Strange Fruit
Jul. 28th, 2010 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hnpccThis website is seriously disturbing.
The website has 81 photos of lynchings from the late 1880s to the 1930s, a collision of technology improvements and culture. These days it'd be mobile phone videos and going viral on youtube within minutes. Back then it was photographs and postcards - up to the point when they were banned for making the areas from which they were sent look bad. Some of the inscriptions on the cards aren't that different from comments you read now on youtube videos either.
The victims pictured are predominantly black, although there are also a couple of non-black people in there (and at least one black lynch mob incidentally). The crimes they were accused of range from forming a union and going on strike to paedophilia to lying to protect a child to murder to theft to to attempting to use legal means to improve conditions to rape to enclosing prime cattle land to assault. Some were undoubtedly guilty. Some were undoubtedly innocent. Most weren't actually tried. All were murdered, some in astonishingly brutal ways that make you wonder just what exactly was going through people's heads at the time.
Photo #27 - described in the additional information as "The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, a large gathering of lynchers. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana" is seriously, seriously creepy.
I think it's because the onlookers are all so ordinary looking. There are women in dresses, men smiling towards the camera - it could be a church picnic were it not for it being at night and the two dead black men hanging from a tree.
It's also because, seriously, 1930. The youngest of my grandparents was 19 in 1930. That's not that long ago. And yes, I know that isn't even close to the last verified lynching date. But that people would be willing to (a) participate, (b) be photographed there and (c) be smiling astounds me. It's so far removed from what I consider 'normal'.
I mean seriously, they just watched two guys be beaten up and hanged. And smiled. This is not, in any sense of the world I live in, normal.
The lone survivor of the trio who were singled out to be lynched, James Cameron, founded the Black Holocaust Museum
in Milwaukee after a visit to Yad VaShem in Israel. James Cameron died in 2006 at the age of 92. He was 16 when they broke into the jail. 1930 is really not long ago.
The museum was trying to interview people living who remembered and attended the lynching to try and better understand how and why the lynch mobs formed. I hope the museum finds funding again because I think understanding what happened and how is important, not least for prevention and education reasons.
The website has 81 photos of lynchings from the late 1880s to the 1930s, a collision of technology improvements and culture. These days it'd be mobile phone videos and going viral on youtube within minutes. Back then it was photographs and postcards - up to the point when they were banned for making the areas from which they were sent look bad. Some of the inscriptions on the cards aren't that different from comments you read now on youtube videos either.
The victims pictured are predominantly black, although there are also a couple of non-black people in there (and at least one black lynch mob incidentally). The crimes they were accused of range from forming a union and going on strike to paedophilia to lying to protect a child to murder to theft to to attempting to use legal means to improve conditions to rape to enclosing prime cattle land to assault. Some were undoubtedly guilty. Some were undoubtedly innocent. Most weren't actually tried. All were murdered, some in astonishingly brutal ways that make you wonder just what exactly was going through people's heads at the time.
Photo #27 - described in the additional information as "The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, a large gathering of lynchers. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana" is seriously, seriously creepy.
I think it's because the onlookers are all so ordinary looking. There are women in dresses, men smiling towards the camera - it could be a church picnic were it not for it being at night and the two dead black men hanging from a tree.
It's also because, seriously, 1930. The youngest of my grandparents was 19 in 1930. That's not that long ago. And yes, I know that isn't even close to the last verified lynching date. But that people would be willing to (a) participate, (b) be photographed there and (c) be smiling astounds me. It's so far removed from what I consider 'normal'.
I mean seriously, they just watched two guys be beaten up and hanged. And smiled. This is not, in any sense of the world I live in, normal.
The lone survivor of the trio who were singled out to be lynched, James Cameron, founded the Black Holocaust Museum
in Milwaukee after a visit to Yad VaShem in Israel. James Cameron died in 2006 at the age of 92. He was 16 when they broke into the jail. 1930 is really not long ago.
The museum was trying to interview people living who remembered and attended the lynching to try and better understand how and why the lynch mobs formed. I hope the museum finds funding again because I think understanding what happened and how is important, not least for prevention and education reasons.
