POSTCARDS OF THE HANGING

From vigilante justice in colonial America to post-Civil War lynching, Ida Wells (1890's), "Strange Fruit" (1939) and Emmett Till (1955) 

By l780 William Lynch had seen enough lawlessness.

For the past four years the men folk had been lending a hand to General George Washington, who was out to prove that we were worthy of being an independent country, not just a lowly colony; all pretenses of local law enforcement had fallen apart as a result. Even if the accused were apprehended, their cronies all-too-often liberated them en route, and since the courts were so far away and so ineffective, few witnesses bothered to testify.

Lynch’s approach wasn’t overly stylized: He placed the “lawless” man on a horse, put a rope around his neck, tossed the other end of the rope over the limb of a tree, and, as Lynch himself put it, “There was an accident and the horse walked away.” 

As Americans moved out West and left the law behind, the legacy of William Lynch “came along for the ride.” By the time the gold rush rolled around in ’49, lynch law was all that stood between civilization and chaos.

The Hanging of a Horse Thief, 1900, The Oregon Native
Son, http://en.wikipedia.org

Before l880 more whites were lynched than blacks: “So long as the Negro had been property…he had been safer from the rope…than any common white man…. But with the abolition of slavery his immunity vanished.” In the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction, ‘lynching’ came to mean white southern mobs murdering African Americans in any manner. The majority of victims were male, and the crime was often, supposedly, in response to allegations of rape, though, as W.J. Cash suggests in his groundbreaking book, The Mind of the South, white women had greater chance of being struck by lightning than being raped by an African American man.

*            *            *            *           

“While murder is usually a personal deed, lynching, in the sense of the execution of another person by a self-constituted group with accompanying public rituals, is a social act; it requires confidence in community approval.”

Cropped Photo of a 1901 Postcard
Showing Tom Ketchum's Decapitated
Body, http://en.wikipedia.org

Newspapers posted the time and place of lynchings since “ordinary people” tended to travel miles just to see one, sometimes on special excursion trains. Simple execution wasn’t all that was on the bill: sadism, mutilation, torture, castration and a carnival type atmosphere prevailed. Body parts were passed around as souvenirs.

Yet, or maybe as a result, it was a family affair. Crowds milled around, meeting and greeting, talking and laughing, eating, drinking or just looking on. Others took photographs and later, bought “postcards of the hanging.” After all, “the circus was in town.”

  

Gunner Myrdal, in his seminal study of race in America, “[c]ouldn’t find a single case in which the grand jury had indicted a white man for participating in a lynch mob, although some lynchers were named, even caught by newspaper photographers as they stood a few yards from the dangling feet of lifeless bodies.”

 Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
Courtesy of the New York
Public Library, www.nypl.org

By 1892 Ida Wells had seen enough lawlessness as well.

Born to Mississippi slaves in the second year of the Civil War, the firstborn in a family of eight, Ida lost her parents to a yellow fever epidemic before her seventeenth birthday. She insisted the family stay together, rather than be sent to live with other families or institutions, and found a job teaching, so she could provide for her brothers and sisters. Ida may have been “a little slip of a thing, a few inches short of five feet tall,” but that didn’t stop her from refusing to leave a train’s “white only ladies car” in 1883, at the age of 21.

A Jim-Crow Car for Negroes
Only, Courtesy of the New York
Public Library, www.nypl.org

“...determined not to be taken, [she] hooked her feet under the seat in front of her, began scratching the conductor with her nails, and then bit his hands deeply enough to draw blood. The conductor asked for help from the passengers and they readily complied. Two of them sitting in front of Wells turned the seat around so she could no longer hold on to it with her feet. Two others helped the conductor pry Ida out of her seat and drag her to the platform between the cars. But Wells refused to be forced into the colored car and chose instead to get off the train. With the cheers of the white passengers echoing in her ears, she disembarked, disheveled but determined.”

Wells wasn’t done: She sued the railroad company, winning twice. A DARKY DAMSEL OBTAINS A VERDICT FOR DAMAGES was one Memphis newspaper’s take on her noteworthy victory. A black church affiliated magazine asked her to write about the experience, and other black periodicals requested articles from her. By 1889 Ida Wells was part owner of a black Memphis Weekly.

Then, in March, 1892 everything changed.

W. L. Smith's, another negro-owned
grocery in Tennessee, 1899?, Courtesy
of the Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress, LOT 11307

Three men—one a good friend—were lynched. The friend, Tom Moss, was a hardworking postal worker, who had recently organized and opened the People’s Grocery. The circuitous trail that led to their deaths began with two boys—one black, one white—who were playing marbles; a disagreement led to a fistfight, and when adults got involved, what was a problem turned into a tragedy. 

Accusations led to an armed confrontation between a large group of white men—law enforcement officers and citizens “deputized” for the occasion—and the black men at the People’s Grocery. There was a shoot out, and three men were taken into custody. Not long after their arrest, a masked white mob, estimated at seventy-five, forcibly removed them from the city jail and systematically, brutally lynched them. 

Wells, saddened, stunned and outraged, wrote a blistering editorial, asserting that the competition People’s Grocery posed to a nearby white grocer was the actual reason for Tom Moss’s murder. (William Barrett, the white grocer, would later, buy the People’s Grocery for a fraction of its market value.) She called for blacks to retaliate by moving out of the city, which they did by the thousands. 

Looking Down Union Avenue, Memphis, TN, Dorothea
Lange, 1937, http://en.wikipedia.org

The editorial didn’t exactly go over well with Memphis’s white population.

While Wells was attending a conference out of town, a mob looted the newspaper’s offices before burning its headquarters to the ground. Friends warned that white men were watching her house and the railroad station waiting for her return. Wells decided not to: Hers wasn’t the only life that was at stake. She didn’t want to jeopardize the lives of the black men in Memphis who had vowed to protect her.

*            *            *            *           

“Having destroyed my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt that I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.”

Moving first to Brooklyn (a separate city until 1898) and then Chicago—where she married—Wells, as promised, continued to write fact-laden editorials, articles and pamphlets supported with statistics and scrupulous research. She spent countless hours going over court records, reading newspaper accounts and tracking down eyewitnesses and anyone acquainted with the victims for interviews. All of her work was signed “Exile.”

Cover of Southern Horrors:
Lynch Law in All Its Phases,
1892,  http://en.wikipedia.org

Frederick Douglass, escaped Maryland slave, orator, writer and the most respected black person in the country wrote in his preface to “Southern Horrors,” one of Wells’s pamphlets: 

“Brave woman! You have done your people and mine a service, which can neither be weighed nor measured. If the American conscience were only half alive…a scream of horror and indignation would rise to Heaven.”

“Dauntless” the black press called her, and indeed, Wells was, as she traveled across the United States and England to disprove the accepted myth that rape was the reason for lynching. “The world knows that the crime of rape was unknown during four years of Civil War, when the white women of the South were at the mercy of the race, which is all at once charged with being a bestial one.”

Allegations of rape, Wells demonstrated, were only involved in one out of three incidents. She worked tirelessly to educate the population, at home and abroad, and mobilize support for anti-lynching legislation and sentiment, and she didn’t stop there.

Winchester Repeating Arms Company Ad,
1898, http://en.wikipedia.org

“...a Winchester rifle,” she suggested, “should have a place of honor in every black home and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life.”—this, sixty years before Malcom’s “...any means necessary” and Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power” speech.

Nor did Wells refrain from turning criticism on blacks: “Are We a Race of Cowards?” she asked in one editorial.

Despite her extraordinary efforts, when it came to anti-lynching legislation, the federal government did what it always did in the face of grave injustice: nothing. As Pulitzer Prize winning historian Robert Caro says, “Of all the areas in which the Senate failed America, it failed it most memorably on the issue that was the single most important issue of the time: race.”

Billie Holiday, featured in Down
Beat magazine, circa Feb. 1947,
http://en.wikipedia.org

Congress made use of the time-honored tradition of the filibuster and other tactics to block the legislation from even coming to a vote in l922, l935 and l938. 

It wasn’t until 1939—belatedly as always in the case of civil rights—that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI initiated a formal investigation of lynching. (The same year a New York City schoolteacher, union activist and composer named Abel Meeropol showed “Strange Fruit, a song he had written after seeing a photo of a lynching, to Billie Holiday, who was already a well-known jazz vocalist. Holiday’s label, Columbia, refused to record the song, so she recorded it under another label. Some radio stations refused to play it, but Holiday continued to sing it for the rest of her life—some say to the detriment of her career. In 1999 Time Magazine voted “Strange Fruit” the best song of the twentieth century.)

Despite the FBI’s efforts, lynching would remain something all black Americans needed to be concerned about—even if they were only fourteen, like Emmett Louis Till.

In the spring of 1955 Emmett had just finished the seventh grade. His mother thought it would be good for him to spend some of his summer in the country, so she sent him to stay with his cousins in Mississippi. Before Emmett left, she warned him that things were “different” in the South; drinking fountains were either “white” or “black,” buses were segregated and unspoken rules—such as stepping off the sidewalk to let white folks pass and saying sir or ma’am if you spoke to them—reigned.

African American Man Drinking at "Colored" Water Cooler
in Oklahoma City Streetcar Terminal,  http://en.wikipedia.org

At 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday August 24th, a few days after he had arrived, Emmett, his cousins and some of their friends went to the Bryant Grocery & Meat Market. 

Mr. Bryant was away, so his 21-year-old-wife, a local beauty contest winner, was watching the store—alone.

Emmett Till, portrait, Courtesy
of the Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress,
USZC2-6304

No one knows precisely what happened when Emmett went into that store. He may have looked at Carolyn Bryant the wrong way, whistled, blew a bubble with the two-cents-worth of gum he bought, touched her wrist or grabbed her waist. He even may have asked her for a date, on a dare. Whatever happened, it wasn’t long before Roy Bryant learned of the incident. 

At 2 a.m. that Sunday, Bryant, armed and accompanied by J.W. Milam, abducted Emmett from his 64-year-old uncle Moses Wright’s shack, despite Wright’s pleas. They took Emmett, beat him to death, tied a seventy-five pound industrial fan to his body with barbed wire and threw him in the river, where a fisherman found him three days later.

Mamie Till, portrait, Courtesy
of the Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress,
USZC2-6304

Mamie Till insisted on a very public funeral with an open casket: “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she declared. Over a four-day period, they saw. As many as 100,000 paid their respects, and an African American magazine published photographs of the fourteen-year-old’s hideously mutilated and bloated face—a face that, as his mother put it, “...looked as though all the hatred and scorn [the world] ever had for a Negro was taken out on that child.”

Emmett’s mother, seated just a few feet away from the men, who killed her son, and incessantly harassed by spectators, attended the entire trial. The jury was all-white and all-male. (Women and African Americans were not permitted to serve on juries in Mississippi.)  

Emmett’s uncle, a work-worn sharecropper, testified, and his refusal to be intimidated by the defense and Southern lawlessness “was an epiphany in the eclipse of Jim Crow in the Deep South.” He had to hide before the trial. He probably was aware that identification would mean he would have to flee the state afterward, and yet, “[w]hen the district attorney asked for identification...[he] first acknowledged J.W. Milam and said ‘Thar he,’ and then pointed to Roy Bryant.”

Emmett's Uncle Moses Wright, 1955,
Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress,
USZ62-135349

One journalist characterized this moment as: “...the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in the United States.”

After an hour and seven minutes with time for a soda break, the jury delivered the not guilty verdict, as “...a prominent Black [Mississippi] surgeon...pointed out to a visitor, whites in Mississippi generally received longer jail terms for killing a deer out of season than for killing a Negro.” 

Rosa Parks with Martin Luther
King Jr. in the background, ca.
1955, http://en.wikipedia.org

Protected by the double jeopardy law, Bryant and Milam confessed their crime in a LOOK magazine article published four months after the trial. (The price, as they say, was right. Their compensation for the article was $4,000.)

“The grief and outrage among Blacks was eventually translated into political and civic action in the South, and some civil rights activists bore witness to the impact that Till’s death exerted on their desire to overcome the legacy of black powerlessness.”

Less than three months later, Rosa Parks, one of those African American activists, refused to move to the black section of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and the civil rights movement was born. 

Five years after the Montgomery bus boycott victory and the emergence of Martin Luther King, a different kind of headline began to appear in America:  “Attorney General Foresees a Negro as U.S. President.

Attorney General Kennedy and Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., 22 June 1963,
Washington D.C., http://en.wikipedia.org

Washington, May 26, 1961:  In an international broadcast over the Voice of America, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy acknowledged that... “There’s no question that in the next thirty or forty years a Negro can achieve the position...of President of the United States.”

Forty-seven years later, on November 4, 2008, American citizens elected Illinois Senator Barack Obama as president.

2009 Inaugural Parade, Courtesy of the Prints and
Photographs Division, Library of Congress, DIG-highsm- 03840

Postscript:

In 2004 the FBI reopened Till’s case in response to evidence uncovered by documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, who was ten when he saw before and after photos of Emmett published in JET Magazine. Unable to shake his initial conviction that something had to be done, Beauchamp spent nine years researching the evidence and testimony, interviewing witnesses and working with Mamie Till Mobley, who wouldn’t give up on the pursuit of justice either. In 2006 the FBI decided not to press charges and turned the case over to Mississippi grand jury. Some of the witnesses Beauchamp interviewed reported that they had heard a woman’s voice during the abduction. Carolyn Bryant, Roy’s 72-year-old widow, was one of twelve people named in the indictment.

In February 2007 the grand jury ruled that there was insufficient evidence to indict her or any of the others. Case closed.

Bibliography

Allen, James; Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in the United States.

Bee, Charmaine; “Documentarian Keith Beauchamp Reveals the Truth about the Lynching of Emmett Till,”  fnewsmagazine.com, Feb. 2005.

Blackburn, Julia; With Billie.

Caro, Robert A.; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Cash, W. J.; The Mind of the South.

Dray, Philip; At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.

Duberman, Martin B.; Paul Robeson: A Biography.

Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries; Word Histories & Mysteries.

Fariello, Griffin; Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition.

Giddings, Paula J.; Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.

Ginzburg, Ralph; 100 Years Of Lynchings.

Hendrickson, Paul; Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy.

Hodes, Martha Elizabeth; White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19^th-Century South.

Holt, Alfred H.; Phrase and Word Origins: A Study of Familiar Expressions.

Margolick, David; Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights.

McFeely, William S.; Frederick Douglass.

McGovern, James R.; Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal.

“The Murder of Emmett Till,” PBS. Associated Press, No Indictment in the Reopened Emmett Till Case, Feb. 27, 2007.

Olson, Lynne; Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970.

Prial, Dunstan; The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music.

Roberts, Gene and Hank Klibanoff; The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.

Till-Mobley, Mamie and Christopher Benson; Death Of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America.

Whitfield, Stephen J.; A Death In The Delta: The Story of Emmett Till.

Wilkerson, Isabel; The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

“There was an accident....”; Holt, 169

“So long as....”; Cash, 113

“While murder….”; McGovern, 66

“All blacks….”; Wilkerson, 320

“[c]ouldn’t find a single...”; Roberts, 9

“...a little slip...”; Olson, 33

“…determined, [she]….”; Giddings, 63

“A darky….”; Olson, 35

“Having destroyed….”; Giddings, 211

“Brave woman!....”; McFeely, 363

“…Dauntless…”; Giddings, 229

“The world….”’ Hodes, 2

“…a Winchester…”; Giddings, 228

“…any means…”; Bartlett, 815

“…Black Power…”; Ibid, 835

“Are We….”; Giddings, 311

“Of all the….”; Caro, 97

“Let the world....”; Till-Mobley, 7

“…looked as though...”; Dray, 425

“...was an epiphany...”; Hendrickson, 161

“When the...”; Ibid

“...the hardest half hour...”; Dray, 427

“...if we in America...”; Till-Mobley, 147

“The grief and outrage...”; Whitfield, 115

“Attorney General...”; Ginzburg, 49

“There’s no question....”; Ibid

“...hate(d) lynching...”; Blackburn, 111