The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. And it made them feel closer to one another. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death-and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. Their names have mostly been lost to time. Read Adam Serwer on why the Supreme Court is headed back to the 19 th century There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street-one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. About the author: Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
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