Quoi more rural and family than this term that the whole world has adopted!
Its origins are no less grim. “Picnic” is a contraction of “Pick a nigger” “to pick up a nigger”. And pick it up not to invite it to a pleasant country party but to lynch it.
Contrary to popular belief that the lynchings were inextricably linked to the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction, they continued on a large scale until the 1930s, without disappearing entirely from American traditions.
But if some were operated in absolute secrecy and under the protection of Ku Klux Klan balaclavas, others took place in broad daylight, occasions for real celebration.
We sausage and we drink beer in front of corpses being consumed on braziers, in front of bodies twisting at the end of a rope or under barbed wire which surrounds them, we strike with leaded canes, we widen wounds with a knife, screwdriver, can opener or the metal tip of an umbrella, we cut off fingers, ears or sexes to offer them around us, we shoot the victims - three thousand and eight one hundred and thirty-three between 1881 and 1940, 98% of whom were black - and the pictures taken turned into thousands of postcards.
Lynching is the distraction of the small towns of the South, but the West and the great plains indulge in it willingly. We go there as a family, sometimes the newspapers announce it through the press. It is not uncommon that in the front row of the spectacle of the hilarious police officers laugh with all their teeth. These festivities have received two names, the “picnic” and the “Friday Night Boot Burnings” “The Friday Night Grill”.
Three years ago, four black journalists and historians published in the United States a book entitled “Without Sanctuary”, with the eloquent title: Lynching in the United States in XNUMX photographs. A frightening, overwhelming document and an exceptional testimony.
Some, while confessing their horror at the scenes thus exposed before their eyes, play the ostriches, congratulating themselves that these barbaric practices belong to a bygone past and proclaim over and over that "there was no lynching in America for almost fifty years ”. However, the lynchings have not disappeared.
It's just that we don't always hang Negroes, Jews, Indians, Yellows or Hispanics. We plastic their houses, we shoot them with assault rifles, we hit them until death ensues with a baseball bat.
The Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal recorded 1980 murders attributable to the ultra-right between 1986 and 1968, twice as many in the years that followed. Again, these are only assaults and attacks with a fatal outcome. But the good old American-style lynchings did not disappear in XNUMX.
We will be content to recommend reading the magnificent Freedom, a photographic history of the struggle of black Americans, published in 2003 by Phaidon editions.
We will not find the photo of the Negro dragged behind the car of three members of the Klan until their death ensued in Texas in 1999, on the other hand we will see that of the young Michael A. Donald, 19, who , who left on March 21, 1978 to buy cigarettes, was found hanged and tortured from a tree the next day. The scene takes place in Mobile, Alabama, where, from November 1980 to May 1981, no less than “twelve deaths motivated by racial hatred” were counted.
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Freedom: A Photographic History of the American Black Struggle
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Release Date | 2005-03-24T00:00:01Z |
Language | Français |
Publication Date | 2005-03-24T00:00:01Z |