Lynch mobs killed festively with meals, Sunday clothes, mutilation, and souvenir photos

Evidence

A crowd of whites, attributing to themselves the sanction over life and death and viewing themselves as good and right, are reduced to the level of savages in their pursuit and apprehending of a presumed black criminal; they usually exhibit a festive atmosphere by singing, donning their Sunday finery, and bringing food to the place of death. A castration or some other mutilation usually accompanies the killing in addition to a gathering of trophies from the charred body. Sometimes the crowd lingers to have its picture taken with the victim. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 164

Categorization

• XREF: The festive picnic-and-photograph texture parallels the Abu Ghraib trophy photographs this chapter discusses — and the Norse funeral feasting in Ibn Fadlan’s account from ‘On Sacrifice’. — connects to: White churchgoers streamed directly from Sunday worship to a mass lynching — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 91; Lynching crowds voiced religious ecstasy, merging mob murder with worship. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 97; Crowds scavenged lynched men’s bones as souvenirs. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 99
• CANDY: The Sunday-finery picnics at lynchings is a grotesquely vivid, conversation-stopping detail.