The irony is that these photos turned out to be damning to all contrary to the pride of those portrayed as the perpetrators. The dissemination of these images was critical to the movement against lynching.
W.E.B. DuBois, the editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, ‘a record of the darker races,’ printed a special supplement in 1916 to explain the case of Jesse Washington. In the public square of Waco, Texas, the developmentally disabled teenager was lynched before a crowd of more than ten thousand spectators who cheered and jeered. Government officials there looked on. The mayor himself had summoned the ubiquitous photographer, ordering folks to make way for him to have a good spot from which to practice his art. DuBois commissioned an English suffragette to report on the savagery. He later sent her on a speaking tour with the very pictures intended to glorify the occasion, which were received with a reaction the antithesis of exaltation.
The ownership of these icons is controversial. Even as late as 1955 whites were slaying Blacks: such sadism was inflicted upon Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago who was visiting Mississippi and allegedly flirted with a white woman, though she subsequently recanted the story about any physical contact. During the period of ‘massive resistance’ to racial integration which had been mandated the year prior, the woman’s husband and her brother abducted him, beat him to near dead, and gouged out his eyes, before shooting him in the head and tossing the remains into a river fastened to part of a cotton gin; the body floated to the surface three days later. Till’s mother insisted on an open casket for the funeral services to expose the atrocity, and Jet magazine, with a predominantly Black audience, agreed to run the photos. Then in 2017, the Whitney Biennial art exhibition, a renowned survey of contemporary creativity, presented a painting based on the scene, by a Caucasian woman. It attracted protest on social media as cultural appropriation, white profit from Black suffering.
Although African Americans were the target in most instances, others were taken as well. White southerners who objected to lynching were lynched; whites who helped Blacks were lynched. In 1871, in Los Angeles, then a frontier settlement, eighteen Chinese immigrants were dispatched together. They constituted a tenth of the total population of that minority community. A few photos are extant of the Chinese being driven out in riots throughout the West. These episodes, which culminated in the 1882 Exclusion Act, were immediately forgotten, as the proponents of prejudice acquired respectability in business and politics. In 1915, in Marietta, Georgia, ‘Yankee Jew’ Leo Frank was executed ‘extra judicially.’ The manager of the National Pencil Company, he was blamed without evidence other than the testimony of the actual assailant for strangling an adolescent girl who had worked in his factory, and his extermination is credited for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.
The most widely reproduced photo of Frank features a bystander clutching his pants leg, presumably to ensure the corpse was steady enough for a clear snapshot. Conspiracy theorists on the internet continue to insist Frank committed the initial violence.
The year Frank was eliminated saw the premiere of the silent film epic, Birth of a Nation. The D.W. Griffith blockbuster of three hours running time when other moving pictures were crude shorts, was the first to be screened at the White House, supposedly garnering praise from President Woodrow Wilson as history written with lightning. With white actors in blackface as degenerates deserving to be put in their place by being put to death, the movie paid homage to the KKK.
Yet photography can be purposed for a positive role achieving racial justice. Until recent technology enabled easy editing, the verisimilitude of the print was trusted. Even the proof of what was negative, such as Northern media outlets capturing the unprovoked attacks on civil rights protestors of the 1960s or the citizen journalists streaming smartphone videos of George Floyd being choked in broad daylight during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been salutary to inspire legislation and the mass activism of #BLM. If it were not for the confirmation beyond denial, a disturbance of the peace would have been noted with the fault ascribed to Floyd himself and the protesters who gathered. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police apprehended Floyd on the allegation of passing a counterfeit $20 bill to buy a pack of cigarettes. Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for no less than eight minutes 15 seconds, until he had passed out and then expired, as three colleagues watched. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder and then pled guilty to federal civil rights charges. That same year in Georgia, three white vigilantes chased down Ahmaud Arbery, an African American jogger, opening fire on him with a shotgun.
The killing attracted no attention until a recording made by one of the killers was circulated by him, prompting prosecutions which succeeded over baseless claims of self-defense.
African Americans have had the autonomy to show themselves realistically since the daguerreotype, albeit in intermittent flashes. Once enslaved, abolitionist Frederick Douglass is believed to have sat more than any other American for portraits when the medium was new. He was an early theorist about the invention, perceiving it as a means of self-representation for the advancement of humanity.
The prolific DuBois oversaw an auspicious early display of Black dignity. For the 1900 world’s fair in Paris, the Exposition Universelle, the scholar, a ‘race man,’ curated an ‘Exhibit of American Negroes.’ At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, convened in Chicago, African Americans had not been allowed any such opportunity, and the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta had emphasized a supposed natural order of racial hierarchy with whites ever dominant. DuBois would have none of that. He led an all-Black team that included Booker T. Washington, with whom he often is contrasted. They took pains preparing copious charts and maps, what would be termed ‘infographics’ generations later. The visuals included both African Americans who were obviously well-to-do, and data about discrimination, each fact its own remedy to stereotypes. DuBois must have been writing what he would soon release, The Souls of Black Folk, a prophetic collection of essays in which he decreed: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line; the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.’
Through photography, we envision problems and progress. Can photographs redeem racial tragedies?