Lynching and Spectacle by Amy Louise Wood

Author:Amy Louise Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2009-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.1 Lynching postcard, Andalusia, Alabama, Crisis, January 1912.

The NAACP thus transformed the ideological significance of these photographs by detaching them from their specific localities and recontextualizing them. On the pages of the black press, these images no longer served as visual testimonies of white unity and superiority but instead as graphic and indisputable symbols of white brutality and racial injustice. In December 1911, within a year of its inauguration, the Crisis printed its first lynching photograph, an uncaptioned, cropped image of an unidentified lynching, to accompany a short story, “Jesus Christ in Georgia,” by editor W. E. B. Du Bois. The photograph appears as part of the title graphic, which is dominated by a wooden cross with an image of Jesus’ face at its intersection and flanked on one side by the story's title and on the other by the photograph (figure 6.2). Jesus gazes down in sorrow at the hanged body of the black lynching victim, a juxtaposition of images that mirrors the ending of the story, in which a crucified Christ appears “heaven-tall, earth-wide” beside the body of a lynched black man, his gaze “all sorrowful… fastened on [his] writhing, twisting body.” But the title graphic did more than simply illustrate the story's ending; because the photograph depicted an actual lynching, it literalized the story's lynching, bringing it from the realm of fiction to that of truth. Within this context, the photograph had literally become iconic, a material representation of the divine.19

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