Lynching photography circulated as ordinary domestic tabletop objects in Black homes

Evidence

On the cover: a Black protester, caught in a cop’s chokehold, his mouth open to shout or gasp for air. Inside, pictures I could not bear to look at as a child: a man tied to a scaffold, his body burned blacker, the fire still smoldering beneath him; two boys hanged from a tree above the smiling white faces of the revelers turned back toward the camera: a young couple holding hands, ordinary as any night out on a date. Now I think of my mother, in love and writing love letters, cataloging her days, those terrible/beautiful pictures on the table next to the crocheted lace doily and crystal bowl my grandmother kept for candy: butterscotch in cellophane wrappers, bright and shiny as gold. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1151

Categorization

• SEED: A vivid image for an essay on how atrocity imagery coexists with domesticity — the doily and candy bowl next to lynching photographs as a material object of that juxtaposition.