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- A postcard is an extension of our experience.
A postcard allows us to continue to relive
that experience.
It also allows us to disseminate that experience.
People use social media today
to show other people what they are doing
in their everyday life.
"Look what I draw pleasure from."
Lynching postcards were used in the same way.
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- In the aftermath of the Civil War,
African Americans have an opportunity
for freedom and equality.
But there's a backlash among white citizens,
particularly in the South,
with people who do not want African Americans to enjoy
the full rights of citizenship that other people enjoy.
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- You have a shifting of the racial hierarchy.
And one way to really solidify white over Black again
was using forms of racial terror.
And one of the most acute and profound and widespread
and visual forms of racial terror
was the lynching of Black bodies.
- Suddenly, African American mobility and freedom
starts to look a lot more threatening.
There's a new set of narratives and stereotypes
that start being circulated around Black criminality.
- But the reality is,
many of these lynchings occurred simply because of
a deep-seated racial animus
or hatred toward African Americans.
- If a Black person were successful at a business.
If a Black person vote.
A crime could involve any simple everyday act.
And that act of simply existing
in a new white society could be punished by death.
- Between 1880 and 1968
there is an estimated 4,000 lynchings that take place
in the United States.
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- Lynching becomes a form of leisure
for many who engage in it.
The vast majority of people who lynched Black bodies
were not members of the Ku Klux Klan.
They were in fact everyday ordinary citizens,
people who were young and old, men, and women,
and children from all social classes.
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- And they're often described as festivals of violence,
where ultimately the entire community comes together
to participate in what are called at various times
picnics or barbecues and often where
photographers and the media are given privileged access
so they can capture the violence.
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- Kodak invents the amateur camera at the end
of the 19th century.
And with that we start to see photography
become even more and more a part of people's daily lives.
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Photographs of lynchings start to appear
in a host of different forms.
- It became very profitable for photographers
to take pictures of people being lynched,
take pictures of the crowds, and then sell them
on the streets.
People could purchase the postcard as a piece
of memorabilia from the event that they witnessed.
- Bragging rights, so to speak.
And this becomes a big business,
where there are photographers who make a fortune
selling these lynching postcards.
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- The photograph extends the life of an event.
Very simply, when we think about photography,
we think about time.
It allowed a viewer to relive and reexperience
that sense of power and control
over and over and over again.
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They functioned as a form of ownership over Black people
even in death.
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- Black families were often under assault,
and Black women were often lynched as well.
- One of the only extant images we have
of a Black woman who was lynched
was Laura Nelson and her son in Okemah, Oklahoma.
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- Lynching postcards are traded widely,
sent through the mail in the United States.
It's how people communicate with their relatives.
Where you were in relation to the body
often becomes a sign of how influential
or important you were.
And people clambered to get to the front of the mob.
One could be a celebrity if captured
in a lynching photograph.
- One surviving postcard is the lynching
of a man named Will Stanley.
He had been lynched by a crowd of about 10,000
in Temple, Texas, in July of 1915.
- And on the back of the postcard is written,
"This is the barbecue we had last night.
"My picture is to the left with a cross over it.
Your son, Joe."
- That was written by Joe Meyers,
who was a local oiler in Bellmead.
There's a level of pride that we see
in his association with this lynching.
He is not shameful of it.
He does not attempt to hide his attendance there.
- He's sharing this as if he were sharing a postcard
of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.
- It widens the community of people who can take part
in a lynching.
It suggests that white folks thought that this was a story
to pass on, a story to be proud of.
- The reason those people are unmasked
is that there's no fear that they'll be prosecuted
for their actions.
Even though there are photographs that capture
the number of participants,
when coroners' juries performed their duty
by looking at the corpse of those who were lynched,
they often came to the conclusion
that the person had died at the hands of persons unknown.
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This was a euphemism for the lynch mob.
But ultimately, what it meant was,
no one was to be punished for these acts of terror
witnessed on African Americans.
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It is terrorism in its clearest expression.
And in some of the most infamous lynchings,
including the lynching of Jesse Washington,
it's also an example of the complicity
of state and local government.
- Jesse Washington was a Black teenager from Waco, Texas.
He was a laborer in 1916 when he was accused
of the bludgeoning death of a 53-year-old white woman.
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Fred Gildersleeve was a local photographer
who had arrived in Waco about 1905.
Gildersleeve had told the mayor that he would
give him a cut of his profits should the mayor allow him
to set up his equipment previous to the lynching
of Jesse Washington.
And it was reported that the mayor was not worried
about the injustice that was occurring
outside of his office, but instead he was worried
that the people who were burning Jesse Washington
would damage the oak tree.
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- As the lynching is concluded,
the city officials, the mayor and the sheriff
suddenly begin to recognize
that what's taken place here needs to be kept quiet.
As they're attempting this cover-up,
those Gildersleeve photographs become a hot commodity.
Everybody wants an example of what took place in Waco.
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- Burning of the Black body
had become so associated with the way that Black people
were lynched in Texas that other states would say
so-and-so had been lynched Texas-style.
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- Whether it's of Will Stanley or Jesse Washington,
the photograph doesn't tell us anything about
what their living was like
or what their hopes or dreams were.
What we're looking at
is actually an undifferentiated Black death.
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- In the immediate aftermath of the lynching
the NAACP recognizes that this is just the type
of opportunity they'd been seeking
to point to the barbarity inflicted
on African Americans in communities like Waco.
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W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent African American scholar,
is editor of their newspaper, "The Crisis,"
and recognizes that this will be a powerful story
if the NAACP can garner accounts that indicate
the complicity of local officials in the violence.
- The NAACP published a supplement to "The Crisis"
called "The Waco Horror."
And it was disseminated to 750 newspapers
across the country and every single member of Congress.
The hope was that if they could demonstrate
to audiences across the country
and even across the world
that this was occurring in the South,
they could somehow shake people
out of their complacency and push them
to join the fight against lynching.
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- I think we actually have to stop and ask
how difficult a choice it must have been
to use these photographs,
to take these images, which had been celebrations
of white supremacy, and to transform them
into anti-lynching images
to indict white supremacy
and white society at large.
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- W.E.B. Du Bois in publishing the images
from the Waco horror was actually building
on the work of female activists such as Ida B. Wells.
- She was the first activist
to use photography as part of her anti-lynching campaigns.
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Ida B. Wells and the NAACP
and later anti-lynching activists
would draw on photography as part of an arsenal
of evidence to prove that these crimes were happening,
to prove how brutal they were.
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- Over the last century, about 200 anti-lynching bills
have been presented Congress.
Not one has passed.
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- It's often said that the camera doesn't lie.
For all the ink that's dedicated
to rehabilitating the image
of communities where lynchings took place,
the photographs become the final testament
for the ugly brutality of lynching in America.
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- Well, John, this is a token
of a great day we had in Dallas.
March 3rd a Negro was hung for an assault
on a three-year-old girl.
I saw this on my noon hour.
I was very much in the bunch.
You can see the Negro hanging on a telephone pole.
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- I bought this in Hopkinsville, 15 cents each.
But not on sale openly.
I forgot to send it until just now I ran across it.
I read an account of the Night Riders' affairs
where it says these men were hung
without any apparent cause or reason whatever.
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- Say, old boy, Why didn't you tell me
you was coming?
Sorry I didn't get a chance to see you.
Say, look at this picture on the other side
and see how they do Negroes in this county.
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- This is where they lynched a Negro the other day.
They don't know who done it.
I guess they don't care much.
I don't.
Do you?
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