The Lynching of Will James

Found on the website of the James Allen collection of Lynching Postcards is a set of seven images devoted to the lynching of Will James. The photographs tell an important story of how this lynching was glorified and established as an attraction for the town of Cairo Illinois. Two photos in particular are especially compelling in their portrayal of Commercial Avenue in Cairo. 

First, image 43 (above), shows what is probably a drawing/painting of Commercial Avenue. The image shows what appears to be a normal main avenue in an average sized city in early 1900s America. In image 44 (right), we see a far different portrayal of Commercial Avenue.

Image 44 shows us Commercial Avenue filled with citizens of Cairo at night time during the lynching. The street is lit up for the lynching as a street would be lit today if a concert, festival, or parade took place on it. The street is packed with people standing shoulder to shoulder as far as the camera can see. The photographer found a perch far behind and high above the crowd in order to take a picture. The body of Will James cannot even be seen. 

What I find so compelling about these two images is that the lynching, the death of a man, was such an attractive event for so many people that the town of Cairo spent the time and money to establish the event as one for thousands of spectators. Perhaps town officials saw it as a way for citizens to come together. Perhaps they saw the event as a way to advertise the consequences of certain actions. All that I know, however, is that the lynching was enough of a big deal for the town of Cairo to come together with enthusiasm to watch a man die. 

The Lynching of Leo Frank

James Allen’s collection of images for his anthology “Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America”, while being profoundly disturbing, offers an interesting opportunity to examine the acts of racism, prejudice, violence and terrorism that occurred in our nation’s recent history. The images below, both of which were found on printed postcards, depict the highly publicized lynching of Leo Max Frank in August of 1915. The trial of Leo Frank is considered by many to be one of the most celebrated court battles of the twentieth century due to the fact that the cased called into question issues of anti-Semitism, lynching and general violence that were rampant during this time. Moreover, the case became incredibly polarizing as it played with the notion of religious freedom and acceptance during a time when Christianity was commonly viewed as the nation’s religion.

Frank, a young Jewish-American factory superintendent living in the thick of the Georgia countryside, was arrested for the murder of a young factory employee by the name of Mary Phagan in the spring of 1913. Minimal evidence was found linking Frank to the murder, however, it is widely accepted that anti-Semitism and racial/ religious profiling played into his conviction. As Allen described in his notes on the images, “[Frank partook in] a grotesquely engineered trail [which] led to [his] conviction and sentence of death by hanging. After the communication of his death sentence. Frank was transferred, for his own safety”(Allen 176). The mention of his transfer hints at the media coverage and national attention the Frank case was receiving by suggesting that the news could spur potential action. Moreover, the order for transfer highlights a fear, concern or simple acknowledgement of the threat of vigilante action and mob violence by law officials of the time. Despite the attempt to protect Frank by moving him off-site, a gang of Marietta’s most hate-filled citizens banded together to lynch Frank on the evening of August 16^th.  As Allen writes, “a gang of some twnty-five men, some of Marietta, Georgia’s ‘best citizens’, wearing goggles and hats pulled down low, pulled Frank from a hospital bed… placed him, feeble, undressed, and handcuffed, in one of four waiting cars… intending to hand him over the monument of Mary Phagan.” (Allen 176).

When analyzing the images of Franks murder, it is important to comment on the text that has been imposed over the image that reads “The End of Leo Frank”. The rhetoric in that sentence seems to suggest a notion of closure that is meant to accompany the image for any receiver of this card. Declaring this the “End of Leo Frank” rather than the “murder”, or the “dehumanization”, suggests that his end brings with it a certain level of peace. In Allen’s notes on the postcard, he notes that the photos of this lynching were widely consumed and sold outside the undertaking establishment in Marietta that his body had been taken to. This fact, while rather vague and interpretable, seems to suggest that the owners of the establishment did not lose much sleep over profiting off the unlawful murder of a seemingly innocent man. While the Leo Frank case spurred much controversy and became a focal point of the national discourse, opinions on the matter were relatively uniform in the South so it is not all that surprising that his death would be commoditized. Another interesting point worth mentioning about the photographs is the amount of spectators that were included in the images. To me, this served as a symbol of the lynch mob culture that existed in Southern American culture during and throughout the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries. The rather unaffected and sometimes cheerful faces that dot the images are in many ways deeply disturbing and speak to the widespread acceptance of the brutal and barbaric practice of lynching.

The Lynching of Allen Brooks Captured On a Postcard

Postcard of a photograph taken in 1910 showing Allen Brooks
hanging from Elk's Arch during lunchtime in Dallas, Texas

This image, like all of the lynching postcards collected by James Allen, is incredibly disturbing.  As shown above, the scene is of a large crowd of white individuals in Dallas, Texas in 1910 who all seem to be going about their daily business despite the naked, African American male hanging dead from the prominent landmark of Elk’s Arch.  However, perhaps even more chilling and horrifying are the words that were penciled in on the collected postcard.  On the front, the boarder of the image is inscribed with the wording, “All OK and would like to get a post from you. Bill, this was some Raw Bunch.”  This very casual description placed on such a vivid image is quite shocking to the modern day viewer, however intense scenes such as this were not all that uncommon in the South in the early 20^th century. 

         
            Yet today, most people are either unaware or have chosen to forget that such forms of terrorism and violence took place in the United States.  Personally, I think this comes from an overwhelming desire to see ourselves as the good guys.  We want to remember the times that we were heroic and forget the ugly times that make us cringe.  Interestingly, photography can be used for this exact purpose, as it allows us to freeze a moment in time that we can later look back at and reflect upon.

            Gruesomely, it is possible that the photographer of this particular image wanted to do just that.  As a little background on the pictured event, Allen Brooks had been accused of killing the three-year old daughter of his employer and during his trial, had been abducted and lynched by an angry mob of 200 individuals.  These men wanted justice for the murder they claimed had occurred and yet there was little attention paid to the fact that Brooks was likely innocent.  The man who found Brooks with the girl claimed there were marks on her that indicated Brooks was responsible for her death and, whether true or not, that was all the racist mob needed to justify killing and hanging the African American in the public setting which they did.  Many of them were even outwardly proud of this “accomplishment”.  This may be exactly why the photograph was taken as an attempt to highlight the success of catching and killing an animal and murder such as Brooks.  As written on the back of the postcard by one lunchtime spectator to his friend, "Well John - This is a token of a great day we had in Dallas, March 3, a negro was hung for an assault on a three year old girl. I saw this on my noon hour. I was very much in the bunch. You can see the negro hanging on a telephone pole. "  Thus it almost becomes clear that this image was a proud moment for most of those involved.  This is truly horrifying and disturbing and yet it tells an honest truth about the United States.  It tells us, in an image, that our history is full of violent and viscous acts that have somehow led us to where we are today.

Lynching postcards / Civil War photographs : a different story telling

     Gardner's and Brady's photographs of the Civil War are mostly about keeping memories, having something left of those soldiers. Most of the photographs staged union soldiers in front of their tent or cabin, playing cards, waiting. Some of them would be of abandoned houses, camps, drills, work on the field (building bridges, telegraphs...); and a few would be of death. However, as it was pointed out, even those photographs of dead bodies were staged: corpse were moved, and there would not have any photograph of the actual violence of the war: battles, soldiers firing...

Plate 27: What do I do, John Henry?

Plate 36: Harvest of death

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 27, tends to give a romanticized idea of what the life  in camp was. The soldiers are well dress and seem to have a "good life" as well as "enjoying" themselves and there brotherhood. Whereas plate 36, gives a feeling of helplessness. 

     Lynching postcards are quite different. They are only depicting violence and are even more difficult to look at because nothing tempers their wrongness. There is no feeling of brotherhood or of doing what need to be done for a greater good. In addition, photography became easier with the time, people did not need to stand still for minutes in order to take their picture. These postcards were 'live' not 'stage' as were the Civil War's photographs. Photographs were not only a mean to keep dear and good memories but started to become common. 

 

George and Ed SILSBEE HANGED by a MOB of CITIZENS IN FRONT OF JAIL. Jan. 20, 1900. Fort Scott Kan. Flash Light by Dabbs

 

      In the case of the lynching postcards, death seems represented as an entertainment, a spectacle citizens enjoyed and participated to create. It is not war casualties or self-defense. It is citizens killing other citizens because of their skin color. Even when their is no spectators in the frame, the viewer can understand that it is a warning, a message intended to be seen by onlookers. It is staged in a different way Civil War photographs were. Whereas the latter were supposed to give the image of the "good death", to reassure families back home that their father, brother or son were well taken care of; the postcards have a darker purpose: frighten free African American, celebrating White supremacy.

     The same media is used, photography, but it serves opposite purposes and ends. Civil war photographs can be perceived as intimate photographs. Even though they were display in exhibits, they somewhat private and treated with care, deference even. Lynching postcards were a mercantile object as were slaves. One can send postcards to family and friends, collect them, sell them, buy them, display them. It is as if nothing changed, as if the Civil War main purpose was not reached: freeing slaves and making African American the equal of White American.

 

     Today, seeing these postcards is disturbing, revolting, sickening, but it might not have been the case in the early 1900. Now we see them as the illustration of what should have never happened, of shame to  have let it happened, of a reminder of what should never happen again. However, then it was something normal, something to be proud of (you do not make postcards of shameful moment).

These photographs tell a different story, then and now. We can ask ourselves how today's pictures of conflicts, war, terrorisms attacks can be perceived in the next century. Are the photographs we see today in mass media any different than the ones of the Civil War and Lynching? And how so?

What Does Death Really Look Like?

Four photographs of the lynching of an unidentified 

African American male in a coastal Georgia swamp, 1902

The collection of lynching photographs compiled by James Allen on the “Without Sanctuary” website is not only disturbing as a set of images, but a stark and brutal reminder of an incontrovertible moral corruption in our nation’s recent history. Some images show a single body, dangling at the end of a noose, with no living bodies in sight while others are filled with onlookers eager to get a glimpse at the hanging victims. It is unclear which scene is more unsettling: the corpse left to rot silhouetted against a scenic pastoral landscape or a crowd of white men gathered around a tree to witness death much in the same way they are captivated by fly balls and home runs. Was this just a game to them? Both scenarios are graphic and horrific but it is the utter fascination that the spectators of this terrible crime seem to share is the most unnerving. Crowded around a tree where the victims have been killed, the people in the mob are not excused from their participation in this event; their presence serves to support the lynching and even in such high profile cases as some that have been documented through these postcards, no bystander is innocent. Perhaps even more upsetting, many of these images were taken by professional photographers, their names and studios etched into the negatives with dates and locations and sometimes even with personal notes about the event or the selected audience. Clearly, there was a market for these types of photographs or else they would not have been taken; the contemporaneous trend of labeling photography as a documentary medium discounts the fact that photographers were looking to make a living and sell what they could capture, even stooping so low as profiting from these lynching photographs as postcard images.

Confederate dead gathered for burial after battle,
photograph by Alexander Gardner 

            Comparing these post-war lynching photographs to the thousands that were taken by the now famous photographers of the Civil War, the fascination with death and corpses is consistent, but the surrounding context can not be avoided. The bodies laying horizontal on the battlefield are stoic in what may become their final resting place and as such, they become depersonalized; one can not discern how they were killed, what side they fought for, or even who they are. The photographers sent to capture scenes from the war were doing so in order to place the war on every front page newspaper and shock the American public by appealing to their moral hierarchy. Photography was a way to preserve memories, however skewed, for a nation that was falling apart at the seems and which have lasted through the past century. In the way the Civil War photographs are passive representations of a massive death toll, the lynching photographs are personal and intrusive attacks against the victims they portray and exploitative of their “shock value” as sellable items. Some of the identities of the hanging bodies are know as are their crimes or reason for death and they become activated in the scene both by the presence and absence of bystanders; the fact that such a photograph was even taken of the event attests to the fact that lynchings were grossly popular in the post-war period. When considering these postcards, the persecutor of the lynching may not be directly pictured but is nonetheless universally known: white men in search of an unattainable vengeance against non-white outsiders. While the photographs from the Civil War aim to portray the horrific aftermath of war for the wider public, the lynching photographs represent a perversion of the human consciousness and an unnatural fascination with images of the dead. And even more vital to this distorted narrative, both sets of photographs were taken by professionals, which ultimately poses the question: which were more important to remember, the Dead at Antietam or the “Unidentified corpse of an African American male?”    

Our presenters last week reflected on the general absence of violence from photographs of the Civil War, with the important exception of Brady and O'Sullivan's photographs of corpses of soldiers killed in battle at Antietam and Gettysburg.  These debuted to the horror of American gallery-goers and were neglected in the aftermath of war.  [See links in sidebar.]

In spite of these silences, we know violence is a central theme in US history: in the expulsion of indigenous people from their lands, the institution of slavery, the conquest of Mexican lands, the experience of civil war.  Sven Beckert, writing a history of capitalism, has gone so far as to rebrand "mercantile capitalism" as "war capitalism," intent on emphasizing the indispensability of violence to the development of economies based on commodity production for world markets.

In this week of the course alone, we're obliged to acknowledge violence as one of the primary reasons for the failure of Reconstruction: the Ku Klux Klan's campaign of terror against black Americans subdued the nation's first attempts at interracial democracy in the South. (For descriptions of the KKK's tactics, see Lisa Cardyn's "Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging the Body Politic in the Reconstruction South")  Lynchings remained common in the Southern states through the 1930s.  (See (1) Brundage, Lynching in the New South, (2) the postcards of lynchings collected by James Allen [note accompanying essays by historians and civil rights activists], and (3) the NYT feature on the recent report of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.)  [All of the aforementioned resources are linked in the sidebar.]

So we have incontrovertible evidence of a history of widespread violence and terrorism in the United States: yet perhaps not one with which many people are familiar. This simultaneous documentation and eschewal raises the question: how do we make sense of the presence or absence of records of violence in American histories?  To what extent does the United States have a usable history of violence? Of terrorism?

Option 1 is to reflect on these questions, making reference to the aforementioned sources and to American history more broadly, including contemporary conflicts and exercises of force/violence.
Option 2 is to compare the lynching postcards collected by James Allen to the photographs of the Civil War discussed in class or to accounts of death provided in Faust's Republic of Suffering.
Option 3 is to analyze one of the postcard images [please include the image in your post], taking into account the setting, role of the photographer, spectators, killers, and victim.  Be aware that these are very upsetting images, and that the exercise of describing them will also be disturbing.

Please label your posts with any relevant keywords or important motifs to make the cloud navigation in the sidebar meaningful.