Lynching Postcards

From looking at these postcards I feel that visual representations of lynching is much more disturbing than actually reading about it in a literary text. Although both are very unsettling and horrific, the pictures bring about the reality in lynching. Reading about this racist violence in the poems from earlier this year only gave me a mental picture of these awful events and not until I saw the postcards did I realize how repulsive it actually was. Having the act of lynching described in a poem versus actually looking at photographs of this racism is much more powerful. Reading a novel or poem can show the reader a lot how a victim of lynching might feel. For example the heartbreaking scene in Beloved when Sixo is being burned from trying to escape Sweet Home and fights the white men till his death. While Sixo is being burned he is laughing and screams out “Seven-o,” to name his child that Thirty-Mile Woman is carrying that he will never be able to see. This painful scene represents the emotions of the violence against blacks, and the photographs bring about the truth of the physical brutality and the reality of lynching to a much higher level for me.

What bothered me the most about these acts of lynching is that the whites sometimes did not even use lynching for punishment of a crime but to intimidate the blacks into being compliant with their political or social views. Most blacks were not even guilty of the crime yet they were still lynched. One of the postcards that especially caught my attention and I thought was most troubling was the one in which the whole community stood around witnessing the lynching as if they enjoyed it as some form of entertainment.