American lynching souvenirs make ugly return
New Jersey, June 8, 2020 — A group of Americans march for the rights of African Americans.
Across the street, a group of white Americans taunt the marchers with a red pick-up truck, an American flag, a Trump flag and a white man’s knee on a man’s neck to mock the police killing of George Floyd.
Minnesota, June 14, 1920 — The John Robinson Circus gives a free parade. The next day, three Black circus workers are lynched by a mob of 1,000 to 10,000 whites. They’re beaten, have ropes placed on their necks and hanged.
The three men are the main act of an encore, a spectacle that no doubt draws a larger crowd than the original circus show.
This is an American lynching, with groups of whites ending the life of a Black man and white supremacists taking prescribed roles as judge, jury and executioner.
A hundred years later, we are seeing American lynching adjusted to our times. A knee on a Black man’s neck is a noose.
We know about the 1920 lynching because photographs of it were turned into mass-produced postcards. Historian James Allen documented it in “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.” The book is filled only with postcards showing Black bodies being lynched — postcards found in basements and donated by white American families.
Postcards created by white Americans as souvenirs. Images of hanging, burning and castrated Black men.
Postcards of a lynched man’s feet dangling over a large crowd of white men and children, staring determinedly into the camera, with stern looks or grand smiles.
Imagine me, a black female college student from Charlottesville, Virginia, being introduced to these past American horrors in a classroom.
My response was a potential spectacle for my white peers. I blocked out their voyeurism as I read the cursive handwriting on the backs of these postcards with notes to family members.
One I will always recall: “We had a Barbeque last night…” Another I will never forget had a piece of the lynched Black man’s hair taped to it.
I realized in that moment that lynching was not only violence against my ancestors, it was entertainment, a sport, a collectible.
These postcards were souvenirs from the American 1900s. Souvenirs my white student peers were outwardly ashamed of. Souvenirs we all thought would never again exist. I kept my eyes unseen.
On Feb. 23, 2020, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia, served up a reminder that groups of white men still lynch Black men.
Greg McMichael and his son, Travis, went looking for a lynching when they grabbed a loaded shotgun, got into their white pick-up truck and began searching for an unidentified Black man.
Father and son, like the many white fathers and sons shown smiling on those lynching postcards from the past.
A Black man running. White men chasing. And William Bryan recording the main attraction, just like the lynching photographers of a century ago.
We need to contend with our American past, because it is still very present today.
White people once shared lynching postcards like baseball trading cards. Likewise, the man who recorded Arbery’s murder might have watched his video over and over again. He might have shared it with his white friends, like a baseball instant replay.
He did not release it to the public like any outraged bystander should. He held onto it. Only a month later did he use it to claim his innocence.
But his video is not aligned with those trying to stop police violence; rather, it commemorates violence. It is a souvenir of his participation in a lynching.
Arbery had no idea he’d be rerouted back in time where running for your life was the everyday reality of Black men and boys in white spaces.
He did not know he would be the man in the NAACP announcement: “A black man was lynched yesterday.”
And he did not know his murder would be shared virtually in the context of the American lynching postcard.
Welcome back to our past.
LaToya T. Brackett is a visiting assistant professor of African American studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Reach her at lbrackett@pugetsound.edu