Without Sanctuary: The Symbolic Representation of Lynching in Photography

• Published in: The journal of the gilded age and progressive era Vol. 20; no. 1; pp. 87 - 94
• Main Author: Wood, Amy Louise
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.01.2021
• Subjects: Archives & records; Black history; Lynchings; Photography; Special Forum: Lynching in the New South A Quarter of a Century Later; Symbolism; Taxonomy; Violence; White supremacy; New York; Atlanta Georgia; Georgia; United States > US; Fitzhugh Brundage; racial violence; lynching photographs
• ISSN: 1537-7814; 1943-3557
• DOI: 10.1017/S153778142000050X

What’s more, in places, Brundage collapses distinctions between categories, for instance, when he notes that the mass mob that tortured and killed Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, in 1899 began as a posse. 7 Nor does he discount that private or terrorist mobs conveyed messages to themselves and others about white superiority and Black inferiority through their violence. 8 Even a perfunctory lynching, seemingly performed without ceremony, still might carry symbolic meaning; its memory might still be “rife … with symbolic representation.” Most photographs we now have access to undoubtedly were the products of mass mob lynchings, at which local professional photographers snapped pictures to sell as cabinet cards or postcards, or at which amateurs in the crowd used their Kodaks to commemorate the event. 9 But a number of images of lynched bodies exist that were taken at the behest of private mobs or posses. Yet, the next day, a local photographer snapped pictures of Richardson’s corpse, which he made into cabinet cards to sell out of his studio. 10 In another photograph, date and place unknown, a posse of at least fifteen white men stand in a row, their unnamed victim, shot to death, flung over a horse. 11 In these instances, the violence of mobs who had otherwise killed their victims covertly and without ceremony became public and imbued with representational power. In 2005, the U.S. senate invited 200 relatives and descendants of lynching victims to the senate chamber and issued a resolution of public apology, with eighty senators in support, for its past refusal to pass federal anti-lynching legislation.