The postcard of two mutilated Black bodies hanging from a tree remains difficult to look at to this day. The photographer’s eye on Aug. 7, 1930, and thus that of the viewer, focus on the victims of the lynching, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. This infamous photograph, snapped by a local studio photographer who happened to be on the scene, is the only visible reminder we have of this all too typical instance of brutal mob violence against Black people.
What grabs my attention every time I look at this horrific image is the bottom of the photograph, the natural place one’s gaze settles when averted from the stomach-churning dangling corpses above. Filling the entire lower third of the frame, one sees the crowd of white spectators, from teenagers to grandmothers.
I say “spectators” deliberately. Most of them are likely not the direct perpetrators, the lynch mob itself. While complicit in some fashion, they are not all murderers. Many of the men still wear their hats; some look up at the bodies calmly, in curiosity, with cigars in their hand; one, wearing a tie, grins ghoulishly while looking straight into the camera; another looks back at the photographer while pointing up at the corpses, seemingly directing his attention to what should be his real subject. It was a warm August night, and no one in the crowd seems to be sweating. The women — five of them clumped together, perhaps a multigenerational family — do not look directly at the lynched bodies, and they wear a range of expressions, from indifference to surprise. None look unduly troubled over what they may have just witnessed or the ghoulish display just above them. For all its banality, the white crowd in this widely circulated lynching photograph is perhaps just as disturbing as the disfigured bodies.
Given that the image first circulated as a postcard, it clearly began its life as a raw form of racist propaganda and pornography, rather than as a condemnation of the carnivalesque and lawless pleasure white people can take in the collective torture and murder of their fellow Black citizens. But it remains the only visual record we have of this particular lynching, and despite its tainted original purpose it speaks volumes. The most representative figure, surely, is the man pointing toward the corpses as if to say, without shame, “see, this is what we do.”
Taken by an alert, not to say opportunistic local photographer, Lawrence Beitler, the image was almost immediately repurposed and widely disseminated by others as an iconic illustration of the horror of lynching and used to mount campaigns — local, national and international — against the practice. Alerted by local activist Flossie Bailey, NAACP executive secretary Walter White made this lynching — so visually arresting — a centerpiece of the organization’s anti-lynching campaign during the 1930s, and ran the photograph in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Songwriter Abel Meeropol claimed the photo as his inspiration when he penned the words to Billie Holiday’s immortal song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.” Barely a week after the lynching, the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker ran the photograph on its front page, as did the national edition of Chicago’s Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. Soviet artist Nikolai Sedelnikov subsequently incorporated the hanging corpses (he cropped out the crowd) into his 1935 photomontage “Lynching in front of the U.S. Capitol,” though it is impossible to know if he first saw the photograph in the Daily Worker or elsewhere.
In many ways, this lynching was like the thousands of others we know about. Wild charges of the rape of a young white woman were thrown around with abandon (a charge later to be proved untrue). The alleged victim’s father demanded immediate justice for his wronged daughter (could that be the pointing man in the photo?). A mob of thousands broke into the local jail and removed two of the young men arrested for the alleged crime (a third, James Cameron, escaped), tortured and murdered them and hung them from a tree in public view, unmolested by local authorities. The mob’s work was photographed and proudly circulated on a souvenir postcard — for many whites, this was a night to remember and to celebrate. The bodies were left to hang on the courthouse square overnight, as a message to the entire surrounding Black community: We can do this to you with impunity. And so it proved; although two men were eventually charged with leading the mob, both were acquitted by all-white juries.
But in another sense, this history unsettles the American narrative of racial brutality. It did not occur in Mississippi or Alabama or South Carolina, but in Marion, Indiana. This was, as Indiana historian James Madison says, “a lynching in the heartland.” Walter White and others understood that the Marion lynching challenged the national bad habit of imagining that all of the nation’s racism and the depth of its commitment to white supremacy were confined to the region below the Mason-Dixon line.
The United States is beginning, slowly and against determined resistance, to reckon with this inescapable aspect of the nation’s past. In some Southern communities, the Confederate monuments are being taken down. In Montgomery, Alabama, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has made a memorial coming to terms with lynching the new centerpiece of the city’s remembrance culture, once devoted to the First White House of the Confederacy. Yet no marker stands on the courthouse square in Marion, a small city about an hour northeast of Indianapolis, to remind people of what happened here almost a century ago. Many people, Black and white, do know of course, but many would prefer not to talk about it, let alone acknowledge it with a memorial. There is a local remembrance project afoot, in conjunction with the EJI, to find the best way to commemorate the horror. Yet some descendants of the victims remain reluctant to revisit their family’s pain publicly. And no doubt, there are still white people in Marion who can look at Beitler’s photograph as if it were a perverse family heirloom and recognize members of the crowd. Presumably, today they would look away with shame rather than pride — and perhaps that’s progress. Still, shameful silence is no substitute for truth. As EJI founder Bryan Stevenson never hesitates to point out, “A history of racial injustice must be acknowledged … before a society can recover from mass violence.” As in Montgomery, public commemoration is the best way to begin the healing process; a memorial may be the ideal antidote to the continued and indelible presence of the past in that ever-revisited photograph.
Alex Lichtenstein is a professor of history and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is part of an ongoing project entitled “Unmasked: The Antilynching Exhibits of 1935 and Methods of Public Community Remembrance in Indiana.”
