Mob Victim Essay Research Paper Mob Victim

Mob Victim Essay, Research Paper

Mob Victim : One Of The Untold Stories

Lynching is an act of violence that took place in great numbers from the era of slavery to the times of the civil rights movements. The Webster s definition of lynch is to execute, extrasensory perception by hanging, without due process of law. Many innocent lives were taken because of the hatred that was accepted during the time that lynching was occurring at large. Between 1882 and 1900 more than a thousand people in the South were killed by whites who took the law into their own hands. Lynchings peaked 1892, and in all years the overwhelming majority of victims were black men, (Hodes 176). These victims had not always done something wrong or committed a heinous crime, the charge could have been wholly fabricated, and they were accused of many things. Acting suspiciously, gambling, quarreling, adultery, grave robbing, race hatred; race troubles, aiding a murderer, rape, arguing with a white man, resisting a mob, inflammatory language, informing, slander, being obnoxious, courting a white woman, throwing stones, demanding respect, mistaken identity, unpopularity, voodoism, trying to vote, and voting for the wrong party are just a few of the unjust reasons where whites felt it was their place to take the law into their own hands. Many mob victims were young black men who may have shown insufficient caution in avoiding situations that older blacks might have perceived as dangerous, (Brundage 81). The young men may have been able to avoid some of the situations that brought their lives to a premature end, but that does not mean that lynching should have been accepted. Lynching was a community event, notices might be printed in local papers, rail road companies might add extra cars or run special trains, and children might be given the day off from school to attend, (Hodes 176). Whites made lynchings a common activity for the average white family. The mobs, which were the murderers, made sure that the public heard the most vicious story about the victim in order to insure that there was no person that believed the act was unjust.

These lynchings were held in public settings, in the public s eye, but there are missing records for lynched victims because the cause of death was recorded as unknown. Even as the newspapers published detailed accounts from the mouths of eyewitnesses, the coroner or his jury would name the cause of death as at the hands of persons unknown, (177). These victims soon became statistics, just numbers and dead bodies, which is why there are only documents about certain lynch incidents. The lynching of John Henry Williams is one of the murders that are not intensely researched, but Lois Mailou Jones took the time to represent his lynching in the remarkable piece entitled Mob Victim.

In 1945 Lois Mailou Jones painted Mob Victim. It is a representation of the lynching of John Henry Williams, which occurred June 24, 1921. John Henry Williams is one of thousands of lynch victims. Williams was lynched for unknown reason and unjust severity. To be lynched may have included many severe things beyond being hung. The method of murder might include mutilation, castration, skinning, roasting, burning, hanging, and shooting, (177). Williams sang Nearer My God To Thee, a spiritual, while he was being tortured and about to be burned alive. Jones happened to come across a man on U Street in Washington, D.C. in shabby clothes with a certain look on his face. She was searching for a model for the Mob Victim and this man embodied the look that she wanted as well as the story of his brother John Henry Williams. This man witnessed the lynching of his brother by their boss man and posed as his brother for Jones painting. In order to capture the emotion of the model Jones uses many short strokes of watercolors. There is a great use of red, blue, yellow and green in the painting that mixes well to give the subject s skin a bronzed brown color which many African-Americans can relate with, instead of the subject being extremely black as many early paintings of black people are. This painting depicts Williams before the lynching occurs, so, if one did not know that a lynch victim is the purpose of the painting, one may believe that it is a head shot of a regular black man that is old and worried. The expression on Williams face is one that no one would forget.

This impressive masterpiece, Mob Victim, would have never been completed if Lois Mailou Jones did not follow her passion for art. Lois Mailou Jones was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1905. She studied at a plethora of schools, which included the Boston Normal Art School, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Columbia University Teachers College and the Academie Julien in Paris. These are only a few of her educational triumphs. Jones attended the High School of Practical Arts in Boston where she was the art editor of the magazine. During her high school years Jones received a scholarship to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts vocational drawing class. From this point she was awarded a scholarship to go to the Boston Museum school of Fine Arts, where she majored in design. She later received a graduate scholarship for the Designers Art School of Boston to do textile designing for cretonnes. She also studied at the Massachusetts College of Art. From her design education she was able to become a drape designer for a large New