Sharing their last moments
As Ahmaud Arbery fell to the ground, the sound of the gunshot that took his life echoed loudly throughout his Georgia neighbourhood.
I rewound the video of his killing. Each time I viewed it, I was drawn first to the young black jogger’s seemingly carefree stride, halted by two white men in a pickup truck.
Then I peered at Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Trevor, 34, who confronted Arbery in their suburban community. I knew the McMichaels told authorities they suspected Arbery of robbing a nearby home. They were performing a citizen’s arrest, they said.
The video shows Arbery jogging down the street and the McMichaels blocking his path with their vehicle. First, a scuffle. Then, gunshots at point-blank range from Travis McMichael’s weapon.
My eyes travelled to the towering trees onscreen, which might have been the last things Arbery saw. How many of those same trees, I wondered, had witnessed similar lynchings? And how many of those lynchings were photographed, to offer a final humiliation to the dying?
It may be jarring to see that word — lynching — used to describe Arbery’s killing. But many black people have shared with me that his death — followed in rapid succession by the officer-involved murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd — harks back to a long tradition of killing black people without repercussion.
Perhaps even more traumatising is the ease with which some of these deaths can be viewed online. In my new book, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphone
s and the New Protest #Journalism,
I call for Americans to stop viewing footage of black people dying so casually. Instead, cellphone videos of vigilante violence and fatal police encounters should be viewed like lynching photographs — with solemn reserve and careful circulation.
To understand this shift in viewing context, I believe it is useful to explore how people became so comfortable viewing black people’s dying moments in the first place.
Every major era of domestic terror against African Americans — slavery, lynching and police brutality — has an accompanying iconic photograph.
The most familiar image of slavery is the 1863 picture of Whipped Peter, whose back bears an intricate crosssection of scars. Famous images of lynchings include the 1930 photograph of the mob who murdered Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. A wild-eyed white man at the bottom of the frame points upward to the black men’s hanged bodies. The image inspired Abel Meeropol to write the poem Strange Fruit, turned into a song blues singer Billie Holiday sang around the world.
Twenty-five years later, the 1955 photos of Emmett Till’s maimed body became a new generation’s cultural touchstone. The 14-year-old black boy was beaten, shot and thrown into a river by white men after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. She later admitted that she lied.
Throughout the 1900s, and until today, police brutality against black people has been immortalised by the media too. Americans have watched government officials open firehoses on young civil rights protesters, unleash dogs and wield billy clubs against peaceful marchers, and shoot and tase today’s black men, women and children — on the televised evening news, and, eventually, on cellphones that could distribute the footage online.
When I conducted interviews for my book, many black people told me they carry this historical reel of violence against their ancestors in their heads. That’s why, for them, watching modern versions of these hate crimes is too painful to bear.
There are other groups of black people who believe the videos do serve a purpose, to educate the masses about race relations in the US. I believe these tragic videos can serve both purposes, but it will take effort.
In the early 1900s, when the news of a lynching was fresh, some of the nation’s first civil rights organisations circulated any images of the lynching widely, to raise awareness of the atrocity, publishing the images in black magazines and newspapers.
After that image reached peak circulation, it was typically removed from public view and placed in a “shadow archive”, within a newsroom, library or museum. Reducing the circulation of the image was intended to make the public’s gaze more sombre and respectful.
The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People often used this technique. In 1916 it published a horrific photograph of Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old boy hanged and burned in Waco, Texas, in its magazine, The Crisis.
Memberships in the civil rights organisation skyrocketed. Blacks and whites wanted to know how to help. The NAACP used the money to push for anti-lynching legislation. It purchased a series of costly full-page ads in the New York Times to lobby leading politicians.
Though the NAACP endures, neither its website nor its Instagram page bears casual images of lynching victims. Even when the organisation issued a statement about the Arbery killing, it refrained from reposting the chilling video. That restraint shows a degree of respect not all news outlets and social media users have used.
Critics of the shadow archive may argue that once a photograph reaches the internet, it is very difficult to pull back from future news reports. This is simply not true. Images of white people’s deaths are removed from news coverage all the time.
It is difficult to find online imagery from mass shootings that have affected scores of white victims. Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012, or Las Vegas music festival of 2017, are most often remembered in endearing portraits instead.
Cellphone videos of black people being killed should be given this same consideration. As past generations of activists used these images briefly — only in the context of social justice efforts — so, too, should today’s imagery retreat from view quickly.
Likening the fatal footage of Arbery and Floyd to lynching photographs invites us to treat them more thoughtfully. We can respect these images. In the quiet, final frames, we can share their last moments with them, if we choose to. We do not let them die alone. We do not let them disappear into the hush of knowing trees.