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

of torture, and demands an audience to witness its occasion and spread confirmation of its actions. As spectacle, lynching depends on the public weight of its visual intimidation and orgiastic violence. The larger point of a lynching was the impact of the act and the intention that it would be felt by more than the one person who was lynched – even extending to the family and friends who would have to reclaim and bury the lynched person’s body.
Unlike, a terrorist attack, lynching does not depend on maximizing the number of lives lost.

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

witnesses.
To better examine the witness phenomenon that Williams is able to establish, the Elizabeth Alexander article, “Can You be BLACK And Look at This?” considers that placing viewers into the place of witnesses requires finding a language of equality and empathy that will allow viewers to find a way to understand what they are seeing.

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

body.
In considering the Life Magazine photo as an inscription of traumatized collective memory, Williams employs the posture and binding of the man as a reminder of
The spectacle of lynching [which] dramatized a social hierarchy where whites and blacks, women and men, knew their place. Blacks were terrorized, white women were vulnerable, and white men were on top, invulnerable and free. Still, whites projected immense sexual power onto blacks; the terror of lynching reflected their own anxieties… Indeed lynching also seems to be the expression of a peculiar necrophilia, manifest in the desire to possess the bodies of victims, in the passion with which dead bodies were handled and displayed—as if they were talismans of life itself (Rushdy, 2000).
In breaking the body into the individual components of binding and torture, Williams also visits the “peculiar necrophilia” that Rushdy mentions. By assigning blame and cause through the addition of the bold red letters decrying “Accused,” “Blowtorch,” and “Padlock,” Williams takes ownership of the body and handles it as a “talisman of life.”
Williams includes the observer in her claim of ownership, by accessing both a shadow archive of racial violence and oppression and accessing cultural memory through a process that Elizabeth Alexander considers to be ethical engagement. Situating her thesis in embodied cognition and synesthetic response, Alexander looks at ways in which a practical memory exists and crucially informs African Americans about the lived reality of violence in three ways that include desensitization through coded language as a way of building stereotypes and desensitizing spectators to allow victimization through racial identification and national imaginations, working through identity politic – the tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background to form exclusive political alliances and a collective “we” who is able to access the knowledge with which Williams has imbued Accused/Blowtorch/Padlock (Alexander, 1994).
Alexander also argues that in creating “self,” African Americans are taught to expect physical vulnerability and how that expectation works as a way of shaping a collective “we” for black people. Williams uses this to create witnesses to the images of her work using bottom line (abject) blackness to create vulnerability both witnessed and reported, communally witnessed violence known from its appearance and occurrence in slave experience and narratives to create a witness once-removed, and to create an unforgettable witness, of any race, as one who has the ability to remember something that can never be forgotten, and is positioned to be both witness and participant.
Having created an audience of witnesses, Williams art works outside of one man’s tortured historical moment to make a case against the legalities surrounding lynching and confront a system of white superiority. Issuing a call to action, Williams’ handwritten words condemn what can’t be seen immediately. When her words begin at the top of her tarpaper canvas with “There’s something going on here. I didn’t see it right away…He doesn’t look lynched yet,” she confirms that there is yet some life in the image of a man condemned more for his blackness, than any crime he may have committed. At the lower right hand corner of the tarpaper canvas, Williams issues a demand for action, “Somebody do something.” She does not end the call with an exclamation point, or even a period. The lack of punctuation is also a statement, and works to remove a timeline or deadline for the need to end the racism that has threatened the African American community for far too long.