Lynching and Photography

I am work­ing on a paper about lynch­ing pho­tographs for my His­tory of Slav­ery in the New World class. I am stretch­ing the scope of the class by reach­ing into the 20th cen­tury so that I can spend time on the more dif­fi­cult aspects of my favorite medium.

There has been a flurry of schol­ar­ship on lynch­ing pho­tographs since the exhi­bi­tion With­out Sanc­tu­ary at the New York His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety in 2000. I remem­ber attend­ing the exhibit and being stuck in a daze as I tried to take in the over­whelm­ing col­lec­tion of tat­tered post­cards size images of mobs of white peo­ple col­lected around limp, muti­lated black bod­ies. The images are resound­ingly about white power. There is no indi­ca­tion of strug­gle, hys­te­ria, or pain, which must surely fig­ured promi­nently in the actual event. Masses of white peo­ple are gath­er­ing around the destroyed black bod­ies. The pho­tographs are assert­ing a sta­ble, tri­umphant, white soci­ety that was dying it’s own trau­matic death in the midst of these rit­u­al­ized attempts to assert oth­er­wise. While the white mob lynches the black man, the pho­to­graph lynches the mob.

Charred corpse of Jesse Wash­ing­ton sus­pended from util­ity pole.
May 16, 1916, Robin­son, Texas.

Spec­ta­tors at the lynch­ing of Jesse Wash­ing­ton.
May 16, 1916. Waco, Texas.

The need to under­stand the inter­nal logic and social real­ity sup­port­ing lynch­ing is only more evi­dent with the acquit­tal of the offi­cers respon­si­ble for Sean Bell’s mur­der. Lynch­ing is in many ways so hor­rific because it was sanc­tioned by soci­ety. Law enforce­ment did not enforce laws around due process, let­ting lynch­ers into pris­ons to take the accused into their own hands. Judges ruled that the mur­ders were “unknown” when thor­ough pho­to­graphic doc­u­men­ta­tion of the events existed. The anx­i­eties and struc­tural inequal­i­ties of a slave hold­ing soci­ety con­tinue to have vio­lent ram­i­fi­ca­tions that can be traced his­tor­i­cal from eman­ci­pa­tion up to today.

As I research the topic, I am bal­anc­ing my moral judg­ments of the racist prac­tices of a soci­ety in flux with the need to probe effec­tively into cir­cum­stances that moti­vated lynch­ings, as well as the pho­to­graphic prac­tices around them. I see some com­men­ta­tors, includ­ing the writ­ers of the intro­duc­tion of the book accom­pa­ny­ing the His­tor­i­cal Society’s exhibit, short cir­cuit their analy­sis by con­clud­ing with a moral indict­ment of lynch­ing. It is easy to point to lynch­ing with dis­gust and decry the prac­tice. Tak­ing this rout misses the oppor­tu­nity to under­stand why these things hap­pened by psy­cho­log­i­cally dis­tanc­ing the com­men­ta­tor and the reader from the event.

The bru­tal­ity of the lynch­ing is obvi­ous. To con­demn it to some anom­aly or deplorable behav­ior or a throw­back to an out­dated south­ern men­tal­ity is to close the door to under­stand­ing how it was indeed a mod­ern, sophis­ti­cated prac­tice par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to 20th cen­tury Amer­ica. The per­va­sive use of pho­tog­ra­phy, then a new tech­nol­ogy, is one indi­ca­tion among many that lynch­ing was a mod­ern prac­tice. Grace Hale argues in her book Mak­ing White­ness that racial vio­lence is mod­ern because it is the anx­ious response to mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism where peo­ple are equal­ized as con­sumers. Race, class, and gen­der no longer order soci­ety as it had before pur­chas­ing power was con­trolled. This argu­ment hold weight when we con­sider the social cli­mate of other his­tor­i­cal moments when lynch­ing was pop­u­lar, namely the killing of so called witches in Renais­sance Europe.

I had a con­ver­sa­tion the other day about the roll of pho­tog­ra­phy in sham­ing. I was talk­ing about human rights and pho­tog­ra­phy, offer­ing exam­ples of projects I was excited about. The per­son I was talk­ing to brought up Abu Graib and asked about the roll of pho­tog­ra­phy there. He pointed out that all my exam­ples had to do with pro­mot­ing pos­i­tive val­ues and that there are many cases where pho­tog­ra­phy can shame in very pro­duc­tive ways. I remain sadly skep­ti­cal about the wider impact of the Abu Graib pho­tographs, but I see clearly the need to under­stand the sham­ing poten­tial of pho­tog­ra­phy with the fol­low­ing example.

The use of pho­tog­ra­phy to shame requires a care­ful atten­tion to the sit­u­a­tions in which you are inject­ing the images. Some schol­ars argue that the advent of pho­to­graphic prac­tices in news­pa­per pub­li­ca­tion actu­ally fueled lynch­ing in the 1890’s. The images were also mailed widely as pic­ture post­cards, show­ing the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of such events and the impli­ca­tion of the whole of Amer­i­can soci­ety in sanc­tion­ing them by pass­ing the evi­dence through the postal sys­tem. This con­trasts dra­mat­i­cally to the impact of widely cir­cu­lated pho­tographs of Emmitt Till’s muti­lated corpse in 1955. The 14-year-old boy has been kid­napped and bru­tally killed in Mis­sis­sippi after hav­ing whis­tled at a white woman on a dare a few days prior. His mother insisted on an open cas­ket funeral. The pho­tographs of the event, includ­ing a famous essay in Jet mag­a­zine, are cred­ited with giv­ing remark­able impetu­ous to the then nascent Civil Rights Move­ment. The moral out­rage felt by view­ers of the Till pho­tographs moti­vated them to action, while the moral out­rage expressed by com­men­ta­tors look­ing at lynch­ing pho­tographs 100 years after the fact uncon­vinc­ingly dis­as­so­ci­ates them from the impli­ca­tions of the events depicted.

I feel like I just cracked open a few huge top­ics and now I am not sure how to wrap things up neatly for this post. You’ll have to just wait for my paper to be done.