Spectacle Lynching

In her essay "Deadly Amusements" Grace Elizabeth Hale writes about cruelty of white Southerners in the form of lynching of ex-slaves. Lynching became a form of entertainment, gathering the whole family together for the carnival. It was advertised in papers and attended by thousands. White people kept it this way not only to amuse themselves, such publicity and cruelty was a form of violent vigilante justice and the way of achieving control over African American Southerners and restricting their political activity.

The 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas was the founding event in the history of spectacle lynching. It was the first blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern black, beginning of the "transformation of the practice from quiet vigilante justice to modern public spectacle" [209]. The killing of Smith made the practice of lynching more powerful and organized. Public lynching became a murder which gathered large crowds from many different towns. The mob drove cars, spectators used cameras, out-of town visitors arrived on specially chartered excursion trains, and the towns and counties in which these horrifying events happened had newspapers, telegraph offices, and even radio stations that announced times and locations of these upcoming violent spectacles [201]. After Henry Smith's murder the pamphlet was issued which contained the detailed description of the process: from the discovery of alleged crime to the frenzied souvenir gathering at the end. It also included photographs of Smith's torture. The purpose of all this publicity was to spread the message of white supremacy supported by violence and murder.

The lynching of Sam Hose in Newman, Georgia, in 1899, made an isolated event into a new horrifying pattern. [209]. It was arranged in the Capital of the new South and got coverage in local and regional newspapers. Same Hose was accused in brutal killing of white farmer, injuring his children and raping his wife. Hose's lynching was announced 10 days in advance and the lynch crowd having no fear of watching person be killed violently, all anticipated the day of "amusement" to come. The alleged victim Mrs. Cranford demanded to participate in planning the lynching and she wanted to witness the whole process herself. She also stated that she preferred Hose to be burned slowly. This showed not only the cruelty of white southerners, but also their desire to show power and spread the idea between black people that white people still have control over them. The story of Hose's capture provided a somewhat lighter interlude between Mrs. Cranford's gruesome descriptions of rape and murder and the anticipated climatic horror of Hose's torture and death [212]. Even though Hose confessed that he did not rape the white woman, nobody believed him. Instead he was badly tortured and killed in front of the large crowed. By that white people