The Lynching of W.C. Williams

This postcard depicts the lynching of W.C. Williams in Ruston Louisiana, on October 15, 1938. Of all the photographs I viewed, this one struck me most, first because the event it captures it took place later than any other in Allen’s collection. Our resource purports that Williams was most likely castrated before being hanged based on the blood dripping down his legs. A quick google search makes the photograph even more disturbing.

According to Northeastern University Law Schools’ database, Williams was a 19 year old African American who was not sound of mind. The lynching of Williams was orchestrated by three white male teenagers, in response to the recent killing of R.M. Blair, a white man, and the beating of his female companion. A lynch mob which grew to about 3,000 people disregarded the sheriff’s pleas for order, and Williams was tortured, shot, hanged, and ultimately burned to death. The image in the photograph is particularly graphic, as the angle of the shot reveals the torture Williams underwent prior to his death.

            The setting of the photograph seems to be a rural area, however, to draw such a crowd, the scene of the lynching must have been publicly accessible. The angle from which the photographer takes the photo is significant because it captures the gathered crowd, who all appear to be there for the spectacle. The fact that in 1938, areas like Ruston Louisiana could attract over 3,000 people to watch a gruesome lynching is astounding. It reveals the extensive racial tensions and white supremacy which pervaded in areas of the Deep South then, and continues in certain areas today. It really is quite horrifying to see both indifference and general revelry on the faces of those in the crowd. Even more upsetting is that the lynching was facilitated by three white teenagers who simply happened upon Williams while driving down a rural road. I do not know whether the three teenagers were the ones who ultimately killed Williams, but they initiated the lynching. This reveals social structures, especially in the South, in which being young, white, and male gives one an inordinate amount of power, and essentially shields one from the consequences of heinous actions.

            Williams was the complete opposite of the young males who initially captured him. He did not have the privilege of being white, or even sound of mind. This makes his lynching all the more disturbing. While one might think that he might be treated better as a result of his mental disability, I would venture to say that his disability and the color of his skinned combined perfectly in the minds of the gathered crown, and painted the picture of a deranged, deviant killer. And thus, he was castrated, like an animal that is not fit to breed. The dehumanization of Williams is beyond comprehension for me.

            While the photograph in and of itself is extremely disturbing, the context surrounding the events makes it even more so. What is most unsettling to me though, is that a culture existed in the United States even a century ago which was desensitized to not only the practice of lynching, but also to depictions of it in ways which painted spectators as highly amused, killers vigilante heroes, and victims as animals.

Additional info,

http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/louisiana/w-c-williams/

Postcard of Lynching in Duluth, Minnesota

This postcard, displayed on James Allen’s website, “Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America,” reads “THREE NEGROES LYNCHED AT DULUTH, MINN FOR RAPE. OCT, 1919.” In fact, this lynching took place in Duluth Minnesota the following year, in 1920. The three men pictured, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, were killed in response to rape allegations made by the father of nineteen year old Irene Tusken. Her father told the Duluth Police Chief that six Black men, who were working for a circus that she had attended, had raped her at gunpoint.

After six Black men were arrested for the rape, a mob of between 1,000 and 10,000 white people crowded around the jail, eventually breaking in and capturing the Black men inside. They proceeded to hold a “mock trial,” and after finding Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie guilty, the mob lynched the three men on a nearby lamp pole. It was there, at that lamp pole, that this photograph was taken.

Following the event, The Chicago Evening Post exclaimed, “This is a crime of a Northen state, as black and ugly as any that has brought the South in disrepute.” Although I have been taught some about the history of “Lynch Law” in the United States, I have always learned about lynching as a mostly Southern phenemonen, and was surprised to learn that this horiffic event took place in Minnesota.

Of course, the murder of these three men in Duluth is part of an extensive history of lynching throughout the United States, and is one example of the many lynchings of Black men who were accused of raping white women. In this instance, “little evidence would be found to corroborate” the rape accusations. Lisa Cardyn, in “Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging the Body Politic in the Reconstruction South,” explains, “While these crimes, too, surely occurred throughout the period, charges of this nature were also routinely fabricated and manipulated by klans- men bent on portraying themselves as defenders of vulnerable white womanhood” (765).

Violence against Black men was regularly perpetrated in the name of protecting White women; a fictitious opposition was created between the safety of White women and the freedom of Black men, leading to murders such as those depicted in this postcard. The crowd shown is made up entirely of White men, leading me to question what role White women played in lynchings. Would they participate in the actual practice of lynching, or were they merely the reason that white men used to perpetuate the lynchings?

It is clear that many of the men in this scene are posing and are aware that the photographer is taking the photo. Some men appear to be standing on their toes, trying to get into the photograph as best they can. Others, disturbingly, are smiling at the camera, and even most of those who are not smiling do not have particularly serious expressions on their faces. They seem excited about the photograph being taken, as though they want a lasting souvenir of this experience. One smiling man, on the right hand side, is leaning into another man, who has his arm on him, suggesting closeness between them, as though lynching was a bonding experience for the White men involved.

Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie are placed in the center of the photograph, with the men crowded around them, though none of the men are looking at them or acknowledging their presense in any way. These murdered men stand out; they look out of place in this photo, which, disturbingly, might otherwise look like a friendly gathering of men. The fact that their chests are exposed also stands out, for all of the other men pictured are fully clothed. The fact that Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie’s shirts were removed or pulled down to expose their chests is significant, for it suggests that the murderers wanted to make a public display of their naked bodies. Why might this be? Does the act of removing their clothes further dehumanize them? Does it connect to the fact that they are being “punished” for an alleged sexual crime?

Additional Sources:

"Duluth Lynchings Online Resource: Lynchings." Duluth Lynchings Online Resource: Lynchings. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Apr. 2015. <http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/html/lynchings.htm>.

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.