little more than symbolic gestures, they are useful, among other reasons, for exposing the racism of members of Congress who find even these emblematic measures unpalatable. The increase in recent years of memorial committees and reconciliation initiatives meant to confront lynchings that occurred decades ago also resulted in the unveiling of the nation’s first major lynching monument, in October 2003. The Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial in downtown Duluth, Minnesota, commemorates a notorious triple lynching that took place there before thousands of people in the summer of 1920 (figure 18). The victims were three teenage circus workers, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, who were falsely accused of raping a white girl. The monument, as if to counter an infamous photo of the lynching (figure 19), transforms the abject, partially stripped, and hanging bodies surrounded by a defiant crowd into monumentalized and dignified living figures, who look less like impoverished and peripatetic circus workers than like men with whom a contemporary middle-class audience can more readily identify. A major theme of the monument is atonement. That word is chiseled into the concrete pavement before the three relief sculptures that represent the victims. It can be read, in contrast to civic actions in Waco and Marion, as open penance for the shameful act of a community whose descendants still inhabit the town but had not addressed the killings publicly.42

although spectacle lynchings no longer occur, racial violence still does. The infamously brutal beating of Rodney King, stopped for a traffic violation and surrounded by eight Los Angeles police officers in March 1991,

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Figure 18

Carla Stetson and Anthony Peyton, Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial (detail of model), 2003. Courtesy of Carla Stetson.

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Figure 19

Unknown photographer, Lynching of Clayton, Jackson, McGhie, Duluth, Minnesota, 1920. Minnesota Historical Society.

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appeared, in the videotape that recorded it, to pivot on the perceived threat of his sexuality and desirability (figure 20). The white Los Angeles police sergeant Stacey Koon explained how he saw Rodney King holding his buttocks and gyrating his hips at a white female patrol officer, Melanie Singer. In the original manuscript for his book Presumed Guilty, Koon described what he regarded as Singer’s “fear of a Mandingo sexual encounter,” a phrase edited out of the text of his book. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times on May 16, 1992, Koon attempted to explain the words: “In society there’s this sexual prowess of blacks on the old plantations of the South and intercourse between blacks and whites on the plantation. And that’s where the fear comes in, because he’s black.” 43 But who was it that felt this “fear”? Linda Williams, in her analysis of Koon’s explanation, notes the use of the word “intercourse” rather than “rape” and the phrase “sexual prowess of blacks,” which intimates white male sexual envy. Most telling of all is the reference to Mandingo, which denotes a tribe of African warriors but also refers to a popular sexploitation film made in 1975 that represented the desire of a white plantation mistress for a taboo-breaking sexual encounter with her husband’s prize Mandingo slave. In his reflexive action against Rodney King, Koon thus saw himself as beating the black man to “rescue” the white woman, who was never in any real danger—other than the “dangerous” arousal feared by her white male “protector.” 44 The video of the beating was shown repeatedly on television, and when the police were acquitted of all charges, massive rioting erupted in Los Angeles. The death of James Byrd Jr. in June 1998 in Jasper, Texas, was another event that caused national outrage, although there is no image of his ordeal. The Figure 20

Rodney King beating, 1991.

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forty-nine-year-old black father of three was not a middle-class figure like Mamie Till Bradley, but a man with a well-known drinking problem. Three white men—John William King, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and Shawn Berry—offered Byrd a ride as he walked home, drunk, from a party one night. Byrd, unsuspecting, recognized two of the men and accepted the ride but then was kidnapped and driven elsewhere. The men beat him, sprayed his face with black paint, dropped his pants down to his ankles, tied him by his feet to the bumper of their pickup truck with a logging chain, then drove about three miles, dragging his body over the rural Texas pavement of Huff Creek, the black part of town, dismembering and killing him. The road was littered with blood, skin, and body parts—false teeth, head, and right arm. The autopsy report suggests that Byrd was still alive and trying to hold his head up as he was dragged and twisting his body in an attempt to lessen the pain. The murderers laid out what was left of his body at the gate of a black cemetery.45 As an echo of “the Waco Horror” of Jesse Washington’s lynching in Texas eighty years earlier, the murder of James Byrd Jr. was a shock to Jasper, whose population of 8,600 is forty-five percent black. Most of those in the white community condemned the killing, especially when they felt the eyes of the nation upon them. As Dina Temple-Raston wrote in her book on the event, “Outsiders had decided that the James Byrd murder was about as raw a display of atavistic inhumanity as one could imagine.” Whereas many white locals felt it was an isolated incident, not proof that prejudice was rampant, black residents asserted that racism was alive and well in Jasper. One woman said, “The prejudice here is more insidious. It’s in all the little things that we see the racist side of whites. Whites, because it doesn’t really affect them, can’t see what they are doing. They don’t see the way they look at us or treat us as prejudice.” 46 But it was clear that photographs of James Byrd’s humiliated body could not be pictured either in the community or outside it, and no photo of the corpse has ever been published. To represent the dismembered body publicly would have further shamed the Byrd family, the black community of Jasper, and the town as a whole in the eyes of the nation. Instead the picture of James Byrd

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included in news accounts showed him looking into the camera, wearing a Colorado Rockies baseball cap; eventually, the faces of the perpetrators, named and identified as white supremacists, were also printed with news stories. The Boston Globe published the most graphic picture, showing dried blood staining the street where Byrd’s body had been dragged. Temple-Raston published a photo in her book of the culvert where Byrd’s head was found with the word “Head” written in capital letters in orange Day-Glo on the pavement.47 The prosecution did present graphic pictures of Byrd’s body, documenting his suffering, at the trial of John William King in 1999. All three killers had criminal records, and King and Brewer were known to have joined the Confederate Knights of America while in prison. The CKA is an offshoot of a Ku Klux Klan group from North Carolina and one of eleven major racial groups that have flourished in the Texas prison system. King, considered the ringleader, hoped the Byrd killing would help launch a new white supremacist organization, the Texas Rebel Soldiers Division of the Confederate Knights of America, for which bylaws were found in his dwelling, and ultimately ignite a race war in Jasper. The murder also was meant to initiate King’s first recruit, Shawn Berry, who had no history as a racist. Prosecutors relied on pictures not only of Byrd’s body but also of King’s, which bore racist tattoos from his time in prison, including a cross with a black man hanging from it, a swastika, the insignia of Hitler’s SS, a woodpecker peeking out from a KKK hood, the Virgin Mary holding a horned baby Jesus, and the slogan “Aryan Pride.” King had also produced writings filled with racist invective. Among the racist literature found at his apartment was a book on the Ku Klux Klan, as well as an Esquire magazine article on the Emmett Till lynching. All three accused men were convicted of capital murder. King and Brewer were sentenced to death, while Berry, who drove the truck but could not be tied to racist prison organizations, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after forty years. These are very different outcomes from those following the lynchings of Jesse Washington, George Hughes, Shipp and Smith, Rubin Stacy, or Emmett Till, after which no one was ever convicted of murder. But the town of Jasper was left shaken and exposed. Whitney Dow

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and Marco Williams’s 2003 film, Two Towns of Jasper, portrays the different perspectives on the murder of Jasper’s black and white communities, tracked by black and white film crews, respectively, revealing that deep divisions still exist between black and white Americans.48 After the trial, it was revealed that King’s uncle had been acquitted of killing a disabled gay man in 1939. Mamie Till Bradley spoke about the Byrd murder on New York radio and held the hand of James Byrd’s father at a Harlem memorial service. “More than half a century of hate crimes,” writes Ashraf Rushdy, “has ensnared these families— the Tills, the Byrds, the Kings—in America’s quiet history of guilt and grief.” 49 Citing reports of attempted copycat crimes in Louisiana and Illinois that took place within a week of Byrd’s murder, Rushdy suggests another reason for not publishing pictures of the corpse of James Byrd: the possibility that doing so would have fanned the flames of white supremacy and inspired similar racist crimes. In other incidents, New York City police officers and firefighters parodied Byrd’s murder by imitating it in a Labor Day parade float; in Washington, D.C., a radio announcer responded to a clip from a song by the soul singer Lauryn Hill by commenting, “No wonder people drag them behind trucks.” (He was fired the next day.) But Rushdy argues that publishing the pictures, despite the risk of inciting further racist atrocities and again wounding the Byrd family, might also have had the effect of horrifying viewers enough to quell future assaults. Faced with such sickening imagery, he suggests, perhaps the cops and firefighters in New York and the DJ in Washington would have found it more difficult to joke so lightly about the crime. 50 As we have seen, however, the shame is felt most often by the persecuted, not the perpetrators. The many lynching photos already in existence do not prevent jokes about lynching among white supremacists—nor did the photo of Emmett Till prevent John William King from pursuing his own crime. There is some irony in the fact that even Till’s photo can be appropriated by contemporary racists for whom the threat of “blackness” and its implied “blurring” of the color line remains real. Indeed, the power of photographs has been deployed

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to justify and legitimate opposing ideological perspectives, as we have seen with lynching photographs, used first to support white supremacy and later as weapons against it. Lynching photos have been compared to the contemporary photos of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, such as the now iconic Hooded Man (figure 21). As I have argued elsewhere, both were sanctioned by a community of peers; both represent an abuse of power in a stratified hierarchy of power; both were meant as private souvenirs whose meanings were transformed when they circulated to broader publics; and both make visible the bodies of “others” who have historically been considered unrepresentable except in highly coded ways. Another shared feature is that the leaders of the communities perpetrating the atrocities have not been held accountable. Just as coroners and juries always found lynching victims to have met their death “at the hands of persons unknown,” today the prison torture of Arabs and Muslims at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other U.S. detention centers around the world established after the attacks of 9/11 has been sanctioned by a military hierarchy that continues either to justify or to deny torture, although a few lowly recruits have been prosecuted as “bad apples.” The shift from a carefully defined audience to a global one exposed the community sanction and sense of pride on the part of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators as they exercised their understanding of national, racial, and political power.51 This is not to say that the memory of those lynching photos lingers in the Abu Ghraib torture photos, but that they employ similar strategies of domination and control. The protocols of power fueled by desire and taboo have changed little over time, so that understanding lynching photos can give us insight into more recent photos of the humiliated racialized body in the public sphere. Like lynching photos, photos of torture taken as private souvenirs assert the ability of those in power to “look” at the effects of their power and at

Figure 21

Hooded Man, Abu Ghraib, 2003.

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the shame of helplessness, in the case of the Abu Ghraib photos asserting the right of American soldiers and their friends to look at the nude and brutalized bodies of their Middle Eastern victims while typically hooding the prisoners so that they could not look. Although the twenty or so images leaked to the media have been reproduced around the world in print, on television, and on the Web, the U.S. government has suppressed thousands more, arrogating to itself the sole right to look. The news media, while occasionally leaking the truth, also help chill free speech and assist the government’s assault on civil liberties and the right to dissent by suppressing such photos, as the Washington Post and the New Yorker both have admitted doing.52 Even taken out of their original context, such photos, like lynching photos, are significant tools of visual and political power. Public images of the tortured body act against historical amnesia, transforming those activities in which the perpetrators took pride into a public sense of shame, provoking political conscience. More powerfully than words, lynching photos demonstrate the logic of white supremacy, which must not be forgotten, just as dissent today against the effects of the limitless “war on terror” must not be suppressed in the name of nationalism or patriotism. Thus the context in which these photos are represented makes all the difference in how they are understood and how we perceive ourselves as members of an international community. By allowing us to look, collectively and publicly, such photos enable us to recognize those lost and tortured lives and to mourn their deaths. Beyond this, we are encouraged to position the acts they represent historically, consider the social/sexual implications they embody, and, through the shame and outrage they engender, protest the suffering they represent and the political conditions that allow it.

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Notes

Introduction

1. Walter Howerton Jr., “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” Ace Magazine (March 1, 2000). 2. Nina Burleigh, “Pictures from an Execution,” New York Magazine ( January 24, 2000). 3. Thurston Hatcher, “New South Confronts Old Lynching Images,” CNN.com, May 11, 2002, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/05/10/lynching.exhibit/index.html. 4. Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Without Sanctuary,” Journal of American History 89, no. 3 (December 2002): 993. Hale’s review considers primarily the Atlanta venue of the traveling exhibition. The Evidence of Lynching Photographs / Shawn Michelle Smith

I am grateful for opportunities to present earlier versions of this essay to several audiences whose engaging questions helped to shape its final form, and I would especially like to thank Marsha Jordan, Rita Jones, Laura Wexler, Mary Helen Washington, Leigh Raiford, and Elizabeth Abel for inviting me to speak in the following venues: African American History Series, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis; University of Northern Colorado, Greeley; Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; “Spectacular Fictions: Race and Visual Culture” conference, University of Maryland, College Park; American Studies Association annual meeting, Oakland, California. I am also grateful for an opportunity to discuss the final version of the essay in the American seminar at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Much of this work was completed while I was a member of the De-

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partment of American Studies at Saint Louis University, and I would like to thank my colleagues there for their encouragement, and Matthew Mancini, chair of the department, for his support. I would also like to thank my research assistants, Clara Núñez-Regueiro and Zhaochun Li, for helping to collect many of the materials for this essay, and the members of my writing group, especially Georgia Johnston, Caroline Reitz, Joycelyn Moody, Candy Brown, Ellen Crowell, and Joya Uraizee, for offering very helpful comments on an early draft. It was a real pleasure to work on this project with Anthony Lee and Dora Apel, whose scholarship and collegiality I greatly admire. Finally, I am most indebted to Joe Masco for his generous and rigorous engagement with this essay in all its various forms. 1. According to the New York Times (August 8, 1930, sec. 1), the mob was “estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000 people, comprising half the white population of Grant County, of which Marion is the county seat.” 2. James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 6. 3. James Cameron, A Time of Terror (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1994), 54. 4. Cameron tells of his harrowing experience in A Time of Terror, 53–76. 5. Ibid., 74. 6. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1912 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 203–4. 7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 77 and 115. 8. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 13. For these numbers, Madison cites W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 8. See also Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 1840–1935 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Gonzales-Day encourages us to rethink the black-white binary that has dominated studies of lynching by examining the practice of lynching in the American West. 9. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and Selected Works of Ida B. WellsBarnett, comp. Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: “Southern Horrors,” “A Red Record,” “Mob Rule in New Orleans” (New York: Arno, 1969); Hazel V. Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” in “Race,” Writing,

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and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Hale, Making Whiteness. Other important studies of lynching include Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); and Brundage, Lynching in the New South. 10. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings; and Wells, Crusade for Justice. 11. A Grant County grand jury failed to indict anyone for the August 7, 1930, lynching in Marion, Indiana. In response to this negligence, and at the prompting of Walter White, head of the NAACP, who conducted his own investigation at the request of the local head of the NAACP, Flossie Bailey, Attorney General James Ogden personally filed charges against eight people, including Sheriff Jake Campbell. Later, Deputy Merl Wall indicted another man. Of the nine, only two were brought to trial, and they were acquitted. Finally, “in March 1931 charges against all the other suspects were dropped. As the motion to dismiss put it: ‘There is no likelihood of conviction.’” See Cynthia Carr, Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America (New York: Crown, 2006), 143–46. 12. Henry McNeal Turner described and decried this rhetoric in “An Emigration Convention,” in Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner, comp. and ed. Edwin S. Redkey (New York: Arno and New York Times, 1971), 153. 13. Carr, who interviewed residents of Marion, Indiana, identifies several of the people in Beitler’s famous photograph in the following pages of her book, Our Town: Mrs. Van Vector (mother of Mark Van Vector) is the woman standing closest to the camera (36); Ed Stephenson is the man in the straw hat (37); the “old lady” is Ancil (37); Phil Boyd is the grinning man holding a young woman’s hand (38); Bernadine Whitlock, daughter of a minister, is the woman whose hand he holds (116); William Lennon, a preacher, is the man whose face is blurred (38); Herman Pontzious is the older man to the right wearing a painter’s cap (122); the man toward the back of the crowd, standing just to the left of one of the victims, his light hat tipped back, is Finn Byrd (133). 14. Leigh Raiford, “The Consumption of Lynching Images,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Abrams, 2003), 269. 15. Ashraf Rushdy, “Exquisite Corpse,” Transition 9, no. 3 (2000): 70.

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16. For a discussion of the fluid and shifting nature of the color line in Marion, Indiana, and elsewhere in the Midwest, see Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 43–61. 17. Cameron, A Time of Terror, 9, 18, 20, and 35. 18. Hale, Making Whiteness, 204. 19. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 64 and 112. As Dora Apel suggests, “The photographer is implicated by rendering a service to the lynching community, supplying the images for commemorative postcards that record the race-color-caste solidarity and lethal ‘superiority’ of the white community.” Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 7. 20. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 113. 21. Ibid., 116; see also 115–17. Madison’s careful research led me to many of the reproductions of Beitler’s photograph that I discuss here. 22. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 13. 23. The Chicago Defender (August 16, 1930, p. 1), in its own caption to the Beitler image, proclaimed: “Some papers in Indiana towns near Marion would not print the picture. They were ashamed for their readers to know the gruesomeness of the crime.” 24. Cameron, A Time of Terror, 84. 25. Chicago Defender (August 16, 1930), p. 1. 26. The Chicago Defender (August 23, 1930), p. 14, published a drawing by Henry Brown entitled The Crucifixion that depicts three figures crucified on the ground of “Marion.” The two men in shredded clothes to the left and right of the frame are presumably Shipp and Smith; the large figure in the middle is “Justice,” her scales askew and nailed to her cross. As Jonathan Markovitz has argued, in Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xviii, “Both the antilynching movement and lynch mobs themselves were engaged in a struggle over how lynching would be understood and remembered.” 27. Crisis 37, no. 10 (October 1930): 348. 28. The county sheriff, Jacob C. Campbell, is said to have known the names of six of the lynchers, but Judge A. D. Clawson of the Grant County circuit court refused to sign the papers to authorize the charges. See “Indiana Mob Murders Two; Police Aid

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K.K.K. Hoodlums,” Chicago Defender, August 16, 1930, p. 1; and “Marion Lynchers Have No Fear of Law,” Chicago Defender, August 23, 1930, p. 3. See also Carr, Our Town, 143. 29. One of the Anderson Daily Bulletin’s headlines (August 8, 1930, p. 1) reads: “Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith, Negroes Who Killed Claude Deeter, 23-Year-Old Fairmount Lad, and Raped Girl Companion Wednesday Night, Were Slain by Mob and Their Bodies Hanged High in Courthouse Yard at Marion.” 30. Crisis 37, no. 10 (October 1930): 353. 31. Wells, A Red Record (1895), reprinted in Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, 55–56. See also “Holmes on Lynching,” Crisis 3, no. 3 (1912): 109–10. 32. Jacquie Jones, “How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: The New Press, 1994), 156. Elizabeth Alexander, in “‘Can You Be Black and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, 91–110, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), suggests that scenes of racist violence can become catalysts for African American solidarity and antiracist action. 33. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland, 10. 34. Turner is quoted in “Muncie Man Is Lynching Witness,” Muncie Evening Press, August 8, 1930, p. 9. 35. Although the victim shown in the image, according to Allen, is Jesse Washington, lynched in Robinson, Texas, May 16, 1916, Dora Apel accepts the identification by William D. Carrigan, who identifies him as Will Stanley of Temple, Texas, lynched on July 30, 1915. See Apel’s essay here and James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000), figures 25 and 26. 36. I discuss this postcard in my book Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 122–25. 37. Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, figure 32. 38. On memory and photography, see Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, 2004), 94–98. 39. Quotations in this paragraph are from Jacquie Jones, “How Come Nobody Told Me about the Lynching?” 153 (first and last quotations) and 154.

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Notes to Pages 26–36

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40. Ibid., 155. 41. For the text and photographs I discuss here, see Joyce Bourjault et al., New Flying Colours, Classe de terminale (Paris: Didier, 1997), 119–28. 42. Ruby Tapia, in an unpublished manuscript, quoted with permission, has called lynching photographs “death images” of the “disdained” to distinguish them from memorial death images of loved ones and family members. In New Flying Colours the “disdained” bodies are not those of the African American victims but those of the white mob. The French textbook exemplifies how lynching photographs generally function for viewers today. 43. At least one French teacher who used the textbook, Wilfrid Lefebvre, of Lycée Privé Louis Pasteur, a high school in Avignon, France, challenged such implicit erasure by asking students to consider America’s “racial issues” in relation to “the treatment of North Africans in the south of France.” See “French Students Study Marion Lynching,” Black History News and Notes 81 (August 2000): 1. 44. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1–23. 45. See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 176–208; Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 3–18; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 46. Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 185. 47. As Markovitz notes in Legacies of Lynching, 25–27, the NAACP used this photograph on an antilynching fund-raising flyer that critiqued the spectatorship of lynching. See also my discussion of this photograph in Photography on the Color Line, 132–34. 48. See Marc D. Allan, “Rap Group Compares Tyson Rape Conviction to Marion Lynching,” Indianapolis Star, October 2, 1992, pp. 1–2; Alison Muscatine, “Tyson Found Guilty of Rape, Two Other Charges,” Tech 112, no. 4 (February 11, 1992): 3; and “Rappers Compare Tyson Verdict to 1930 Lynching,” Anderson Herald-Bulletin, October 3, 1992, p. 4. 49. The lyrics to “Hazy Shade of Criminal” are available online at Lyrics Depot: www.lyricsdepot.com/public_enemy/hazy-shade-of-criminal.html. 50. I am grateful to Rita Jones for directing me to the Justice for All materials. To view the exhibit online, see http://jfaweb.org/exhibit.html.

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Notes to Pages 37–39

85

51. Cameron tried to find a publisher for his story for over forty-five years. After nearly three hundred rejections, and almost a hundred rewritings, he mortgaged his house in 1982 and published A Time of Terror himself. Black Classic Press reissued the book in 1994 and in one week sold out its first printing of five thousand copies. See Carr, Our Town, 15, 23, and 29. 52. By the mid–twentieth century, almost two hundred antilynching bills had been introduced in Congress, seven presidents had petitioned Congress to end lynching, and the House of Representatives had passed three antilynching measures. But these bills were consistently defeated by the Senate. This information is included in the official apology. See Senate Resolution 39, available through a link on Senator Mary L. Landrieu’s Web site: http://landrieu.senate.gov/lynching/index.cfm. 53. See http://landrieu.senate.gov/lynching/index.cfm. 54. Two other images are visible in the C-SPAN footage. One may be an enlarged reproduction of the lynching photograph of Rubin Stacy, and the other is a large portrait photograph, presumably of a victim of lynching. See the C-SPAN video of the Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution, copyright National Cable Satellite Corporation, 2006. 55. Indeed, in the summer of 2005, the ghosts of lynching seemed both present and pressing. On June 1, the body of Emmett Till was exhumed for autopsy, to settle the question of the identity of the mangled body of a boy whose image rocked the nation in 1955. On July 25, civil rights activists in Monroe, Georgia, reenacted the 1946 lynching of four African Americans (two men and two women, one of whom was pregnant) to encourage the prosecution of members of the mob. On June 4, James Allen’s exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America continued its national tour at the Chicago Historical Society, where it was presented with materials focused on the lynching of Emmett Till, in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of his murder. See Monica Davey and Gretchen Ruethling, “After 50 Years, Emmett Till’s Body Is Exhumed,” New York Times, June 2, 2005; Richard Rubin, “The Ghosts of Emmett Till,” New York Times Magazine, July 31, 2005; Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, n0. 2 (1996); “Georgia Lynchings Re-enacted,” MSNBC.com, July 25, 2005, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8700457. 56. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 60 and 80.

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Notes to Pages 41–47

86

57. See the C-SPAN video of the discussion of the Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution. Lynching Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming / Dora Apel

1. For a fuller discussion of the complex causes of lynching see Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 2. Terms such as “white” and “black,” though used in this essay for lack of better terms, must be understood as relational terms of identity that depend on each other for meaning, but also as inadequate categories that are socially constructed and contested. As Ian Haney-Lopez has shown, in White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), in the early decades of the twentieth century, the difficulty of determining “race” on the basis of skin color led to a series of court cases in which a scientific basis for racial categorizations was rejected but racial divisions were nonetheless maintained on the chimerical bases of “common knowledge” and “blood.” This led to the “one-drop rule,” which proposed that individuals with even one drop of “black blood” in their lineage were “black.” By deciding who was “white” and who was “black,” racial identities based on morphological differences could be maintained and even created by the antimiscegenation laws. 3. The initial exhibitions of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America were held at the Roth Horowitz gallery and the New-York Historical Society in New York City in 2000, followed by exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Martin Luther King Memorial Site in Atlanta. See Apel, Imagery of Lynching, chap. 1, for a discussion of these exhibitions; see also James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). 4. See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the NineteenthCentury South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie David Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South (New York: Pantheon, 1998). 5. See Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jessie Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), chap. 5.

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Notes to Pages 47–55

87

6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 189–90. The “Barbecueville” comment is reminiscent of another written on the back of a postcard of a burned and hanging lynching victim. This postcard reads, “This is the Barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it, your son, Joe.” Although James Allen identified the victim as Jesse Washington, Carrigan says the victim was Will Stanley of Temple, Texas, who was lynched on July 30, 1915, a year earlier. The postcard is clearly stamped Temple, Texas. See Carrigan, 185–87. 9. Ibid., 189–90. 10. Hall, Revolt against Chivalry, 129–30; and Sherman Daily Democrat, May 11, 1930. 11. See Lin Shi Khan and Ralph Perez, Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts (1935; New York: New York University Press, 2002). The illustration of Khan’s linocut representing a man hanged and burned is also pictured and discussed in Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 58–59; the lithograph by Orozco, Negro Colgados (Hanged Negroes), in the collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, is pictured and discussed in Apel, 96–97. 12. M.M., “Art Commentary on Lynching,” Art News 33 (February 23, 1933): 13; and J.W.L., “Current Exhibitions,” Parnassus (March 1935): 22. 13. See Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 92–96. 14. John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 22. 15. Benjamin Kilborne, a psychoanalyst who incorporates the insights of sociologists, begins to address the social when he argues that we attempt to control external appearances as a way of controlling internal feelings. See his Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 16. John Hollander, “Honor Dishonorable: Shameful Shame,” Social Research 70, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 1061–75. 17. David Shapiro, “The Tortured, Not the Torturers, Are Ashamed,” Social Research 70, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 1148. 18. Mark Auslander, “‘Father Is Five from Right’: The Family Album of American Lynching Photography” (paper presented at the conference “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies,” Atlanta, Ga., October 5, 2002).

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Notes to Pages 55–62

88

19. Quoted in Allen et al., Without Sanctuary, 185. 20. I borrowed the characterizations from Judith Butler, who uses them in reference to more recent deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. See Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). 21. These gestures also have been described by Shawn Michelle Smith in Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 132–34. 22. Williams discusses the “hypersexualization of the black body (male and female),” which parallels the “‘hysterization’ of the white woman’s body” that developed under slavery. See Linda Williams, “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust,” in Porn Studies, ed. Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 272. 23. In his videotape about the lynching, James Cameron, the third black youth who was arrested with Shipp and Smith that night but escaped a lynching, identifies the figure on the right as Thomas Shipp although other accounts suggest it may be Abram Smith. The video can be seen at the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 24. For a movingly imagined fictional account of the lifelong effects, sexual and otherwise, of witnessing a lynching and castration, see James Baldwin, “Going to Meet the Man,” in Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dial Press, 1965). 25. While Hollywood makes approximately 400 films a year, the porn industry makes from 10,000 to 11,000, with seven hundred million porn videos or DVDs rented each year. Revenues, broadly including magazines, Web sites, cable, in-room hotel movies, and sex toys, total between 10 and 14 billion dollars annually. See Williams, “Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction,” in Porn Studies, 1–2. 26. Williams, “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border,” 275, 302. 27. See Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 1988); and Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). 28. Malcolm R. West, “Mamie Till-Mobley, Civil Rights Heroine, Eulogized in Chicago,” National Report, January 27, 2003. 29. See the documentary film The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, released in the summer of 2005, directed by Keith A. Beauchamp. In his introduction to The Lynching of Emmett Till, Metress notes the persistence of unsubstantiated rumors of castration.

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Notes to Pages 62–69

89

30. Butler, Precarious Life, 128ff. Also see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), in which Moten discusses the aural power of the 1955 photograph of Emmett Till insofar as it bears the material trace of the black voice. 31. See Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 32. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture, 207–8. 33. Thomas J. Scheff, “Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory,” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (March 2000): 98. 34. The film The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till was instrumental in uncovering new evidence, including the involvement of up to fourteen people, five of whom are still alive, that caused the U.S. Justice Department to reopen the investigation into the Till case. See www.emmetttillstory.com. 35. The murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were a turning point in the civil rights movement, in which the federal government intervened only when black people began to arm themselves and fight back against racist violence. This sequence of events is in contrast to that depicted in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning. Since the conviction of Killen, even more Mississippi cases are being reviewed, including the 1964 slaying of two hitchhikers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, and the fatal 1967 car bombing of Wharlest Jackson, who had been promoted to a traditionally whites-only job. In Florida, there is a pending review of the murder of Johnnie Mae Chappell, a black maid killed during a riot in 1964, and a reward has been offered for information about the deaths of Harry T. Moore and Harriette V. Moore, whose house was firebombed in 1951 after Harry Moore helped blacks register to vote. In Georgia, a pardon was granted posthumously to Lena Baker, executed in 1945 for killing her white employer in self-defense after he imprisoned and raped her. See Shaila Dewan, “A Crescendoing Choir from the Graveyards of History,” New York Times, News of the Week in Review, August 21, 2005, 3. 36. Kristin Harty, “Family of Lynched Black Man Unimpressed with Plaque Commemorating Racial Reconciliation,” Chronicle-Tribune (Marion, Ind.), October 10, 2003. On the lynching, see James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 37. Harty, “Family of Lynched Black Man Unimpressed with Plaque.” 38. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 69–78

90

39. See Shapiro, “The Tortured, Not the Torturers, Are Ashamed.” 40. See Resolution 39 of the Congressional Record, 109th Cong., Senate sess., June 13, 2005. 41. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “The Senate Apologizes, Mostly,” New York Times, News of the Week in Review, June 19, 2005. 42. See Dora Apel, “Memorialization and Its Discontents: America’s First Lynching Memorial,” Mississippi Quarterly (forthcoming). 43. Williams, “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border,” 287. 44. Ibid., 287–99. 45. See Dina Temple-Raston, A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town’s Struggle for Redemption (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 3. 46. Ibid., 190, 164–65. 47. Ibid., 9. 48. See also Ashley Craddock, “The Jasper Myth,” Salon, October 25, 1999, www .salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/25/jasper/index.html. 49. Rushdy, “Exquisite Corpse,” Transition 9, no. 3 (2000): 76. 50. Ibid., 76–77. Also see an online archive of stories related to the Byrd killing at www.racematters.org/jamesbyrd.html. 51. See Dora Apel, “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and Images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal (Summer 2005): 88–100. 52. On May 12, 2004, a closed-door session of Congress was held during which members were shown over eighteen hundred photographs and videos of torture at Abu Ghraib. Both the executive editor of the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr., and Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in the New Yorker, supported the decision of their organs not to publish further images because they were in “bad taste.” The online magazine Salon has since acquired some of these photos.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abu Ghraib, 9, 77, 77–78, 90n52 activism, 3, 6, 8–9 African Americans, 1, 14, 31; activism and resistance among, 3; barbarity of white supremacism and, 23–24; black men as mythical rapists of white women, 16, 24, 47, 51; contemporary evocations of lynching and, 32, 33, 34; evidence of lynching photographs and, 26–27; expatriates in France, 28; Great Migration and, 44; hypersexed image of black male, 57, 58; knowledge of lynchings, 17–18; shaming of, 68–69; social inequality and, 46; World War II veterans, 61. See also women, African American Afro-American magazine, 51 Allen, Sen. George, 39 Allen, James, 1, 3, 39, 85n55 American Crusade to End Lynching, 3 Anderson Daily Bulletin, 18, 19, 23 Andy Warhol Museum, 3, 86n3 antiabortion movement, 34, 35, 36–37 antimiscegenation laws, 46, 61, 86n2 Apel, Dora, 8–9, 82n19 Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 3 atonement, 70, 71 Baer, Ulrich, 39 Bailey, Flossie, 18, 81n11

Baker, Lena, 89n35 Ball, Mary, 13, 23 Barthes, Roland, 16 Beauchamp, Keith A., 88n29 Beitler, Lawrence, 8–9, 11–12, 18, 25, 37. See also Marion Lynching (Beitler photograph) Berry, Shawn, 74, 75 Boyd, Phil, 81n13 Brewer, Lawrence Russell, 74 Brown, Henry, 82n26 Bryant, Ray, 62 Butler, Judith, 62, 88n20 Byrd, Finn, 81n13 Byrd, James, Jr., 73–76 Cameron, James, 13–14, 16, 17–18, 88n23; autobiography, 37, 85n51; newspaper coverage of Marion lynching and, 20; Newsweek portrait of, 37, 38; Senate Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution and, 37, 39 Campbell, Jacob C., 81n11, 82n28 Carrigan, William, 49, 83n35 castration, 44, 47, 58, 62, 88n29 Chaney, James, 67, 89n35 Chappell, Johnnie Mae, 89n35 Charles H. Wright Museum, 3 Chicago Defender: Hughes lynching and, 51; Marion lynching and, 20, 21, 23, 82n23, 82n25; Till lynching and, 61, 63 97

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Index

98

Chicago Historical Society, 3 Chicago Sun-Times, 62 children, white, 56, 59 Chuck D, 32, 34 civil liberties, 78 civil rights, 3, 24, 64, 89n35 Clawson, Judge A. D., 82n28 Clayton, Elias, 70, 72 Clayton, Jackson, McGhie Memorial (Duluth, Minn.), 70, 71, 90n42 Clinton, Bill, 70 CNN (Cable News Network), 2, 4 cold war, 61 College Art Association, 52 Communist Party of the United States, 3, 51, 61 Confederate Knights of America (CKA), 75 Congress, U.S., 49, 69–70, 85n52, 90n52 counterhistory, 3, 4 Crisis magazine, 20, 22, 23, 24, 49, 61 C-SPAN, 39, 40, 85n54 Death [Lynched Figure] (Noguchi), 52, 53 Dee, Henry Hezekiah, 89n35 Deeter, Claude, 13 DeLay, Rep. Tom, 70 Dow, Whitney, 75 Downie, Leonard, Jr., 90n52 Du Bois, W. E. B., 24, 49 Florida, state of, 5, 31, 45, 55, 89n35 France, 27, 28, 84n43 Garvey, Marcus, 27 gaze, points of view and, 37 genocide, 35, 36 Georgia, state of, 3 Gildersleeve, Fred A., 47, 48, 49 Glickfield, David, 68 Goodman, Andrew, 67, 89n35 Great Depression, 51 Great Migration, 44 Guantánamo prison, torture at, 77 guilt, 52, 54

Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 6, 17–18 hate crimes, 76 Hawaiians, native, 70 “Hazy Shade of Criminal” (Public Enemy), 32, 33, 34 Heirlooms and Accessories (Marshall), 28–29, 30, 31 Henson, Mike, 68 Hersh, Seymour, 90n52 Holiday, Billie, 27 Holocaust, 4 Hooded Man (Abu Ghraib prisoner), 77, 77 Horowitz, Glenn, 2 Hughes, George, lynching of, 45, 49, 50, 51– 52, 57, 75 Illinois, state of, 76 Indiana, state of, 13, 18, 45 Indianapolis Star, 32, 33 International Center of Photography (ICP), 2 International Labor defense, 51 Internet, 43 Jackson, David, 61, 63 Jackson, Elmer, 70, 72 Jackson, Wharlest, 89n35 Jackson State University, 3 Japanese-Americans, internment of, 69 Jasper, Texas, 73–76 Jet magazine, 61, 62, 64 Jones, Jacquie, 24, 26 Jones, Marion, 31, 55 Justice for All, 34–37 Khan, Lin Shi, 51, 87n11 Kilborne, Benjamin, 87n15 Killen, Edgar Ray, 67, 89n35 King, John William, 74, 75, 76 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 27, 67 King, Rodney, 8, 70, 73, 73 Koon, Stacey, 73 Ku Klux Klan, 25, 26, 27, 58, 67, 75

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Labor Defender (newspaper), 51 Landrieu, Sen. Mary L., 39, 41, 85n52 law/legislation, 16, 23, 24, 59. See also antimiscegenation laws Lefebvre, Wilfrid, 84n43 Lennon, William, 81n13 Levinas, Emmanuel, 62 Life magazine, 62 Look magazine, 62 Los Angeles, 70, 73 Louisiana, state of, 27, 76 lynching photographs: antilynching appropriation of, 24, 45; contemporary uses of, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36–37; cropping and editing of, 27, 28–29, 35, 36, 69; as fetishes, 39; as grotesque carnival, 12; instability of evidence and, 14–15; logic of white supremacy and, 78; in newspapers and magazines, 18, 19, 20, 21–22, 23; as postmortem images, 12; private and public viewing of, 8; racialized inheritance and, 29; shame and, 8; as souvenirs, 16–17, 18, 44; staging of, 12, 31–32; viewers of, 8, 15; white familial ties and, 25 lynchings: American history and, 8, 15–16; amnesia about, 4; campaigns against, 3, 45, 51, 52, 59, 82n26; as national shame, 45; perpetrators of, 4, 15; public resolution to shame of, 67–70; as racist terrorism, 15, 51; “rape” as prime rationale for, 15–16, 23, 70; as spectacle, 4, 6, 17, 23, 25, 43–44, 56, 59; torture and, 1, 46, 47, 59, 62, 78 McGhie, Isaac, 70, 72 Madison, James, 18 Malcolm X, 27 “Mandingo sexual encounter,” 73 Marie Harriman Gallery, 52 Marion, Indiana, 68–69, 70 Marion Lynching (Beitler photograph), 7, 11–12; as generic lynching photograph, 18; history of race relations in United States and, 27–28; Justice for All’s use of, 34, 35, 36–37; newspapers and magazines and, 18,

19, 20, 21–22, 23, 26, 82n23; Newsweek portrait of Cameron and, 37, 38; personal archives and, 25–27; public circulation of, 26; Public Enemy’s use of, 32, 33, 34, 37; sale of, 18, 25; Senate Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution and, 39, 40, 41, 69; white mob in, 7, 11–12, 13–14, 16, 81n13 Markovitz, Jonathan, 82n26 Marshall, Kerry James, 28–29, 30, 31 Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site, 3, 7, 86n3 Milam, J. W., 62 Minnesota, state of, 70 Mississippi, state of, 3, 45, 61–62, 67 Mississippi Burning (film), 89n35 mobs (crowds), lynching and, 4, 6, 82n26; Marion lynching, 7, 11–12, 13–14, 16, 80n1; racism as casual and normal, 26–27; spectacle lynching, 44; staging of photographs, 31–32; violence of, 24; women and girls as participants, 31–32, 55 Moore, Charles Eddie, 89n35 Moore, Harriette V., 89n35 Moore, Harry T., 89n35 Muncie Evening Press, 18, 23 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 3, 18, 49, 59, 81n11; Crisis as official magazine of, 22, 24; lynching photographs published by, 45 Nash, Ruth Ann, 68 Neshoba Democrat (newspaper), 67 New Flying Colours (French textbook), 27–28, 84nn42–43 NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 2, 4 Newsweek magazine, 38, 62 New York Amsterdam News, 61 New York City, 45, 51, 76 New York Daily News, 62 New Yorker magazine, 78, 90n52 New-York Historical Society, 2, 86n3 New York Times, 49, 55, 69

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Noguchi, Isamu, 51–52 NPR (National Public Radio), 4 Orozco, José Clementé, 51 Parks, Rosa, 64 Peyton, Anthony, 71 photography, 6, 8, 11; choreography of lynching and, 14; ideological perspectives and, 76–77; meaning and evidence, 15, 41 Pittsburgh Courier, 61 police, role in racial violence: Hughes lynching and, 51; King (Rodney) beating, 70, 73, 73; Marion, Indiana, lynching and, 13, 16, 17, 18 politicians, 20 Pontzious, Herman, 81n13 pornography, 58–59, 88n25 postcards, 1, 3, 6, 24, 44, 87n8; of Washington (Jesse) lynching, 47; white familial ties and, 25 Presumed Guilty (Koon), 73 psychoanalysis, 54, 87n15 Public Enemy (rap group), 32, 34, 37 race, 46–47, 86n2; defined by courts, 86n2 racism, 15, 16, 26, 28, 67; Byrd ( James) murder and, 74; public resolution to shame and, 68; as sadistic spectacle, 49 railroads, lynching spectacles and, 44 rape: of African American women, 32, 34, 46, 69; false accusations of, 13, 16, 23, 31, 51, 70; Tyson rape case (1992), 32, 33, 34 Rayner, A. A., 62 Reconstruction, 1 religion, 68 Richard, Roberta, 68–69 Rosenblatt, Roger, 2 Roth, Andrew, 2 Roth Horowitz Gallery (New York), 1–3, 6, 8 Rubin Stacy, a lynching victim, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, July 19, 1935 (photograph), 5 Rushdy, Ashraf, 17, 76

Scheff, Thomas, 67 Schwerner, Michael, 67, 89n35 Scottsboro trials, 61 segregation, 15, 49, 61 Senate Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution, 39, 40, 41, 69 sexism, 16 sexuality, 8, 47; antiabortion movement and, 34, 35, 36–37; hypersexualization of black body, 57, 58, 88n22; interracial, 36–37, 43, 46, 57–59; Tyson rape case and, 32, 33, 34; white male sexual envy, 73 shame, 43, 45, 47, 74, 78; of castration, 62; community and, 54; guilt contrasted with, 52, 54; lynching as national shame, 39; public resolution to, 67; Till lynching and, 62; worldwide condemnation of American South and, 61 Shapiro, David, 55 Shipp, Thomas, lynching of, 7, 8, 11–12, 26, 29, 39, 75; black sexuality as implied threat and, 58; circumstances of, 13–14; commemoration of Marion lynching and, 68; history of lynching photographs and, 45; murderers’ point of view and, 12, 16; newspaper and magazine coverage of lynching and, 19, 20, 21–22, 23; Senate Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution and, 39, 40; Tyson rape case compared to, 34. See also Marion Lynching (Beitler photograph) Singer, Melanie, 73 slavery, 69, 70, 88n22 Smith, Abram, lynching of, 7, 8, 11–12, 26, 29, 58, 75; circumstances of, 13–14; commemoration of Marion lynching and, 68; history of lynching photographs and, 45; murderers’ point of view and, 12, 16; newspaper coverage of lynching and, 19, 20, 21–22, 23; Senate Anti-Lynching Apology Resolution and, 39; Tyson rape case compared to, 34. See also Marion Lynching (Beitler photograph) Smith, Shawn Michelle, 7, 8 sociology, 54, 55, 67, 87n15

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Sontag, Susan, 18 South, Jim Crow, 1, 3, 43 spectatorship, 8 Stacy, Rubin, lynching of, 5, 45, 55–57, 75; NAACP leaflet and, 59, 60; orchestration of photographic image, 31–32 Stanley, Will, 83n35, 87n8 Stephenson, Ed, 81n13 Stetson, Carla, 71 “Strange Fruit” (song), 27 taboo, sexual, 46, 58–59 Taylor, John, 52 Temple-Raston, Dina, 74, 75 Texas, state of, 45, 47, 49, 73 Till, Emmett, lynching of, 45, 61–62, 63, 64, 66, 75; contemporary racist crimes and, 76; exhumation of remains, 67, 85n55; mutilation of body, 61, 62 Till Bradley, Mamie, 61, 62, 63, 65, 74, 76 Time magazine, 62 Time of Terror, A (Cameron), 13, 37, 85n51 torture, 11, 17, 44, 47, 55, 77–78 Turner, E. Frank, 24 Two Towns of Jasper (film), 76 Tyson, Mike, 32, 34 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 27 United States: history of racial violence, 15–16, 41; pornography in, 58; race relations, 27, 76; torture of prisoners in detention centers, 77–78 Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, The (film), 62, 88n29, 89n34 Van Vector, Mark, 81n13 victims, 4, 5, 8 12, 77; descendants of, 68–69; mourning of, 64; shame and, 54; “spectacle funeral” of, 45, 64; survivors, 13–14, 17, 37 violence, racial, 6, 11; in American history, 36, 41; contemporary, 70, 73, 73–78, 77; historical meanings of, 4; normalization of, 56; numbing emotional effect on children, 56–57; shame and, 54; white viewers’ reactions to, 24

visual culture, 15 voyeurism, 43 Waco, Texas, 45, 47, 49, 54, 67 Wall, Merl, 81n11 “war on terror,” 78 Washington, Desiree, 32, 34 Washington, Jesse, lynching of, 54, 57, 67, 74, 75, 83n35; circumstances of, 45, 47, 48; public reaction to, 47, 49 Washington Post, 78, 90n52 Wells, Ida B., 3, 16, 31, 47 White, Walter, 81n11 whiteness, 23, 25, 29; defined by courts, 86n2 white supremacy, 15, 17, 44, 75; lynching photographs as critique of, 20, 21–22, 39; mob violence and, 24; opposition to, 45, 59; power of photography and, 76–77; shaming and, 54–55 Whitlock, Bernadine, 81n13 Williams, Linda, 57, 58–59, 73 Williams, Marco, 76 Winfrey, Oprah, 2 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (exhibition and book), 2, 4, 8, 25, 39, 85n55 witness, bearing, 4 Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the Collection of James Allen (exhibition), 1–3, 8 women, African American, 16, 26–27, 34; children with white men, 46; mothers of lynching victims, 62, 64, 65; rape and sexual coercion of, 46, 69 women, white: African American men as mythical rapists of, 13, 16, 23, 31, 51, 70; as bearers of white racial identity, 36, 43; girls as participants in lynchings, 5, 55–56; hysterical body of, 57, 88n22; “protection” of, 43, 47, 57, 73; racialized inheritance and, 29, 30, 31–32; relationships with black men, 46, 59 Wonder, Stevie, 2 Woody, Jack, 2 World War II, 69

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Designer: Nola Burger Text: 10.75/14 Granjon Display: Interstate Compositor: Integrated Composition Systems Indexer: Kevin Millham Printer and Binder: Friesens Corporation Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Apel, Dora, 1952– Lynching photographs / Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith. p. cm. — (Defining moments in American photography ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-25152-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-25332-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lynching—United States—Pictorial works. 2. Lynching in art— Criticism and interpretation. 3. Racism—United States—History. 4. Photographic criticism. I. Smith, Shawn Michelle, 1965– II. Title. hv6459.a64 2007 364.1'34—dc22

2007000210

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