Lynching

In her 1893 speech given in Boston, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (shown left) reflected upon the violence associated with the lynchings of African-Americans. She says, "The lawlessness here described is not confined to one locality. In the past ten years over a thousand colored men, women and children have been butchered, murdered, and burnt in all parts of the South. The details of these horrible outrages seldom reach beyond the narrow world where they occur." Quite similarly, in Richard M. Perloff's January 2001 article in the Journal of Black Studies, he discusses the issues surrounding the lack of research which examines the ways in which the mainstream American press covered the lynching epidemic that swept the South during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. However, according to Perloff, "It is next to impossible to locate a newspaper article that does not identify the victim as a Negro or that refrains from suggesting that the accused was guilty of the crime and therefore deserving of the punishment."

Ida B. Wells-Barnett bravely used her newspaper, the Memphis "Free Speech" to document and condemn lynchings. She says, "as the number of lynchings have increased, so has the cruelty and barbarism of the lynchers." Newspapers did provide graphic coverage of the lynchings. One account from The Springfield Weekly Republican of April 1899 reports, "Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits...small pieces of bones went for twenty-five cents and a bit of the liver crisply cooked sold for ten cents." The crowds watching this atrocity struggled to obtain pieces of the burnt person. Ida B. Wells-Barnett attributes this new coverage that gives every possible excuse for lynching as an attempt to "palliate their own crime but at the same time to prove the Negro a moral monster and unworthy of the respect and sympathy of the civilized world."

It is impossible to ignore these attempts to cover the underlying fear and ignorant attitudes and actions of those associated with the lynching of these African-Americans in the post-bellum period. As Perloff says, "Lynching is fundamentally part of the nation's past."

In January 2000 there was a disturbing gallery exhibit in New York that emphasized the cruelty of lynchings in American history. CNN revealed photos that show men and women stripped, lashed, beaten, burned, and hung. In other words, this exhibit showed the truth in raw form. People brought up some disturbing issues in the article related by CNN. For example, one viewer felt it to be disturbing in general that people felt the need to photograph these "heinous moments". Another person pointed out the fact that witnesses in the photographs were smiling in the presence of death. As CNN clearly believes, we must take responsibility for our past by viewing these harsh realities.

Our question to you, our viewers, is: By showing this exhibit to the public, are we glorifying the atrocities or are we emphasizing the horror of the situation?