Since the first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619 and were sold into bondage, black bodies have been devalued and used for the benefit of whites.[1] Indeed, from their first moments on the land in North America that white colonists had stolen from indigenous peoples, black bodies were commodified, both adults and children, and accordingly abused and disrespected.[2] This dehumanization enforced through the institution of slavery in turn led to a persistent zeitgeist in each era of American history where black bodies were tortured and violated and denied a place in the mythology of the American Republic in which all people are presumed equal. Moreover, contempt of black people often did not end with their deaths but sometimes continued beyond and included mutilation of their bodies post-mortem.

The issue of black bodies being defiled and misused, even after death, is apparent throughout American history. For instance, the use of lynching, extra-judicial execution, and murder of black people provides concrete examples of racial hatred. Lerone Bennett Jr. in Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962 writes that lynching spectacles were orchestrated as both exciting entertainment for white perpetrators and as grim warnings for black victims who were falsely accused of crimes or simply viewed as stepping out of line and needing to be taught lessons about white hierarchy at a time when possessing a job that whites deemed above a black person’s station might result in a lynching.[3] The period 1880-1930 has been identified as the “lynching era” when thousands of black people were killed in violent acts, mostly in the South but also in the North and in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid-West regions.[4] What makes lynchings and extra-judicial murders even more significant in the history of atrocities committed on black bodies is that after being tortured while alive, often victim bodies were burned, dismembered and otherwise mutilated after death in public spectacles that drew crowds of white onlookers and bystanders. In these instances of mutilation, all corporeal remains of the victims were often destroyed, thus depriving victims the respect of proper burials while denying families safe spaces to grieve the loss of loved ones.[5]  Such extreme forms of white violence spread terror and fear throughout black communities and reinforced ideas about white supremacy.

The state of Georgia offers many examples of the cruelty of lynching and extra-judicial murder and illustrates the race-based contempt shown to the lifeless bodies of black people subjected to mob violence. Fitzhugh Brundage identifies 460 lynchings in Georgia between 1880 and 1930 and determines that 95.8% were black victims.[6]  Local journalists also wrote about lynchings, in the daily newspapers thus condoning racial violence while leaving proof of racial trauma.  In August 1906, for instance, the front page of the Augusta Herald announced that in Atlanta, Georgia, Floyd Carmichael, a 22-year-old black man, confessed to assaulting a white woman named Annie Poole in a statement likely procured under duress.  Mr. Carmichael was then shot by a mob in the front yard of Poole’s residence, and his body was placed in a wagon where hundreds of spectators ogled his bullet-filled corpse while yelling their approval.  Excited perpetrators stole Carmichael’s body with the intent of burning it before police convinced members of the crowd to return the mutilated corpse to the undertaker’s wagon.[7]  In another example, the front page of The Morning News announced that two black men in Columbus, ten years prior, in June 1896, were dragged from a courtroom while the jury was still forming and hanged in the middle of the city’s commercial district. The perpetrators then left the victims’ lifeless bodies in full view as a spectacle for the rest of the white population and as a warning for the local black population.[8]  Lynchings were usually focused on black men and boys, but it was not uncommon for women to be lynched as well.  In May 1918 in Brooks County, Georgia, for example, Mary Turner was lynched for speaking out against her husband’s lynching.  In this instance she was hanged, covered in gasoline and set aflame, and her unborn baby was cut from her body, all in ghastly spectacle.[9]

            Combining the history of extra-judicial murder, the gruesome examples of its practice in Georgia, and the foundation of slavery that these events were built upon, a clear image forms concerning the treatment of black bodies in American history. Christopher Meyers states, “Lynch mobs spewed their racial hatred with impunity, brutality, barbarity, and sadism.”[10]  In these instances photographs were often taken of the events showing whites enjoying themselves and sometimes posing with mutilated black bodies in carnivalesque atmospheres.[11]  These photographs were also kept as souvenirs or turned into postcards to be shared with friends and relatives.  Images of mutilated black bodies thus not only inform us about the persecution and torture of blacks in life, but also reveal how their violent murders furthered racialized systems of cruelty and oppression in death.

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[1] Ronald Takaki. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008), 51.

[2] Takaki, Mirror. 55-56.

[3] Lerone Bennett Jr. Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1962). 235-236.

[4] Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 17; Michael Pfeifer, “The Northern United States and the Genesis of Racial Lynching: The Lynching of African Americans in the Civil War Era,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010), 621. For more on the historiography of lynching see Michael Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown? The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship,” Journal of American History, 101, no. 3 (December 2014): 832-46.

[5] William I. Hair, “Lynching.” In The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 4: Myth, Manners, and Memory, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 89-93 and 91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469616704_wilson.26.

[6] W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynchings in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 242.

[7] “Negro Assaulter Speedily Lynched,” Augusta Herald, August 1, 1906. Galileo Digital Library of Georgia, (Accessed June 16, 2022), https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82014179/1906-08-01/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=01%2F01%2F1763&nottext=&date2=12%2F31%2F2021&words=Cox+undertak+undertaking&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&index=0&proxdistance=5&rows=12&ortext=&proxtext=cox+undertake&andtext=&page=1.

[8] “Two Lynched at Columbus,” The Morning News, June 2, 1896. Galileo Digital Library of Georgia, (Accessed June 16, 2022), https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn86063034/1896-06-02/ed-1/seq-1/#date1=01%2F01%2F1896&nottext=&date2=12%2F31%2F1896&words=lynched+LYNCHED+lynching+NEGRO+negro+negroes&searchType=advanced&sequence=0&index=8&proxdistance=5&sort=relevance&rows=12&ortext=&proxtext=&andtext=lynching%2C+negro&page=18.

[9] Christopher Meyers, “Killing Them by the Wholesale: A Lynching Rampage in South Georgia,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 90, no. 2 (Summer 2006), 224.

[10] Meyers, “Killing Them by the Wholesale,” 216.

[11] James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary; Lynching Photographs in America (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 11-12.