Today’s Horrible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
When a mob meted out lynch justice in Fort White, Florida, in 1893, they did so with a ferocity that was becoming all too typical. Trains brought in additional participants and spectators from surrounding cities. After a mock trial, the prolonged execution began. “Every one knew what the crowd meant,” a resident noted afterwards, “but no one expected such horrible butchery.” They sawed at his throat, cut off both his ears, cut out one eye, and stuffed handkerchiefs in the victim’s mouth to stifle his “awful screams”. Stabbing him repeatedly, the lynchers came close to cutting out his backbone. He was then dragged two blocks before the crowd emptied their guns into his body.
One year earlier, near Memphis, the same kind of violence had been inflicted on Lee Walker, removed from the county jail and hanged from a telegraph pole after his skin had been cut to ribbons by the mob. As Walker swung on the pole, blood streaming down his body from the knife wounds, the crowd hurled expletives at him. “The Negro died hard,” one observer wrote. “The neck was not broken… and death came by strangulation. For fully ten minutes after he was strung up the chest heaved occasionally and there were convulsive movements of the limbs.” But the crowd had not finished. Throwing the body into a fire, they watched with “astonishing coolness and nonchalance” as it burned. Finally, the relic hunters moved in to retrieve portions of the rope and what was left of the charred body.
I couldn’t find any images of the Lee Walker lynching, but this photo of a 1911 lynching paints a similarly sickening picture.
Culled from: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
Death Bed Photo Du Jour!
Young Girl on Deathbed
Circa 1850 – sixth-plate dauerreotype – 3.75″ x 3.25″
A portrait of a dying girl. She stares back at the camera, her face seeming to show a tired resignation and an acceptance of her fate.
Culled from: Beyond the Dark Veil: Post-Mortem and Mourning Photography from the Thanatos Archive