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Henry Smith's lynching, Paris, Texas, 1893
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The lynching of Lawrence W. Nelson, May 25, 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma.
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The lynching of Lee Hall, his body hung from a tree, bullet hole in head, ears cut off, discarded cookstove and trash. February 7, 1903, Wrightsville, Georgia
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John Richards hanging on a tree, January 12, 1916, Goldsboro, North Carolina.
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Unidentified Black male lynched in Texas, 1910.
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Lynching of Allen Brooks in downtown Dallas, Texas, March 1910
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Ernest Harrison, Sam Reed, and Frank Howard hanging from a rafter in a sawmill, September 11, 1911, Wickliffe, Kentucky.
American lynch mobs did not eat the Blacks whom Rebecca Felton called “ravening human beasts” who should be lynched by the thousand every week. (Felton, a prominent Southern feminist and journalist, was the first woman to become a U.S. senator) We are told, however, that Southern whites eagerly gathered as souvenirs the lynched victims’ fingers, toes, bones, ears, and teeth. In Paris, Texas, (first photo) for example, some ten thousand whites came in 1893 to participate in the lynching of Henry Smith, an insane former slave accused of raping and killing a three year old White girl “in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity.” High on a platform, so the men, women, and children could see the torture of Smith, the father and brother of the dead girl applied white-hot irons to Smith’s bare feet and tongue before burning out his eyes. One observer recalled “a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal.” There was even a primitive gramophone to make a recording of Smith’s ghastly cries. After the platform had been soaked with oil and set ablaze, cremating what was left of Smith, people raked the ashes to acquire “nigger” buttons, bones, and teeth to keep as relics.
The North wasn’t a safe haven for Blacks either. Take for instance the notorious draft riots in New York City. In July 1863, “mobs, including many Irish immigrants, lynched 11 Black men, mutilating some of their bodies, while also destroying a Colored Orphan Asylum, forcing a large exodus of Blacks from the city, and carrying banners proclaiming, We won’t fight to free the nigger.”
(via Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Davis)