Mob Justice.

Photos recall when taking a life was a public show

Anthony Crawford, a black farmer in Abbeville, South Carolina, came to town one day in 1916 to sell his cotton and got into an argument with a white businessman over the price. When a store clerk came after him wielding an ax handle, Crawford was jailed. Released on bail, he was attacked and kicked unconscious by an angry white mob. The attackers ground their heels into his face, mutilated him, dragged him through the streets, and hanged him from a pine tree.

His crime? He was a black man who stood up for himself.

Crawford's killing was part of a chapter in history that most Americans, black and white, would prefer to forget. Between 1882 and 1968, more than 4,700 African-Americans perished in mob executions known as lynchings. Lynch mobs didn't just take the law in their own hands; they often turned torture and killing into public entertainment. This year, a new exhibit of photographs has forced the nation to take another look at this grisly institution.

The exhibit, recently on display in New York City, features photos of lynchings from postcards. Enterprising photographers often recorded the scenes and sold postcards with lynching photos on the back. The cards were mailed, often by mob participants and sometimes bearing cheery greetings.

"This is the barbecue we had last night," wrote one man to his parents on such a card, delighted that his face had been captured on film among the participants in the burning and mutilating of a black man.

The photos have been available to scholars for two years. But the exhibit, and a book of the photos published in January, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, mark the first time they have been shown to the public.

In the 19th century, lynching had been used in the Midwest and West as a means of meting out quick justice when jails and courtrooms were few. But after the Civil War, whites in the defeated South, who blamed African-Americans for their troubles and focused their hatred on the supposed threat of black men to white women, made lynchings into festivals of racial intimidation.

Often, the victims were suspected of having committed a serious crime. But it didn't take a crime to spark a lynching. Blacks were lynched for failing to step aside on a sidewalk, or accidentally brushing against a white woman. Even when a crime had been committed, lynch mobs often didn't wait for a suspect to be arrested, much less convicted. Instead, the mob played the role of judge, jury, and executioner. In fact, in cases when a suspect had been arrested, mobs often had to break into jail and kidnap the prisoner in order to kill him or her.

Lynch squads often included a town's prominent citizens: bankers, lawyers, merchants, and legislators. The police and the courts looked the other way. When a jailbreak was involved, it often happened with a wink from the sheriff. Rarely was anyone ever arrested for lynching. Until 1930, only four people were ever sent to jail for it.

Many lynchings took place in a carnival atmosphere. Sometimes newspapers announced the event in advance. People came from miles around, occasionally riding special excursion trains chartered for the spectacle. Children were often among the onlookers, and schools delayed their classes until they returned. Witnesses collected souvenirs from the victims, including bits of clothing, hair, and bones.

Lynching was part of a prevalent attitude of racial discrimination. Without Sanctuary quotes a black Mississippian's recollection of the 1930s:

Back in those days, to kill a Negro wasn't nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, `Niggers jest supposed to die, ain't no damn good anyway--so jest go on an' kill `em'.

A Little Rock, Arkansas, newspaper saw lynching as a helpful part of a system of racial control, curbing the danger that black men might get out of line and cast their "lustful eyes on white women":

This my be `Southern brutality' as far as the Boston Negro can see, but in polite circles, we call it Southern chivalry, a Southern virtue that will never die.

But less than one quarter of lynching victims were even accused of attacking white women.

Today, thanks to civil rights laws, changing attitudes, and better law enforcement, racial killing as a community festival has passed from the scene. There were disturbing echoes of the age of lynching in June 1998, when three avowed racists chained James Byrd Jr., an African-American, to a pickup truck and dragged him to his death near Jasper, Texas. But in this case, the three killers were convicted--two condemned to die, one sentenced to life imprisonment.

Some historians say the Jasper murder is one reason the lynching photo exhibit this winter proved so powerful. Others say white Americans have long had what historian Eric Foner calls "a historical amnesia" about slavery and racism, and that they're finally beginning to recover.

Whatever the reason, exhibit visitors were moved by what they saw, and struggled to voice the emotional disturbance the photos created in them. "As an African-American, you try to put yourself in the perspective of the people that this actually happened to," says Bruce Chambers, a New York City bank worker. "Considering the fact that human beings have been executed, for people to smile, to be actually jostling to be in the picture--that's more stunning than anything else."

"I don't know these victims, but I feel a connection," says Marvin Taylor, 23, a stenography student whose family comes from Jamaica. "It's difficult. I see them pleading not to be lynched, begging for their life."

One Korean-American woman says simply: "That could be us."

Such human identification across racial barriers wasn't entirely absent even in 1916. At the lynching of 17-year-old Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, reports Without Sanctuary,

One white spectator failed to share the carnival mood of the crowd. "I am a white man, but today is one day that I am certainly sorry that I am one," he wrote afterward. "I am disgusted with my country."

With reporting by New York Times reporter SOMINI SENGUPTA in New York City.