How the NAACP fought lynching… with pictures of a man being lynched
Nothing was censored — and that was the point
In July of 1916, at the end of a long day, readers all across the U.S. picked up the most recent issue of a new magazine, maybe from a coffee table or while browsing at the library. Its cover image was ordinary: recent college graduates, the women dressed in white lace and the men in fine suits. The articles seemed standard, too, with pieces about young doctors, a new production of Shakespeare, and baseball. But then, at the end, readers were taken aback by something entirely gruesome: an eight-page supplement featuring pictures of an African American man being lynched, step by step, from the convening of the mob to the hanging to the body in a heap of ashes. Nothing was censored — and that was the point.
The magazine was The Crisis, the monthly publication of the still-new NAACP, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. The images were part of a campaign that appropriated and subverted racist imagery for progressive purposes. They were a revelation, one that both cemented the NAACP’s status as a leading civil rights organization and opened Americans’ eyes to horrific hate crimes across the country.
The victim in those nightmarish images was Jesse Washington, a black 17-year-old accused of murdering Lucy Fryer, the white woman for whom he worked, in Waco, Texas, on May 8, 1916. Fryer had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer, and Washington was found covered in blood. Arrested on the spot, Washington confessed under duress: authorities told him they would protect him from a gathering lynch mob. That confession was the centerpiece of his trial one week later, on May 15.
It took the jury all of three minutes to reach their verdict: a death sentence, and the 1,500 people packed into the courtroom wanted it to happen now. Within seconds, Washington was seized and pulled into the street, where he was beaten, stabbed, dragged, and chained. The crowd swelled into the thousands, and all were rapt as Washington was hanged from a tree and burned alive, a throng of white spectators guffawing and gawking, straining their necks to get a better look and giving up their spots for one man only, a photographer named Fred Gildersleeve. Waco’s mayor had called Gildersleeve personally to capture the event, and the photographer readily complied, arriving on the scene with his camera bag and flash pan, using the same discerning eye with which he snapped local sporting events and youthful parades to capture Washington’s agonizing final moments, his flesh turned to char.
None of this was unusual. Lynching had been a largely tolerated part of American culture since 1836, when a mixed-race man named Francis McIntosh was burned alive for allegedly obstructing a police investigation. In the ensuing years, thousands of people were murdered in a similar fashion. Black men were the most frequent targets — an estimated 2,812 were lynched between 1885 and 1915, and Washington was the 31st victim of 1916 — but Mexicans, Jews, Native Americans, black women, and white progressives were sometimes targeted as well, threatening as they were to Christian white supremacy.
Within the lynching culture was a subculture of sorts, one that reveled in trading postcards of the crimes the way kids today might trade baseball cards. That’s why Gildersleeve was taking pictures of Washington’s murder — to cash in. He went on to sell prints for 10 cents apiece, about $2.30 in today’s dollars. But little did Gildersleeve know that his images would be used to flip the script, wielded in the fight for justice by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Formed in 1908, the NAACP spent its first few years focused largely on fighting Jim Crow and other forms of segregation, but leaders were keen to get involved in a burgeoning anti-lynching movement, and understood immediately upon hearing about Washington’s death that they needed to redouble their efforts. To that end, NAACP secretary Roy Nash wired Elisabeth Freeman, an English-born suffragette who he knew was rallying in Fort Worth, and asked her to travel to Waco to investigate. “You will probably be able very soon to locate liberals or Northerners there with whom you can talk freely,” Nash wrote on May 16, the day after the lynching.
Freeman was unsure. She didn’t know much about the case, and she’d never worked on an anti-lynching campaign. “I am terribly ‘green’ at this work & scarcely know what you want to know,” she wrote back. Nash, however, pleaded, and Freeman, a fierce believer in equality, agreed to take a look. Despite her misgivings, Freeman was a natural investigator. She spent eight days in and around Waco, interviewing participants and witnesses to Washington’s murder. Many refused to cooperate, lest they bring their town negative press, but Freeman used her wit and wile to get the truth, even from the mayor, disarming with this line, delivered with an English accent: “I [have] been in Texas four months and would like to go back North and see if I could not show the people that Waco was not as bad as they would expect.” Charmed, Waco’s residents spilled the beans, giving Freeman the material she needed for what became the Crisis supplement. And that included Gildersleeve’s damning, and ultimately useful, images. It was a macabre jackpot.
Using Freeman’s findings, Du Bois was purposefully sensational with his title: “The Waco Horror.” While the text spared no detail, it paled in comparison with Gildersleeve’s photos, presented in chronological order.
Fifty-three years before the Washington lynching, Americans had seen images of the lashed back of an escaped slave named Gordon, which made the violence of slavery undeniable. The supplement in The Crisis was equally powerful. Sure, people had heard about lynching, but few Americans had seen it. More important, Washington’s death didn’t happen in some Southern backwater; it happened in Waco, a town known for Baylor University and its upwardly mobile population. The NAACP had taken images originally intended for enthusiastic racists and turned them into evidence of racism’s viciousness, of the banality of evil in star-spangled America, in stark black-and-white.
But Freeman and the NAACP weren’t done yet. As The Crisis circulated the images to its 30,000 readers, Freeman embarked on a national speaking tour, recounting her Waco experience in places like Detroit, Buffalo, and Des Moines and using Gildersleeve’s images of a dying and dead Washington to punctuate her point: as she said in Buffalo in late July, “You cannot be satisfied with your lot while your brothers are being deprived of their natural rights.”
No one was prosecuted for Washington’s death, but his murder and the images that resulted marked a sea change. Through Freeman and the NAACP’s efforts, the pain Washington faced, the pain Gildersleeve captured, awakened a new generation of activists. By using a reprehensible and unjustifiable piece of racist memorabilia against its creators, the NAACP woke the nation to an ugly reality, energizing the anti-lynching movement. The Crisis’s circulation grew by 50,000 over the next two years, and Washington’s death also opened people’s wallets. The NAACP raised $20,000 (nearly half a million dollars today) in the months ahead, funds that proved useful as they more aggressively pursued justice, including by buying a flag that read, “A man was lynched yesterday.” It flew outside their Fifth Avenue office.
Though lynchings eventually declined in America, they didn’t end completely. James Byrd was chained to a car and dragged to death in the streets of Jasper, Texas, in 1998. And while Timothy Caughman’s 2017 stabbing death in New York City didn’t follow the form, it was arguably a lynching: his accused killer, an admitted white supremacist, traveled from Baltimore explicitly to kill black men as part of a crusade against interracial dating. He later remarked, “I’ve hated black men since I was a kid.” In addition to lynchings themselves, their psychological shadows are dark and long. In 2016, to cite one example, a Florida man hung black dummies from a tree in his front yard, right next to Trump campaign signs. When asked about it, he claimed it was a Halloween display.
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