" ...And Still I Rise "
An American Holocaust

On a Sunday afternoon in 1899, more than two thousands Georgians, some arriving by a special excursion train, gathered near the town of Newman to witness the execution of Sam Hose, a black Georgian. After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self-appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him. Before saturating Hose with oil and applying the torch, they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face. While some in the crowd plunged knives into the victims flesh, others watched the contortions of Sam Hose’s body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out of their sockets, and rupturing his veins. The only sounds that came from the victim’s lips, even as his blood sizzled in the fire, were, “Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.” Before his body had even cooled, his heart and liver ere removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over the souvenirs. This is one of many similar horrific stories that was reported from the American South between the years 1890 and 1950.

Lynching was hardly a new phenomenon. What was strikingly new and different were the sadism and the exhibitionism that characterized white violence. The story of lynching is more than the simple fact of a black man or woman hanged by the neck. It is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation. If executed by fire, it is the red-hot poker applied to the eyes and genitals and the stench of burning flesh, as the body slowly roasts over the flames and the blood sizzles in the heat. If executed by hanging, it is the convulsive movement of the limbs. Whether by fire or rope, it is the dismemberment and distribution of severed bodily parts as favors and souvenirs. The brutalities meted out in those years often exceeded the most vivid of imaginations. To kill the victim was not enough; the executions became public theater, a participatory ritual of torture and death, a voyeuristic spectacle prolonged as long as possible (once for seven hours) for the benefit of the crowd.. (the above exerpts taken from the book Without Sanctuary)

Black Southerners, all too often, were victims of lynching or burnings because they were black and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Victims of lynch mobs, more often than not, had challenged or unintentionally voiced the prevailing norms of white supremacy. While maintaining that blacks were incapable of becoming their social, political, or economic equals, the dominant society betrayed the fear that they might. What had alarmed the white South during Reconstruction was not evidence of black failure but evidence of black men learning the uses of political power. The closer the black man got to the ballot box, one observer noted, the more he looked like a rapist. That suggests the magnitude of the problem. Even as whites scorned black incompetence, they feared evidence of black competence and independence. Even as whites derided blacks for their ignorance, they resented educated, literate, ambitious and successful blacks. The violence inflicted on black people was often selective, aimed at educated and successful blacks, those in positions of leadership, those determined to improve themselves-that is black men and women perceived by whites as having stepped out of their place. The Negro as a buffoon, a menial, a servant, was acceptable; that kind of Negro threatened no one.

The extraordinary amount of attention spent on black southerners, Henry Turner argued in 1904, refuted most compellingly the charge of inferiority. “More laws have been enacted by the different legislatures of the country, and more judicial decisions have been delivered and proclaimed against this piece of inferiority called Negro than have been issued against any people since time began.” Based on the attempts to suppress the race, Turner concluded, “It would appear that the Negro is the greatest man on earth.”

If lynchings were calculated to send a forceful message to the black community and underscore vulnerability, whites succeeded. But at the same time, it exposed black men and women, unforgettably, to the moral character of the white community. The impression conveyed was not so much the racial superiority of whites as their enormous capacity for savagery and cowardice, the way they inflicted their terror as crowds and mobs, rarely as individuals.

More horrifying than the images of lifeless black bodies charred and mangled were the smiling indifferent faces of the whites, some dressed in their Sunday’s finest, celebrating in a carnival-like atmosphere amidst the carnage of black death. There are children as young as five years old depicted standing at the feet of mutilated black corpses. The use of the camera to memorialize lynching testified to their openness and the self-righteousness of the animated participants. What is most disturbing about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of the crimes were considered ordinary people- merchants, doctors, lawyers, laborers; they were family men and women and good “church going folk”. The men and women who tortured, dismembered, and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. Few had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the outbursts of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians but the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another. One has only to view the self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they posed beneath black people hanging from a rope or next to the charred remains of a Negro who had been burned to death.

Revisiting these grisly images may be criticized for catering to the voyeuristic appetites and for perpetrating images of black victimization. This is not a history easy to assimilate. It is necessarily painful and ugly story, as it includes some of the bleakest examples of violence and dehumanization in the history of humankind. The intention is not to depict blacks only as victims or whites only as victimizers, but the extent and quality of the violence unleashed on black men and women in the name of enforcing black deference and subordination cannot be avoided or minimized. Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe-don’t want to believe- that such atrocities happened in America not so long ago. These photographs bear witness to the hangings, burnings, castrations, and torture of an American Holocaust.

Actual period photos and postcards were digitally reimaged, transferred on to pima cotton, and then an antiquing technique was applied. Machine stitched with some hand-sewn elements and suspended with hemp rope on a painted stretched canvas. ( x )

Excerpts were taken from “Without Sanctuary” section Helllhounds by Leon F. Litwack