Christine Turner remembers one of the first lynching postcards she ever saw, but it wasn’t the horrific, charred corpse of Will Stanley in Temple, Texas, in 1915, pictured on the cover that she remembered the most. It was a chilling note, handwritten on the back: “This is the barbecue we had last night,” the caption says, “Your son, Joe.”
“It’s something that is etched in my memory and that I will never forget,” says the director from Brooklyn. “The postcard was so random. This young man shared with his parents something in which he took part and was proud of. It was this feeling that it was almost a normal activity that was most unsettling.”
Turner’s short documentary, Lynching Postcards: Sign of a Great Day, reveals a sobering collection of 19th and 20th century souvenir postcards dedicated to the lynching of African Americans, revealing another little-known facet of America’s vile, ongoing history of racism. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,400 racially motivated lynchings took place in the United States between Reconstruction and World War II, and, as the film shows, many of them were staged by white mobs as public events similar to carnivals or picnics.
The film, released late last year and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film, is timely: Last week, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed a landmark bill that would make lynching a hate crime punishable by imprisonment for up to 30 years. . The passage of the bill, named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teenager who was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi, followed more than a century of unsuccessful attempts.
Turner, who began working on the short film after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, first stumbled upon the postcards during James Allen’s 1999 book No Shelter: Photographing Lynching in America, and then while working as an archive researcher on documentaries such as as “Amend”. released by Netflix last year. “I’m interested in telling unexpected or little-known and little-studied stories of the past and present,” says Turner, who also directed the acclaimed 2013 film Coming Home about African-American funeral traditions. “I knew it was going to be a really powerful story and that a lot of people wouldn’t be familiar.”
Lynching Postcards walks a fine line between the unwavering and the gratuitous in its portrayal of violence, and Turner admits it’s a difficult watch, though a necessary one: “This is not a good mood movie. These images are so hard to look at, but in order to understand the present moment, we must deal with our history and confront the ugly sides.”
It’s no doubt a dark topic, but Turner was determined to tell the story of black resistance as well: black activists like those in the NAACP used postcards to launch an awareness campaign that exposed the horrors of lynching to the world. “I didn’t want to just make another film about black persecution,” she says firmly. “Anti-lynching activists undermined the original intent of the postcards by converting and using them as evidence to end the practice of lynching. These stories of black resistance are often lost in our history.” She adds that photography has long been a powerful tool for exposing injustice; think of Emmett Till, whose funeral photographs sparked the civil rights movement, all the way to Eric Garner in more recent times.
The process of browsing through dozens of harrowing postcards, many from the collections of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, was no easy task. “Maybe I should have meditated or something,” Turner laughs. She relied on discussions with colleagues and friends “which helped me remind myself why I did it in those difficult, all-consuming moments.” (And as the mother of a two-year-old, she tried to keep him away from the disturbing pictures on her desk.)
Christine Turner. Photo: MTVThe topic of lynching has gained more attention in recent years following the 2018 opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Howardena Pindell’s 2020 video Rope/Fire/Water. But Turner refuses to say it’s a cultural moment: “The question is which people are more receptive to these stories,” she says. “As a result of our national attitude towards race, many people are more open to receiving these stories than they would be otherwise. But we have yet to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, and there is still a huge movement to completely erase our history with this attack on critical racial theory. It’s one step forward, two steps back.”
But the director highlights the parallels between the Postcard Lynching story and, for example, the murder of Ahmad Arbery. “There are a lot of what people call modern lynchings that might make some people take our lynching history more seriously,” she says.
As for the audience reaction, “a lot of people are horrified by the imagery and completely unfamiliar with the story and say they can’t believe it happened,” Turner says. “And they don’t just mean the postcards, but the public aspect of many of these lynchings. We tend to think that these lynchings are more like private affairs or spontaneous events when a group of men run off into the woods. These were planned events, with food and concessions. You bring your children and may come from far and wide to attend. And that surprises people.”
While many black viewers told Turner they were unaware of these facilities, others may know them all too well. “The postcards were souvenirs and pride for white people, but they also served as a message, a warning sign for black people. They were a proclamation, a way to reinforce white supremacy and keep blacks in their place. So the black people who lived in the communities where the lynchings took place and where these postcards were created must have had a good knowledge of history.”
Ultimately, she hopes the film will spark reflections on the country’s history, echoing the last chilling words taken from the postcard of a man who attended the lynching and asked the recipient’s opinion: “I don’t care, do you?”
“I was talking to the audience,” Turner says. “I return this question to the viewers.”