Mob Justice.

• Author: SCHAUMBURG, RON
• Position: Brief Article

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...