BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN








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01VIOLENCE



By Frank H. Wu

Through photography, we envision problems and progress. Can photographs redeem racial tragedies?

     Perhaps the most compelling images documenting bigotry are lynching photos. They became the opposite of what they were created to be. Although the profound moment depicted—in the exemplary episodes, a white mob having castrated, burned, and otherwise mutilated a Black man’s nameless body, before hanging him, whether barely alive or already dead, from a noose thrown over a tree—might prompt us to avert our gaze in horror and shame, the crowd celebrating belies any semblance of grief or even an iota of embarrassment. Even if a few observers flinch, many revel in the depravity without compunction, while others stand still as if in shock. The murders happened not rarely but commonly: between Reconstruction and the period of relieved normalcy following World War II, this form of domestic terror claimed at least four thousand known victims. These atrocities were pre-meditated and organised, as if following a ritual, incited by fetishes about Black sexuality and criminality that had to be controlled and revenged. Imagination is not needed because it cannot do justice to the events—or for them.
The substantiation of killing is readily available in black and white, because participants took pictures which were then turned into souvenir postcards to be collected and traded, sent via the mails despite the Comstock Act censoring the obscene. Modern projects to memorialize the enormity of the evil rely on families donating the ephemera handed down over generations.

The stories behind many of these photos were collected by Walter White. A descendant of William Henry Harrison, the ninth President, White was the child of persons who were enslaved. Possessed of blonde hair and blue eyes, he was selected by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to investigate these incidents, risking his safety because he could be discovered to be Black, an advocate for civil rights, or worst of all both Black and an advocate for civil rights.

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