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.