Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers, who collectively became accomplices to public sadism.
Photographers were tipped off in advance and installed portable printing presses at the lynching sites to sell to lynchers and onlookers like photographers at a prom they made postcards out of the gelatin print for people to send to their loved ones. People made postcards of the severance half burned head of Will James atop a pole in Cairo Illinois in 1907. They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come at the hands of human beings in modern times. Some people framed the lynching photographs with locks of the victims hair under glass, if they had been able to secure any one spectator wrote on the back of his postcard from Waco, Texas in 1916. “This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with the cross over it your son Joe.”
This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling. souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote TIME Magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-20th century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning department of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant that the US postmaster banned the cards from the mails.” But the new edict did not stop Americans from sharing their lynching exploits. From then on, they merely put the postcards in an envelope.
In downtown Omaha, they started a bonfire and readied it for Will Brown. The newspapers had advertised the lynching in advance and as many as fifteen thousand people gathered on the courthouse square that day in September 1919, so many people one cannot make out the faces in the human sea in a wide shot taken from above. These thousands of dots on the gelatin print– fathers, grandfathers, uncle, nephew, brother, teenagers– were of one mind had fused into an organism unto itself, intent on a single mission, not only to kill but to humiliate, torture, and incinerate another human being, and together, to breathe in the smoke of burning flesh. Two days before, a white woman and her boyfriend had said that a black man had molested her when the couple were out of town. No one alive knows what happened for sure, but there were questions even then. Resentment had been building against the influx of black southerners arriving north during the Great Migration, and Will Brown, a packing house worker, was the man the sheriffs arrested. There was no investigation, no due process. That day, the mob looted guns from local pawn shops and general stores and fired on the courthouse where Brown had been detained. Before they could even get to him, the mob killed two of their own– a bystander and a fellow rioter– with their ragged gunshots. They set the courthouse on fire to force the sheriff to hand Brown over to them. They cut the water hose to keep the firefighters from putting out the blaze. And when the mayor tried to appeal to the mob, the leaders put a rope around his neck and inflicted injuries that put him in the hospital.
The leaders of the mob pulled Brown from the rooftop of the courthouse where the courthouse workers had escaped from the fire and where the prisoners had been taken. Then the people in the mob began the task for which they had gathered. First they stripped Will Brown, and those upfront fought each other to beat him. They hoisted him half conscious onto a lamp post outside of the courthouse. Then they fired bullets into the dangling body, cheering as a fired, and it was from these gunshots that the corner said Brown died. They burned his body in the bonfire they had they made on the courthouse square. Then they tie the body to a police car and drag the course through the streets of Omaha.
They cut the pieces of rope. They had used to hoist him, and these they sold as keepsakes for peoples display cabinets and fireplace mantels. The photographers of the scene captured the lynching from different angles and produced postcards of the men in business suits and teenagers in newsboy hats posing as if at a wedding reception, crowding into the frame above the charred torso, sparks of fire amid the ash, an image they would send to cousins and in-laws and former neighbors around the country.
A 14-year-old boy was helping his father at his printing plant across the street from the courthouse in the middle of the riot. The boy’s name was Henry Fonda and he would leave Omaha when he grew up and make a name for himself as a leading man in Hollywood. That evening in 1919, against the hollers of the mob and the man from hanging from a lamppost and cinders of the bonfire, Fonda and his father locked the plant and drove home in silence. “It was the most horrendous site I’ve ever seen,” he would say years later when he was an old man. The decades had not swept the ash from his memory.
It was perhaps no coincidence that he would appear in many movies in which he was the moral voice calling for a life to be spared. In the 1943 film the Ox-Bow Incident, about vigilante violence, It is Fonda’s character who warns a blood-lusting mob: “Man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands, and hang people, without hurting everybody in the world“
Wilkerson, I. (2023). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House Trade Paperbacks.
https://www.mahoganybooks.com/9780593230275?searchid=0&search_query=caste
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