DAVID CAMPBELL

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter cry. [1]

'Strange Fruit' is one of the first American protest songs. Billie Holiday's 1939 recording of Abel Meerpol's poem is also one of the most powerful avowals of racial politics in American popular culture. Numerous performers after Holliday have re-recorded the song or sampled its lyrics, drawing on its unvarnished portrayal of lynching in the South to make a statement about contemporary social issues.[2]

Lynching has returned to the American consciousness recently, and those who wish to further this return invariably do so by invoking the themes of 'Strange Fruit.' The instrument for this return has been an exhibition of photographs and postcards recording the death, mutilation and display of people lynched in the United States between 1883 and 1960. The images shown in the exhibition 'Without Sanctuary' offer up but a small fraction of the total number of victims of extralegal violence. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,742 recorded lynchings of African Americans, with the likelihood of a larger number of unrecorded deaths. While the victims of lynchings were predominantly black, they also included Jews, white convicts, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian and European immigrants, the latter of whom were sometimes murdered because of their union involvement. And while the majority of lynchings took places in the South of the US, they were not unknown in the North.[3]

The photographs in 'Without Sanctuary' are brutal. The victims' bodies have been broken, burnt, disfigured, dismembered and strung up. The experience of their death confronts the face of the viewer; no concession is offered to emotional sensitivity, and there is no use of abstraction or metaphor to signal what has taken place. Even more notable than this directness is the fact that the many of the photographs show the white men who carried out the lynching standing around the corpse. Aware of the camera, they are sometimes accompanied by a crowd of on-lookers, including women and children, taking in the scene. The lynching photographs thus display the killers and their victims in the same manner as hunting pictures depict hunters showing off their prey.

The impunity with which lynching mobs recorded their deeds shocks us today, but can be understood given the social circumstances in which the killings took place. Lynching, amazingly, was a social ritual attended by vast numbers of people who created a festive atmosphere. Often the killing would be advertised in advance; The Memphis Press of 26 January 1921 carried on its front page a report in which it was said the crowd "May Lynch 3 to 6 Negroes This Evening."[4] As a public occasion, lynching required photographic recording to ensure its status as an historical event persisted long after the victim's death. As such, the photographers who produced the lynching photos - many of whom embossed the reverse of the prints with their names and business addresses - were not simply spectators to the killing. The photographers were part of the lynching, integral to the public status and social meaning of the murder.[5] The images they produced were also part of the lynching, often reprinted in newspapers. These photographs were also made into postcards and printed in the hundreds if not thousands. The postcards circulated throughout the United States, sometimes as warnings to potential victims, but in many instances simply for use as personal notes.[6]

The lynching photographs were popular because they functioned as "icons of white supremacy" that dramatised the racial and gendered cleavages of a social order in which "blacks were terrorized, white women were vulnerable, and white men were on top, invulnerable and free."[7] But these photographs could also be appropriated by the victim's family for others purposes. When Emmet Till was lynched in 1955, his mother did not hide her son's body, and insisted on an open-casket funeral so the congregation could witness for themselves the violence of Emmet's death. Photograph's of Emmet's battered body were published, and readers of black-owned newspapers in which they appeared wrote in support of their appearance and the anger they generated. A photo essay of the Till lynching in Jet magazine mobilised many young African-Americans, some of whom went on to become student leaders in the civil rights movement.[8]

However, by the late 1950s, a shift in social attitudes altered the pictures. As the public ritual of lynching attracted more wide spread condemnation, photographs of the murders were increasingly rare. Moreover, those that did appear showed the once confident killers now hiding behind masks and avoiding public display of their quarry.[9]

Not that the act of lynching itself disappeared. Not even in the present day. In Jasper, Texas, three white men killed James Byrd in June 1998. Reporting on the trial of John William King in February 1999, The Guardian described, via the prosecutor's statement, how Byrd died:

the three men picked up Byrd, an unemployed, disabled vacuum cleaner salesman, at 2.30 am, as he was walking home along Martin Luther King Boulevard.

They stopped for cigarettes before heading out of town and down a secluded logging track. It was there that they beat him, sprayed his face with black paint, and chained him by his ankles to the back of Berry's pick-up.

Prosecutor Guy James Gray told prospective jurors that Byrd was "not only alive, he was conscious at the time, and he was using his elbows and body in every way to keep his head and shoulders away from the pavement."

He told them how Byrd was alive during the three-mile death ride until his head and shoulder hit a storm drain and he was beheaded. His torso was left in front of an African-American cemetery "as some from of a message."[10]

Pictures of Byrd's body were shown by the prosecution to the jury during the trial of King. According to Rushdy, those photos were unsparing in the suffering they conveyed: "his knees, heels, buttocks, and elbows were ground to the bone; eight of his left ribs and nine of his right were broken; his ankles were cut to the bone by the chains that attached him to the truck. A pathologist testified that Byrd's "penis and testicles [were] shredded from his body=," all prior to the moment he was decapitated and finally died. Jurors found the pictures horrendous, and had to force themselves to look.[11] The images were central to the trial in East Texas, where a jury of eleven whites and one African American found King guilty and sentenced him to death. King's accomplice Lawrence Russell Brewer was similarly tried and sentenced, while the third person found guilty (Shaun Allen Berry) was given a life term. King and Brewer are now the only two white men on death row in Texas for killing an African American.[12]

Despite the shocking story of Byrd's lynching, and its evident newsworthiness, none of the photographs of Byrd's body have ever been published. Indeed, few if any in the media have even seen the photographs of Byrd's body used by the prosecution. As a result, the accounts of Byrd's lynching have been illustrated with word pictures drawn from the trial testimony, or made graphic with photographs that represented indirectly the crime and its staging (with the most direct American example being Boston Globe's picture of dried blood on the road along which Byrd's torso had been dragged).[13]

The disappearance (or non-appearance) of Byrd's body demonstrates that the media does not seize upon every opportunity for the display of death. It has become something like conventional wisdom to argue that media depictions of horror are commonplace, testimony to a commercially driven voyeurism by an immoral (if not amoral) industry. However, the fact that the public has been prevented from seeing the evidence of a contemporary lynching indicates otherwise. The failure to publish the available photographs of Byrd's body suggests the media, rather than always being voracious and voyeuristic, is at least sometimes cautious and discreet:

Displays of the horror and hurt of bodies are a measure of the industry's mix of prurience and rectitude. The press errs on the side of caution in depicting death and destruction. It is careful to write more detail than it dares to show, and often uses the metonymic power of photographs to remove harm from flesh to objects. When the press decides to picture bodies, the imagery tends (with notable exceptions) to be restrained. Newspapers do not revolt audiences for the sake of it. On the contrary, disgust forms a small part of the stock-in-trade, and papers use it sparingly.[14]

The disappearance of Byrd's body can be seen as part of a larger trend in the media coverage of violent death. The Vietnam War gave rise to numerous images of bodily violence, many of which were credited with changing public perceptions of the fighting and, eventually, undermining public support for American involvement. Notable in this respect were Eddie Adam's photograph of a Viet Cong suspect being executed on the streets of Saigon, and Huynh Cong Ut's 1972 photo of the Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack.[15]

Since the Vietnam War, however, there has been an effort on the part of governments to make such images, and the reactions to which they give rise, difficult to come by. During the Gulf War of 1990-91, for example, the US authorities established complex structures for reporting which prevented the freedom of movement enjoyed by the media during Vietnam. The infamous 'pool system', whereby only a small number of accredited journalists had access to the military in general and the front line in particular, gave the Pentagon the time to censor unwanted stories. Indeed, these structures meant that the transmission times for stories from the battlefield exceed the twenty-four hours it took accounts of the Battle of Bull Run to reach New York during the Civil War, more than one hundred years previously.[16] The net result was the almost total disappearance of the dead from coverage of the Gulf War.[17] Media coverage of Bosnia, Kosovo and other contemporary conflicts has continued in much the same vein.

Why should we lament the disappearance of the dead? Why do we need to see the body? In the case of war reporting, following Martin Bell, the lament is because the disappearance obscures the fact that "war is real and war is terrible. War is a bad taste business."[18] But over and above this generalised sense of truth telling as an essential part of the portrayal of violence, we need to see the corpse and what was done to it, as Rushdy has argued with respect to James Byrd, "because pictures of graphic violence still have to power to make an impression." Just as the images of Emmet Till, lynched in 1955, provoked an awareness of violence against African Americans, and an African American response to that violence, so to the photographs of James Byrd "could also turn the tides of history once again." How those photographs are used, and what context is chosen in which to deploy them, is vitally important. But their absence from the public domain has not diminished racism, prevented Byrd's killers becoming martyrs of the white supremacy movement, or stopped copycat crimes.[19] If their absence has not prevented such negative consequences, we can say that their presence through publication could not have been held responsible for furthering these problems. Publication could thus have had some positive benefits for the struggle against racism. Instead, we can endorse Rusdhy's conclusion: "the past teaches us that images of terror - used responsibly - can foster a climate in which terror is no longer tolerated."[20]

Acknowledgement: This is an extract from David Campbell, "Horrific Blindness: Problems With Photographs Of The Dead," in Horrific Views: Tourism, Voyeurism and Spectacle, edited by Debbie Lisle (London: Free Association Books, forthcoming 2001).

NOTES

[1] David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Caf* Society, and An Early Cry for Civil Rights (New York: Running Press, 2000), 15.

[2] Ibid.

[3] An annotated presentation of the photographs, along with a movie narrated by the collector who compiled the exhibition, can be found at http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html, 6/12/00. For an informative review, see Roberta Smith, AAn Ugly Legacy Lives On, Its Glare Unsoftened by Age,@ New York Times, 13 January 2000, http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/, 6/12/00

[4] Smith, "An Ugly Legacy Lives On."

[5] James Allen, movie narration, at at http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html, 6/12/00.

[6] Smith, "An Ugly Legacy Lives On."

[7] Ashraf Rushdy, "Exquisite Corpse, Transition 83 (2000), 70.

[8] Ibid, 72-73.

[9] Ibid, 73.

[10] "Texas Puts Racist on Trial for Murder," The Guardian, 16 February 1999, http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3822616,00.html, 6/12/00.

[11] Rushdy, "Exquisite Corpse," 74, 77.

[12] Ed Vulliamy, "American Graffiti: Deep South Turns its Back on the Klan's Region of Hate," The Guardian 28 February 1999, http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3829087,00.html, 6/12/00.

[13] Ibid, 74, 75. This photographic style is not uncommon. For example, in September 1996, The Guardian published a photo showing a trial of smeared blood on the front steps of a terrace house to illustrate the police shooting of an IRA suspect. The photograph is reprinted in John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 88.

[14] Taylor, Body Horror, 193.

[15] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 17-18.

[16] John. J. Fialka, Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1992), 2.

[17] Taylor, Body Horror, chapter 9.

[18] Quoted in Taylor, Body Horror, 75.

[19] Rushdy, "Exquisite Corpse," 75, 76. Incredibly, New York fireman on a 1998 Labor Day parade float reenacted Byrd's lynching. See "Giuliani Suspends 2 N.Y. Firemen For 'Display Of Racism' At Parade; Participants Mocked Dragging Death Of Black Man In Texas," Washington Post, 12 September 1998, A06.

[20] Rushdy, "Exquisite Corpse," 77.