Oppression Of Lynching In The 19th Century

In a 1994 interview, Williams explains that after discovering the image, she spent a great deal of time with the Vetter image, realizing only after careful examination that the man in the photo was not dead at the time that the image was captured (Curtis, 1994), instead, the photo shows the process of torture before the actual lynching. A dark topic, lynchings found their historical beginnings in the early 19th century, and were directed primarily toward African Americans as a scare tactic and violent means of reprisal. As such, lynchings were not limited to hanging; they were prone to including torture and much more than just murder. A murder may occur in private and between a few as two people. A lynching is a large and very public spectacle

What is more important is the message a lynching sends: a lynching is the majority’s way of insuring that the minority knows that it has been forsaken and the law cannot and/or will not protect it. The most active ingredient in a lynching is silence. The attendant atmosphere of threat and silence act to support the oppression of lynching as intimidation. A physical token of the oppression and intimidation associated with lynching included the souvenir photos and postcards that still find their way into private collections as constant and permanent reminders of the power wielded over black communities through lynching. For the time period, the Vetter photo is not unusual, nor is it unusual that the photo would show up in Life Magazine. However, operating fifty years later, and from the other side of the Civil Rights movement, Williams appropriates the photo to directly address the injustices of race and the horror of torture by incorporating the 1937 photo into the body of Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock. By repurposing the picture, allowing it to speak to the unseen, but forthcoming lynching of the man, Williams transforms viewers into

To do so, Alexander suggests that there is a need to manage the “fact of blackness” which the image and its location in Life Magazines suggests as abject, dismal, hopeless, and irredeemable. What is called for is the ability to position and understand a genuine black identity in a racist American society, and situating the recorded violence in Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock, Alexander uses traumatized collective historical memory to access cultural trauma. In this instance, the cultural trauma is enslavement as a collective memory, a remberance that has become the diasporic foundation of black people, and creates in some form, the underlying intelligence which governs base instinctual operating mechanisms. The fact that African Americans today never suffered enslavement does not lessen the trauma, making it a primal part of the black experience, and part of a collective identity. Alexander considers both the actual and potential violence seen in the 1937 Life Magazine photo as inscriptions of a traumatized collective historical memory on the black male