Browse Items (16 total)

During the winter of 1889–1890, the killing of prisoners by a white mob in Barnwell, South Carolina, and a “race war” in Georgia, prompted the Indianapolis Freeman to unleash a more pointed visual critique of so-called southern…

In early 1895, Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell, Jr., published a series of his own drawings, beginning with this illustration “Prays for His Persecutors.” The image depicts an African American man kneeling in prayer against a…

More conciliatory than his other drawings, this illustration by Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell, Jr., applauded liberal whites for their efforts to thwart lynching and enforce law and order, and thereby contribute to southern economic progress.…

After the brutal lynching of a mentally disabled man, Henry Smith, this image in Detroit Plaindealer portrayed the failure of outgoing President Benjamin Harrison administration’s to condemn the lynching as a direct contrast to Abraham…

In its election-eve issue in 1892, perhaps to encourage the exodus that Ida B. Wells’s campaign had begun, the Indianapolis Freeman re-printed a drawing by the late political cartoonist, Henry J. Lewis. A series of frames reminded readers that…

In this image, widely reproduced in the African American press, popular white political cartoonist Thomas Nast captured the outrage that followed the lynching of three African American men in Memphis, Tennessee a few months earlier--the incident that…

John Mitchell, Jr. created this drawing to contrast two states’ commitments to “law and order.” An Ohio judge refused to release a black man accused of murder to Kentucky, for fear that the man would be lynched in transit. In the…

In the late summer of 1889, the Indianapolis Freemanused the figure of Uncle Sam to protest a Gouldsboro, Louisiana, massacre of African American families on an excursion, and the burning of a church, as a symbol of federal protection. In this image,…

Following the lynching of "Click" Mitchell in spring of 1897, African American editors criticized both President William McKinley’s silence, and Booker T. Washington’s suggestion that lynch victims were “invariably…

Like journalists Jesse Duke and Ida B. Wells, Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell, Jr., had braved mob retaliation for defending an African American man from a rape charge, and challenged the increase in lynching actively. In 1894, for example,…