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I'm going to start playing a song.
This lecture is taking us from the end of Reconstruction,
1877, canvassing an array of events that actually go up
to the, well to the present day in certain ways,
but in a recorded way, in an official way,
until the 1960s. But we will--so from a
phenomenological standpoint, we're talking about a large
period of time. From a literal standpoint,
for this lecture, we're really talking about the
18--end of Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth
century. And with that, I want--I want to play a piece
of music that's actually from the era of the Great
Depression, but it's in reference to the time period
we're talking about right now. And if I can figure it
out while you're listening to it,
I'll get the lyrics up on the screen as well.
[Billie Holiday] ♪And now I'd like to sing a tune. ♪
♪ It was written especially for me. ♪
♪ It's titled Strange Fruit. I really hope you like it. ♪
♪ Southern trees bear strange fruit, ♪
♪ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, ♪
♪ Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, ♪
♪ Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees ♪
♪ Pastoral scene of the gallant south, ♪
♪ The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, ♪
♪ Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, ♪
♪ Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. ♪
♪ Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, ♪
♪ For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, ♪
♪ For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop, ♪
♪ Here is a strange and bitter crop. ♪
Many of you, some of you, I don't know,
might recognize this as one of Billie Holiday's,
the great blues singer, one of her,
her most famous pieces, wrote by--not by her,
but becomes one of her signature pieces for much of
her career, Strange Fruit.
Well, I don't think it needs elaboration in terms of
interpretative potential of those lyrics. It's a song
about lynching, and violence,
and the Southern nature of it,
the scent of magnolia trees and such.
Now you'll recall from the last lecture how I talked
about the massive cultural shift that Southerners had
to endure under Reconstruction governments.
White Southerners' very notions of freedom,
the very notions of labor, who's to do the work,
and of politics, who's running their states,
all these were turned upside down in the most fundamental
ways. You'll remember as well,
at--nearing, nearing the end of the 1870s,
the North is exhausted by Southern intransigence.
South is digging--is continuing digging--to keep
its heels dug in, and a deal is brokered,
and a presidential dispute, a presidential election,
that essentially withdraws Northern troops,
Federal troops, from the South,
ends Reconstruction, and then gives the chance
to--for the South to reorganize itself fully
within the Union. Historians refer to this
moment, this era that begins at that moment,
as "the Rise of Redemption." So you have
Reconstruction followed by Redemption. Now
Redemption...this is a word that needs to be understood,
understood as a fully complicated and loaded
phrase. Who's feeling redeemed,
and redeemed on what terms? It's really important to
understand that when I'm talking about Redemption,
when most people talk about Redemption,
they're talking about the white South rising up and
taking control of what was rightfully theirs. We're
talking about the while male South as well,
and we're talking in different ways about the
wealthy South and the poor South,
the white poor South, and I'll,
I'll map this out in the course of today's lecture.
We are not talking about at all a constructive or
positive era as far as the African American experience
is concerned. Now during Reconstruction,
as I hope I made clear in previous lectures,
deep seated anxieties take root among Southern whites
about economics, about states' rights,
and this is a very important couple of words here for
today's lecture and for this week's reading as well.
There's anxiety about economics and states'
rights, but also about manliness and civilization.
Manliness and civilization, really critical words. So
much of Redemption, this era,
is about reclaiming--about whites trying to reclaim
that which they thought was lost during Reconstruction
and that which they thought was under attack. A perfect
example of an attempt by, or an articulation by,
Southern whites about how they are going to redeem
themselves--redeem the South--from the scourge of
the Northern presence, is the fact that as soon as the
federal troops leave, essentially,
the ***, which had been wiped out by the military,
Northern troops, soon after it was established,
the *** reemerges with a vengeance. But it's not the
only group being formed in this moment of Redemption.
There are other groups. You don't need to know the names
for your--for the purposes of the class,
but just know there were other organizations,
like the Knights of the White Camelia,
the Constitutional Union Guards,
the Pale Faces, the White Brotherhood,
and the Council of Safety. The last name is kind of
interesting, because it's not one of these sort of
grandiose, mythical kind of names,
not Council of Safety. Who's feeling threatened?
Under what terms? How will we establish safety? So any
number of nativist and racist hate groups that are
being formed in this moment of cultural anxiety,
I guess is the most polite way to put it,
cultural, economic, social anxiety in the white South
and a determination to reclaim it on its own
terms. Now when Republican government's faded,
once the federal troops left,
when they faded in the wake of a resurgent Democratic
party, which is a Southern party,
this at the end of Reconstruction,
a range of tactics start being developed to guarantee
the return of white power. So it's not just that the
federal troops left, the government's collapsed,
whites were all of a sudden in control. It wasn't that
quick and that easy. It was actually dirty and messy.
Crops that were owned and tilled by blacks were
destroyed. Blacks' homes, their barns--which is an
incredibly important part of the infrastructure in the
South--their homes, their barns and other property
were destroyed, were burned, as well. If blacks tried to
exercise the right to vote, black men,
and go to the election booth,
and if it is deemed by someone--how is really
immaterial--but deemed that they might be voting
Republican, which virtually all blacks were going to do
anyway, you might find when you walked up to a voting
booth--I might find if I were walking to the voting
booth, someone standing outside brandishing a whip,
making it very clear that if I voted for anybody but the
Democrat, the whip would be used. So there is sort of a
scorched earth policy by citizens,
white citizens of the South to reclaim what was theirs,
to get blacks off the land, to destroy their property.
And the people doing this dirty work are quite often
members of these local militias like the ***. Now
the ***'s [coughs], excuse me,
the ***'s census, its numbers,
really hard to peg down at any particular moment,
and its popularity ebbs and flows. We're at a moment,
it's just come back, it's been destroyed for close to
a decade. It's coming back, it will be around for a
while, it will fade out for a while,
and we'll see in a couple of weeks how it comes back very
strongly again. But it is sort of always there at some
level as a manifestation of cultural and psychological
anxiety. Now remember during Reconstruction,
blacks had a tremendous new amount of voting power. I
mean they weren't winning all elected offices,
of course, but as they had no representation prior to
Reconstruction, any change was a welcome change. When
Redemption begins, black voting power is diluted very
quickly through a range of tactics. You certainly have
people at the polling station with whips. That's
a pretty effective way to stop a black person from
voting, but you also have gerrymandering,
the reconfiguration of voting districts to
eliminate or to mitigate the black vote.
Since housing segregation was,
was the rule of the land, if you cut a district in a
certain way, you can make sure that you cut out black
voting numbers to make any real change. So
gerrymandering--which is part of,
you know, a long tradition. It's not just a Southern
one, not just against blacks. Gerrymandering is
used. Poll taxes are developed. Essentially you
need to come to the poll, the registrar,
to prove that you had paid taxes on land that you own
according to certain guidelines,
you know, generation or whatever. Well,
blacks didn't own land, and if it's about their
predecessors, their predecessors didn't own
land. Or, if they had owned land,
or if it's just about maybe just paying,
proof of paying taxes, they didn't have the money to pay
it. Very effective ways to mitigate the black vote
during this era are grandfather clauses. It's
very simple: if your grandfather voted,
you can vote. Well, basically no blacks'
grandfathers had voted. Wipes out the black voting
population. And then famously,
of course, literacy tests. They're adjudicated by a
registrar under the most sort of random--well,
they weren't random at all, but subjective--that's what
I was looking for--subjective
circumstances. So if you could read this section of a
state constitution, or if you could recite it from
memory, or if you could do anything that suggested you
were literate, then you could vote. Well,
although one of the great stories in world history of
literacy gain happens during,
begins during this era, in terms of blacks becoming a
literate population within the course of two
generations--hadn't ever happened before--they
weren't literate yet as a group. So literacy tests
would wipe it out. So you take gerrymandering,
you take poll taxes, grandfather clauses,
literacy tests, and literal violence,
or threat of violence, you're wiping out the black
vote. Now it's important to realize,
you're also wiping out a lot of the poor white vote.
This is an unintended--well, it depends on your
interpretation--unintended or intended consequence of
those who held the reins of power in the white South.
What was certainly unintended--bless you--is
that poor whites, and there were a lot of them,
and blacks, who were almost, almost by default poor
during this era--we're talking into the 18--going
into the 1880s--start realizing they actually had
a lot in common. They were all hungry. They were all
essentially landless.
And that the white poor farmer,
the poor white farmer had more in common with the poor
black farmer than did the white poor farmer did with
the white gentry, the political elite. And you
have, going into the turn of the century,
into the twentieth century, the rise of one of the many
different articulations of the Populist Party,
rise of populism. Now the history of populism is much
more complicated than the one minute I'm going to give
it right now. But you have, during the end of the 19th
century, a range of different attempts to try to
gather some power for poor agrarian classes. And in
some places in the South, a curious thing starts
happening, that white and black farmers start aligning
themselves with each other, start running
campaigns--joint tickets, start fighting for the same
candidate. Tom Watson, a famous politician from
Georgia, actually rises to power,
rises to a level of influence,
on this notion of, you know, working for agrarian
interests. But a funny thing happens,
is that it becomes--it starts becoming successful,
and there's a realization by the political elite: "My
god, if these poor whites and poor blacks start really
working together, we're in trouble,
'cause the system is not just about racial
domination, but it's also about economic domination.
As a result of the rise in popularity of Populist
sentiment, the race card gets played with increasing
ferocity. Rhetoric, like you saw in the 1868 campaign
poster from a couple of lectures ago,
that this is a white man's country,
becomes much more commonplace. That we may
have different incomes, we may have different sort of
economic security, but by God,
we're all white, and there's prestige and value in it.
And when you have a set of rules or--not rules--a set
of social order being bestowed upon the South by
the ***, that's preying upon racial anxiety,
as well as going against Catholics and Jews,
but preying on racial anxiety,
you start seeing fissures in the Populist sentiment just
as quickly as they appeared. And Tom Watson
being someone who sort of gathered up the energy of a
cross-racial alliance quickly becomes a hardcore
racist and anti-Semite, so this is a radical shift for
him.
But there's this potential unifying moment,
based on class lines, evaporates in the face of
racial demagoguery. That's what this era's about more
than anything else. All these other factors
certainly are around that helps define who America is,
you know, class differences, differences about
possibilities related to your gender. But race is
the driving factor for so many issues relating to
quality of life and safety. Now getting back to the
vote, for example, blacks were voting in new and
startling numbers during Reconstruction. Blacks were
holding office from the local to the federal level,
but because of a series of different mechanisms I
talked about, because the rise of playing to racial
anxieties becomes much more effective,
the black vote's wiped out. So just a couple of
statistics, just to keep, you know,
as representative. In 1896, we're talking in,
in Louisiana, just as one example,
over one hundred and thirty thousand blacks are
registered to vote in Louisiana,
and they are the majority in twenty-six parishes.
Black voting representation. Four years
later, in just four years, going from over one hundred
and thirty thousand blacks, four years later,
there are fifty-three hundred blacks on the
polls--on the voting rolls, and there are no majority
black parishes anywhere. That is an elimination of a
voting class, overnight. In one election cycle,
or maybe two if it's a two-year election cycle,
you go from a possibility of black representation to zero
possibility. In Alabama, of one hundred and eighty
thousand black men of voting age in 1900,
in the wake of all these different kinds of ways of
eliminating the black vote, in 1900,
of over one hundred and eighty thousand possible
black men who'd be eligible voters,
only three thousand are registered to vote. Now if
you know anything about Alabama,
you'll know there is a large black population in
Alabama. There're real opportunities to have black
voting representation if people actually had access
to the ballot box. There's no access. Three thousand
people--three thousand men are registered to vote.
Registering to vote, you need to understand,
is not a matter of filling out a card and just
disinterestedly putting it in the mailbox,
something like that. No, registering to vote,
if you're a black man, is a matter of life or death,
in certain--in many of these places. The possibility of
having your home burned down,
of getting whipped, getting beaten,
and, as we'll see, getting shot,
is very real. Now when it comes to the vote,
you have all these forces trying to wipe it out,
but it's important to take a moment to try to understand
the psychology about why it's so important to wipe it
out. We can take a--an example from a famous
politician, J.
K.
Vardaman of Mississippi.
Rabid racist. And his view of blacks' ability and
education related to their--how civilized they
were--again, there's that word.
I'll start unpacking it later on in the lecture.
That they did not have--they were,
they were uncivilized, uncivilized,
they were not educated enough,
they didn't have the ability to be responsible voters.
And Vardaman says, another one of these rather lovely
sentiments, "I am just as opposed to Booker Washington
as a voter, with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements,
as I am to the coconut-headed,
chocolate-colored typical little *** who blacks my
shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform
the supreme function of citizenship."
Booker T.
Washington, who we'll be talking about next week. By
the late nineteenth century, the leader of the race;
there's no disputing that fact. Even he,
the most powerful black person in the country,
according to Vardaman, does not possess the ability to
be a responsible voter. Now when all this kinds
of--these kinds of harassments fail,
if they weren't successful, if they,
if they--if Vardaman couldn't whip up enough
sentiment among the registrars to,
like, just find ways to eliminate the black vote.
If you had somebody who could pass the literacy
test, who somehow could pass,
you know, pay a poll tax, who could pass the bar as
established by the registrar to prevent him from voting,
there was always the ultimate form of what one
could only politely call racial harassment,
and that's lynching. The statistics on lynching are
sketchy at best. Historians generally point to the early
1880s as the first moment when reliable records of
lynchings first appear. Now it's important to recognize
the timing. I made a comment in a previous
lecture about the value of a black body. Lynching is not
a phenomenon you see during an era,
during--prior to the Civil War. Yeah,
there's always a sample here and there,
but as a phenomenon, it's not there when it comes to
slaves, because if you lynched a slave,
you lynched somebody's property. You
destroyed--you owed them a lot of money. In its own
grotesque way, slavery afforded a level of
protection for blacks. It certainly wasn't there after
emancipation. Of course, that is not a defense of
slavery, but that is just sort of an economic element
to consider in this equation. During the period
of federal occupation of the South,
there was enough military presence to mitigate
these--this form of violence. But when the
North is gone, when the federal troops are gone,
during the era of Redemption,
this is how--one of the ways the South redeems itself.
So reliable records about lynching really point to the
early 1880s. There were certain lynchings before
then, but consistently, we have records pointing to the
1880s. So between 1882 and 1901,
you have recorded more than a hundred lynchings a year
throughout the nation. Between 1882 and 1968,
when, quote "traditional" forms of lynching
essentially disappeared--although they
are not gone from us, don't kid yourself about
that--over four thou--excuse me over five thousand people
died in recorded lynchings. Easily three quarters of
them or more were African American. Lynching was not
only--Blacks were not the only victims of lynchings.
Overwhelmingly, they were the victims of lynchings.
But the most important thing to know about these numbers
is that these represent recorded lynchings.
Historians presume quite safely that numbers were
much higher. Now lynchings were not just about
stringing somebody up. There were many different
types of lynchings, and this is why it's easy for us to
presume that there are, you know,
ones that are very public and recorded,
and those that just happened very quietly. No one really
knows about it. So you have the most obvious,
straightforward form of this kind of violence. Someone
is captured, they're strung up,
and either a chair kicked out from underneath of them,
a horse run off, whatever.
They die by strangulation, by hanging. But you also
have lynchings, it wasn't the majority of them,
but they were certainly important to understand the
phenomenon of lynching, festival
lynches--lynchings. You would have lynchings that
are advertised in the local paper,
in advance, you know that on Saturday night,
we're lynching Joe Smith in Natchez. Enough time for
rail companies to sell excursion tickets,
advertised in the papers, so you could have a grotesque
festival around this--this actual moment of ***.
Lynchings may not have just been--weren't just getting
strung up, but it could be, involve being nailed to a
post or a tree and being lit on fire. It might involve
being physically--in fact, often involved being
physically assaulted and mutilated while you're
conscious, before you're strung up to a post to be
burned, or before you're actually strung up by a
tree. When the lynching was over,
especially for the festival lynchings,
the abuse to the body wouldn't end. The body
might be chopped down. As you remember from,
in my second lecture, the young Irish butcher dragging
a black victim through the streets of New York by his
genitals, as a way of sort of declaring his
citizenship, I was arguing. Well,
body parts were chopped off after lynchings: fingers,
toes, genitals, ears are cut off. They are kept as
souvenirs, and they are sold as souvenirs. Have a
festival lynching in Natchez and you might find,
three or four days later, in a storefront window,
somebody's knee. W.
E.
B.
DuBois, who we'll be talking about next week,
has this exact experience, of walking by a window and
discovering he's looking at a body part,
and realizing that a lynching he'd heard about a
week earlier, that was part of that person's body. Now
I mentioned before, over five thousand people
lynched. The great majority of whom were black. But who
were the victims?--aside from being black men and
white men, also some women, but very few in number,
but also some women. Overwhelmingly,
the narrative says, these were black men accused of
***. Bless you. That was a very cute sneeze by the
way. We have black men accused of ***. That's the
received narrative, that's the received wisdom,
and so the presumption is that there was some justice
being exercised here; that this black man *** this
white woman, whoever that might be,
and therefore deserves to be murdered. He has violated
the sanctity of the South. Much of the language of
lynching during this era was on such terms;
that it was a manly act to protect white womanhood by
avenging the ***; that black brutes who were
rapists were demonstrating how uncivilized they were.
And so again, lynch mobs were being civilized.
They're protecting the bastions of being civilized,
of civilized behavior, and protecting their women.
Manliness and civilization. People though,
as it turns out, were lynched for a variety of
reasons, not just for the accusation of ***. You can
sense--you can hear some of these reasons--you can also
hear ***, by the way--with a quote from a
woman--woman's rights activist,
a very prominent one, named Rebecca Latimer Felton.
Once a slave owner--in a family of slave owners. And
actually, in a strange way, as such an advocate for
women's rights, she's actually also advocating for
protection of black women, which was unusual. But she
was quite convinced that black men were rapists,
and they deserved their punishment. Rebecca Felton
says here, "When there is not enough religion in the
pulpit to organize a crusade against sin;
nor in justice in the court house--nor justice in the
court house to promptly punish crime;
nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering
arm about innocence and virtue,
it is lynching--it is lynching to protect woman's
dearest possession from the ravening human beasts--if it
is lynching to protect woman's dearest possession
from the ravening human beasts,
then I say lynch. Lynch a thousand times a week if
necessary."
Felton is talking about moral order: if there's not
enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade
against sin. Talking about legal justice: if we can't
have our criminals be brought to court and tried.
And she's talking about manhood again: if we cannot
as a nation protect our women,
and if lynching is the way to do it,
then by God, lynch a thousand times a week. Now
I said that lynching is the--seen as the,
the answer for rapists, especially for black male
rapists, and that is the received wisdom. But
really, what was it? Ida B.
Wells, black woman journalist,
becomes an incredible civil rights pioneer,
one of the founders of the NAACP,
not yet organized. Ida B.
Wells lives in Memphis, Tennessee,
and of course she hears about the scourge of the
black male attacking white womanhood and raping women
and children. And then she has a horrific experience.
One of her friends, a guy named Thomas Moses--Moss,
opens up a store, "The People's Grocery." He's a
black man. And he creates economic competition for a
store owned by whites very close by. And that
white-owned store was the store that catered to that
whole area, white and black customers. And Thomas Moss
said, "This is an opportunity.
I want to open a store as well." And the owners of
the other store threatened him. "Do not do this. If
you do this, you will pay." And Moss says,
"I'm just opening, you know, opening a store." Well,
he paid with his life. He was lynched for opening up
the store. He did not lynch anybody. He did not steal
from anybody. I guess he stole potential customers,
I suppose, but he was lynched. Wells writes
editorials, organizes a boycott,
and then in short order had to flee Memphis to save her
life, because she was trying to pull back the cover of
this lie about the connection between *** and
lynching. She would not return to Memphis for fear
of her life until the very end of her life. Decades go
by. She's convinced she will be killed if she steps
foot back in the city. At that moment when her friend
was murdered for opening a store,
Ida B.
Wells sets out to demonstrate that lynching,
claimed as being a way to keep uncivilized blacks
down, was actually the perfect manifestation of
uncivilized white male behavior,
and she starts saying this publicly. She starts
writing consistently in ways where she's deemed--she's
deemed a threat to Southern manhood.
And because she also claimed that white women often
desired the interracial dalliances where they--where
they actually did exist, she had crossed the final line
of taboo, that white women might actually desire black
men. She asked, "If the South is so against ***,
why aren't white men lynched?" There's a long
history of certainly white slave owners raping their
slaves, having children.
And certainly after Emancipation,
you know, *** knew no color line really. "So why aren't
white men being lynched?"
she wonders. And then she goes off to England on a
speaking tour, again on this anti-lynching crusade. And
this is where she really becomes a persona non grata
in the South. Southern US at the time had a very
strong connection to the notions of British
civilizationist hierarchies; that the British were the
height of civilized society in the world at that point
in time, and the South, with their aristocratic
traditions, wanted to be very much like the English
model in that way. Ida B.
Wells goes over and starts talking about lynching,
starts investigating. She goes on these investigations
and reports the investigations. And it
turns out, as you'll see in the reading for next week,
the accusation of *** isn't even there in most of the
lynchings. So there's the popular idea that *** leads
to lynching, but that's not even the case in the
majority of the situations. Theft,
rude behavior, assault, certainly,
all of these things lead to people being lynched. And
Ida B.
Wells tells this to her audiences,
women's audiences and men's audiences in England,
starts talking about the way that Southern white men
actually epitomize uncivilized behavior. And
you have society in England start sending investigatory
groups over to the South, profoundly humiliating to
Southern--Southern cities and towns where these groups
might appear. The South is enraged at Ida B.
Wells and her inappropriate behavior. Now this is an
era--and I'll speak a little bit more about this next
week--an era where the notion of who is the most
civilized is really quite important. It may sound
kind of strange today, but this was one of the
important organizing themes of cultures and societies:
having good manners, acting in proper ways. These
become dividing lines between who can have access
to economic opportunities and who can't. Who's
civilized? Who's manly? For many Southerners,
it seemed like it wasn't even a question,
it's beyond debate. Ida B. Wells says,
"Not so fast." Now we'll work through a little bit
more this notion of civilization and manliness,
well, in section I hope, but certainly in next week's
reading. But with all this talk about lynching and
anti-lynching crusades, it was--there's really an
important piece of the puzzle that's missing.
Because the conversations about this can actually seem
a little bit antiseptic. Lynching was,
and remains, a horribly violent and grotesque act.
Ten years ago--in fact, gosh,
exactly ten years ago--small gallery in New York City,
the Roth Horowitz Gallery, assembles an exhibit called
"Witness: Photographs of Lynchings from the
Collection of James Allen," a white man who collected
photographs and postcards of lynching scenes. This is a
curious phenomenon, by the way.
I mean, I use "curious" in a fully complicated way. At
these festival lynchings especially,
you would have photographers present who would take
pictures, not for the historical record,
but to sell next to the kneecaps and genitals in the
storefront window. Studio photography of lynchings.
Lynchings would appear--Lynching scenes
would appear on postcards and would go through the
mail till the postmaster general prohibited it in the
1920s, I believe. Anyway, the collector named James
Allen gathered up a fair amount of these photographs
and postcards, and the owners of the Roth Horowitz
Gallery's would put it together. They're very
nervous about it, but they wanted to do it,
not from the standpoint of spectacle,
which is what their concern was. They didn't want to
spectacularize this violence all over again,
but to talk about the historical record. These
are-these are horrific images,
and the fact that they were carried in the mail openly,
the fact that they were sold in the windows,
is an important part of our national story that we need
to know. Very controversial exhibit,
very small gallery. They moved it soon to the New
York State--the New York, excuse me,
the New York Historical Society in Manhattan,
where there were lines around the block,
who were very conflicted about this exhibit,
but they still went in. Some people said,
"You can't, you can't show these things because they're
so horrific." Others said, "That's exactly why you have
to show them." Black and white on both sides of that
debate, by the way. I want to share with you some of
these images. I do not do it to spectacularize these
very awful, awful images, but to help you all to bear
witness in a way to the violence,
and atrocities, and inhumanity--in a clinical
sense, the denial of due process for black victims in
the era of Southern Redemption. Now the images
you're going to see cover, chronologically,
a broader period of time. We're not just talking the
1860s, 1870s, eighties here, nineties. But,
I think you will understand what's going on. Now I'm
going to show this, this slideshow. It runs on its
own, and at the end of the slideshow,
the screen goes black, class is dismissed. And I'll have
side comments to where the handwriting might be a
little bit illegible. There were before and after
images. Same man you just saw,
his head impaled, his burned head,
impaled on the stake. The handwriting would be put
there by the photographer, so it could be identified
when he sold it in the store. Litchfield,
Kentucky. September Twenty-Six,
1913, in what would appear to be sort of a town
center. Studio shots. And you would have individuals,
as you'll see, in the background. You can see
them [gestures up] directly above my hand. This is
actually a series of images you're going to see here.
And you'll see the physical assault on the body prior to
the actual terminal event.
Body's been whipped.
He's been whipped. His back has been gouged and
speared. And one very curious thing about the
studio photography is that They would cover up the
victim's genitals, despite showing all of this,
to be proper. This is the same studio from another
image. Several images--several slides ago.
She was lynched next to her son. It's the back of a
postcard.
"The answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to black
brutes who would attack the womanhood of the South."
Here's the answer.
That's the front of the postcard. Another
postcard. "This is the barbecue we had last night.
My picture is to the left with the cross over it.
Your son, Joe."
Again, for propriety's sake,
a cloth around the midsection. Festival
lynching, you can--people brought dates,
they brought their children. You can tell by
the apparel, this is of more recent vintage,
not back in 1911 or '12. Lynchings were of course
being burned at the stake. And they're still fairly
contemporary.
And class is dismissed.