the images

Studying these photos has engendered in me a a caution towards the past. Pictures bring home a lesson much more than words can, and the image of "three negroes hanged from a pole in streets of Duluth, Minn June 1920 during a race riot" solidifies for me the violent racial history of this nation. The postcard shows a white crowd of onlookers crowded around the hanging bodies of three black males stripped to the waist. The well dressed crowd of white men dressed infancy coats and hats are leaning in together to get in the picture. It is a scene of pride, not of horror. The men firmly believe in what they are doing, they have the look of men who feel they have gotten a good job done. The photo shows more than the lonely poetic image of a black man hung to a roadside tree in Langston Hugh's poem Silhoette. There is no "dark of the moon" hangin over these men, they were hung on a street lamp, which illuminates their corpses and the crowd of lynchers through the black of night. Photographs are real, they are limited to the truth and only the truth. Their perspective is not judgemental, but essentially unbiased. Poetry has the ability to dress up an image. An image in a poem can amplify the power of an image, but some of the image's believability is ultimately sacrificed. The photograph of the black men hanging from a pole in a crowd of well dressed white men uses no words, but it makes much clear to the eyes of the beholder. Clearly Duluth in 1920 was a white mans world, where the killing of three black men constituted a high occasion. The white men in the photo look happy, but with my eyes I look back at them and can see clearly the men whose lives they took, and faced with that harsh reality of their corpses, I can feel the saddness true sadness the faces of the well dressed white men do not reflect.

late

it seems im always late for class