The Harkrider Drug Co. in 1908 published a postcard featuring a picture of the corpses of five black men who had been killed in southeast Texas and a poem entitled "The Dogwood Tree," which warned blacks to "stay in the negro's place . . . or they'll suffer the fate" of being lynched.
Although the pictures are gruesome, some descendants said they grudgingly kept them as a record of how their loved ones died. Greene's mother, Winona Puckett Padgett, gave Allen a photo of her uncle's lynching that a family friend had given her in the 1970s.
Lawrence Guyot, a black civil rights activist and educator, said the pictures are an important vehicle to show the "carnival atmosphere" of lynchings and the lack of concern by those who witnessed or committed the crimes that they would suffer any legal consequences.
"When a black person was lynched, no one had to answer," he said. "Lynching was the way things were done. Nobody spoke against it, and nobody did anything about it."
Although blacks were most frequently the victims, statistics from Tuskegee University in Alabama, which keeps records on lynchings, show that other minorities and sometimes whites were also terrorized by mobs. The records reveal that about 1,300 of the nation's lynching victims were white, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American.
Mob Justice
Sometimes lynch mobs operated in direct defiance of the law.
For example, Gov. John Slaton of Georgia commuted to life in prison the sentence of Leo Frank, a 29-year-old Jewish pencil factory manager who had been convicted and condemned to death for killing a white girl in Marietta. In August 1915, Frank was lynched. After his life was threatened by the same mob that killed Frank, Slaton became the first governor in history to call out a militia to protect himself, historians said. Slaton was forced to move out of Georgia for several years, records from the apology committee show. Frank's lynching helped galvanize the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
In the only instance of the U.S. Supreme Court trying a criminal case, the justices in 1909 found Sheriff Joseph Shipp, a jailer, and four members of a Chattanooga mob guilty of criminal contempt for their involvement in the lynching of Ed Johnson, an African American day worker who had been convicted on questionable evidence in the rape of a white woman.
After Johnson was sentenced to death, Chattanooga lawyer Noah Parden and Washington lawyer Emanuel Hewlett appealed to Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter in the Plessy v. Ferguson case that established the separate but equal doctrine and the justice who had proclaimed the Constitution to be "colorblind." Harlan took the matter to his colleagues, who, in an unprecedented move, stayed Johnson's execution.
When word of the decision reached Chattanooga, a mob descended on the Hamilton County jail, where Shipp had left a single guard on duty, and snatched Johnson from his cell, beat him, shot him and hanged him over the Tennessee River, historical records show. The high court held that Shipp and the mob had defied their stay and sentenced each man to 60 to 90 days in jail, according to historical accounts.
Although several states, including Georgia and Virginia, had anti-lynching laws on the books -- in Georgia, as early as 1893 -- lynching was never a federal crime. Because most states refused to try a white man for killing a black person, fewer than one percent of lynchers were ever brought to justice.
Cameron, who opened a museum in Milwaukee 20 years ago to educate people about atrocities suffered by African Americans throughout history, said it took him years to overcome the hate he felt toward white people after almost losing his life to a lynch mob.
An Overdue Apology