Blog 4

After watching this short clip, I am left almost completely speechless. The only sound I could manage to mutter was a "oh my gosh!" in disbelief. I was so stunned by these powerful images I didn't quite get a grasp on what James Allen was talking about, so I'm really glad they had the narrative so I could go back and really understand this message. Lynching is something that has always bothered me; I grew up in a small town in Iowa and have heard countless stories of lynching rope being hung at schools, or threats to minorities of death. Hearing and being scared about lynching is one thing, but looking at actual pictures of it is another. At some parts of the movie I could barely watching. Was it really necessary to burn and scorch the victims after they'd already been hung? Was it really necessary to cut off the limbs of a dead innocent man? The heartbreaking thing is the joy that these pictures display in doing such things. I found it so disturbing when James Allen says that these pictures were actually in family albums. What kind of family album would want to celebrate the death of a unjustified man? The impact and weight these pictures had on me made me realize that not only am I scared for this to happen again, but how ashamed I am to be related to people that believed this was OK.