The First Ladies

The art exhibit of pieces centered on lynching reveal the viciousness and inhumanity of racism when taken to its extreme conclusion. Walter White intended the gallery visitors to be moved by the artwork because it put faces and personalities to both the victims and the perpetrators. His belief, as well as Mary’s and Eleanor’s, is that white people will be moved to demand change only when the people behind the crimes are made real. His strategy works; the exhibit inspires Eleanor to bring the issue to Franklin with greater insistence. Mr. Woodruff further shows the symbolic meaning of his piece when he explains the lynching victim’s body is on the church steps to reflect the hypocrisy of “the lynchers and the mob” by showing “that dichotomy between their actions and the beliefs they profess to hold” (188). The paintings are further described as “visceral,” and Eleanor says they allow her to feel the “terror” and “inhumanity” of lynching. The viciousness of the mob violence is clear in the artwork, which Walter says gives viewers the experience of empathy. He imagines them asking themselves what it would be “like to be a colored person in the South and ask how we can consider ourselves a civilized country if torture and murder routinely happen without regard or punishment” (188). Once they’ve seen the artistic depictions of lynching, the viewers must be moved to action; otherwise, they become like the bystanders who watch but do nothing.

The idea of using images of the aftermath of violence to elicit outcry is one that has been discussed in recent years in response to repeated mass shootings in the US. The debate centers on one question: if more people saw what bullets do to bodies, would they be moved to demand legislative changes? The philosophy is essentially the same as the exhibit White and others organized—with one exception: None of the images in An Art Commentary on Lynching were photographs.