[I dunno, Chris, is US culture something you *want* to know deeply? Here's a story off today's AP wire. I saw one of these postcards depicted in yesterday's NY Times; it was beyond belief.]
NYC Gallery Shows Lynching Photos
New York (AP) -- Once upon a time in America, mobs dragged people out of jails or off the streets and hanged them from the nearest tree. Sometimes they burned them alive.
Then, often as not, members of the mob lined up to be photographed with the deceased.
Dozens of these sobering pictures-- some of them turned into postcards that were occasionally used as warnings -- have been put on public display today at a Manhattan gallery.
“It's clear to me that this is a piece of history that demands an audience,” said Andrew Roth, co-owner of the Roth Horowitz Gallery.
There are photos of corpses of young black men hanging from branches, telephone poles and, in one case, a bridge. There is a shot of a man being incinerated and another of “the half-burned head of James” on a pole.
The material was gathered over the past decade by James Allen, a Georgia-based dealer in antiques and memorabilia, and are now part of the Allen-Littlefield Collection at Emory University in Atlanta.
Picture after picture shows people gathered around the dangling bodies -- some likely perpetrators of the crime, others simply curious bystanders.
The amateurish snapshots reveal a sameness about southern racist mobs and western posses carrying out vigilante justice -- rawboned, angular-faced men wearing hats. In some, small children watch the proceedings.
The victims are overwhelmingly black.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reported 3,436 people lynched between 1889 and 1922. One photo in the collection is dated 1960.
During the peak years, most victims were black men accused of offenses ranging from murder and rape to not stepping off the sidewalk to let a white person pass. It was not a strictly Southern practice, and whether in Gadsden, Alabama, Duluth, Minn., or the “Hanging Tree” in Helena, Mont., someone with a camera was there.
Many photos were turned into souvenir postcards, some colorized and inscribed with such notations as “Down in Old Kentucky,” or “Negro who shot J.H. Rogers at Ten Mile, Miss., 5-21-19.”
At least one series of photos, from a double lynching in Okeman, Okla., in 1911, was copyrighted by the photographer.
The postcards with one-cent stamps could be sent legally through the mail until about 1908, when they were banned. “I bought this in Hopkinsville for 15 cents. It's not on sale openly (the law forbids it),” an anonymous correspondent wrote on the back of one postcard.
Perhaps the exhibit's most chilling entry is a 1921 NAACP pamphlet. It reproduced the Jan. 26 and 27 front pages of the Memphis (Tenn.) Press that provided an account of a white mob seizing a black youth from a jail in Georgia and transporting him to Arkansas, where he was burned at the stake.
The paper duly reported how the kidnappers stopped off in Memphis and were seen “laughing and talking” in the lobby of the Hotel Peabody, and how police guarded the roads but did nothing to interfere -- more than a decade before the FBI won the power to take charge of interstate crime.
“Questions,” Roth said when asked what people should take away from the exhibit. “Questions about our culture, our history, our times.
“People aren't being lynched today, that we know about, but there certainly are references ... that we hear on the news, morning noon and night, that connect back to this history.”
[end]
Carl
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