On February 27, 1861, Congress passed an Act that allowed privately printed cards weighing one ounce or less to be sent by the US Postal Service. That same year printer and stationer John Charlton in Philadelphia copyrighted the private postal card.
He later transferred the rights to his friend and inventor Hymen Lipman (who patented an integrated pencil and eraser in March 1858) who first produced cards with a decorative border and a small print reading “Lipman’s Postal Card. Patent Applied For.” They were soon referred to as “postcards.”
Postcard Craze
The postcard was an innovation that allowed for quick correspondence without the formality of a letter. John Charlton’s design was that of a plain card, the face of which was reserved for a message. The reverse side was restricted to address and stamp. Neither side bore an image. Illustrated cards produced by private publishers were not accepted by mail services until later.
During the 1890s photography began to be used in postcards. The commercial postcard was a reproduction of a photographic original printed onto cards. Companies such as Raphael Tuck & Sons (London publishers with a Manhattan branch at 368 Broadway) started to produce sets of postcards with serial numbers.
This encouraged people to collect not only a single image, but the entire set. Messages often refer to postcards as “P. C.” and suggest the recipient should add the postcard to an album of images.
Commercial mass produced cards depicted a variety of images. They varied from natural and urban views, portraits of actors and entertainers, to images of railway disasters. For many enthusiasts, such cards were cherished as souvenirs from a pleasure trip or vacation, a tangible reminder of a joyous experience.
In 1903, George Eastman’s Kodak Company in Rochester, NY, launched the 3A Folding Pocket Camera with negatives that were the same size as a postcard. They could be printed directly onto a sensitized card without cropping.
This development led to a passion for “real photo” postcards that were printed either as a single copy or in a small edition. These images were kept in the photographer’s private collection or shared with a select number of people through the mail.
Real photo postcards gave African-American devotees an opportunity to create a collection of proud portrayals in contrast to the degrading imagery that permeated white representations of Black culture.
Many postcards circulating in these circles carried a more sinister and racist message.
Family Spectacle
A lynching is the physical torment and public killing of an individual without due process. Executions were carried out by lawless mobs without intervention from the police.
The may be derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736 – 1796), a judicial officer in Virginia who administered rough justice in the later eighteenth century. Lynching was a way of controlling and terrorizing Black people, particularly in the South.
Mobs used dubious justifications for their actions. Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on rumors of crimes such as murder, robbery or arson. Many were murdered without being accused of any particular crime.
Most of the victims remain nameless. A common claim was the perceived sexual transgression against white women. Charges of rape were routinely fabricated and used to advance stereotypes of Black men as violent aggressors.
At the outset, lynching was a system of punishment and terror aimed at African-Americans.
It had been tolerated since even before 1836 when Francis McIntosh, a free Black sailor, was burned alive in St Louis, Missouri, for allegedly obstructing a police investigation into a fatal stabbing. In the ensuing years, many people were murdered in a similar manner.
After the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1866 the number of killings increased dramatically. The group’s objective was to maintain white supremacy in the South (“the Union as it was”) after the Civil War had come to an end.
According to some estimates, two African-Americans a week were lynched in the United States between 1880 and 1920.
Deliberately performative and ritualized, these killings were acts of grotesque brutality, often involving torture and mutilation.
Like public hangings in previous periods, lynching was a “family” spectacle attended by the whole white community, including women and children, and celebrated as a show of racial supremacy. Local newspapers contributed to the excitement by printing the time and date of a lynching.
Lynching Postcards
Lynchings were remembered in ballads and songs, lurid narratives and displays of visual imagery – above all through the creation of lynching postcards. During the early twentieth century, thousands of such photographs and postcards (often inscribed with racist texts or poems) were collected, traded and sent through the post.
Lynching photographs (usually made by unidentified photographers) were souvenirs that captured the brazen cruelty of audacious white mob members who were willing to be photographed with the victims, smiling and enjoying the occasion.
The cards were shared to reanimate a sense of control and saved as mementos in family albums that were passed on from generation to generation.
To locals, these events were intensely personal as they “owned” the lynching. Once images were detached from a locality, they became unrelated and bizarre, allowing opposing activists to imprint a wider meaning of disturbing inhumanity upon them.
Black activists like Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois reproduced lynch cards for politicians and community leaders to stress the calculated cruelty of these murders.
Although images of racist lynchings were dispersed in white communities, these photos were rarely published by newspaper editors who either did not have the technical means to print photographs (not until the 1920s), or because they were unwilling to reveal the identities of mob members and protect the “genteel” image of the South. Cards were distributed within local circles instead or shared with a wider group of family and friends.
Most pictures were shot by amateur photographers who came to the crime scene with their Kodak camera at hand (the company’s slogan was “Take a Kodak with you”). At times, professional practitioners captured the gruesome spectacles.
Some small towns had designated photographers for weddings, funerals, festivities or lynchings. They would vie for the best vantage point and print their shots in souvenir booklets or as single postcards. Recording the suffering of Black victims was a rewarding business.
In the July 1916 issue of The Crisis, its founder-editor W. E. B. Du Bois published a photo essay called “The Waco Horror” that featured images of the lynching of seventeen year old Jesse Washington by a white mob. He was accused of murdering Lucy Fryer, a white woman.
Du Bois turned the postcards of this act against their white creators to fire up the emerging anti-lynching movement. Nearly fifteen years later, another postcard inspired one of the great songs of the twentieth century.
Lawrence Beitler was a local studio photographer who on August 7, 1930, took a shot of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Virginia. The men were both African-Americans and had been arrested the night before on charges of killing a white factory worker and raping his girlfriend.
A large crowd broke into the jail with crowbars and sledgehammers, beat up the men before hanging them. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching.
The photograph shows the dead bodies hanging from a tree surrounded by onlookers (a lynch mob of some 5,000 people). Thousands of copies of the photograph were sold for fifty cents apiece in the following days.
Having seen that image, poet and teacher Abel Meeropol (better known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) penned a poem to express his horror at lynch parties.
Published in 1936 in The New York Teacher (a union magazine) and subsequently set to music, the tune made an impact as a protest song.
Café Society
Shoe salesman Barney Josephson was born into a Jewish family of Latvian immigrants who in 1900 had settled in Trenton, New Jersey. Without experience in show business, he had a passion for jazz and its performers.
He opened the Café Society at 1 Sheridan Square, West Village, in December 1938 and turned the club into an American version of the political cabarets he had visited in Berlin. It was the first racially integrated night club in the United States.
The name was picked to mock playwright Clare Boothe Luce (later a reactionary Republican member of Congress) who at the time was the “toast” of Broadway for her play The Women which, with an all-female cast, was a big hit. Luce referred to the champagne-drinking habitués of Manhattan’s snooty and segregated nightclubs as a “café society.”
Josephson trademarked the name and adopted “The Wrong Place for the Right People” as its slogan. The club’s interior was decorated with caricatures of contemporary personalities; the walls filled with murals by local artists. Its doorman wore a tattered top hat and white gloves with the fingertips ripped off.
Mockery aside, Barney engaged the cream of jazz and blues performers. In 1940, he opened a second branch on 58th Street. After that, the original club was known as Café Society Downtown and the new one as Café Society Uptown.
Barney’s elder brother Leon, a labor lawyer, was investigated by the authorities for suspected communist ties and sent to prison in 1948 for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
Barney soon felt the heat of J. Edgar Hoover’s misgivings too as Café Society was frequented by a predominantly liberal, left-leaning clientele. The FBI staked out his clubs, photographed patrons and kept a file on the owner himself.
Both locations were closed by 1950. Barney picked himself up and opened another jazz club named the Cookery at University Place & Eighth Street which stayed open into the 1980s.
Marseillaise of the South
Abel Meeropol (1903-1986) was born to Russian-Jewish immigrants who had recently fled the harsh pogroms in what is now Western Ukraine. He studied at City College of New York, then at Harvard University and became an English teacher at a high school in the Bronx.
As a social activist he was disturbed by racism in the South and his views were rooted in personal experiences. In an early poem entitled “I am a Jew,” he pointed at the intersection of anti-Semitism and racism towards African-Americans. These beliefs led him to join the Communist Party.
After seeing Beitler’s shocking photograph, he wrote a poem which he titled “Bitter Fruit.” He then set his renamed “Strange Fruit” to music. Singer Laura Duncan performed it in Manhattan venues, including at Madison Square Garden in 1938.
On Café Society’s opening night, a young woman took to the microphone. Her name was Billie Holiday. She stood at the beginning of her career under contract of Columbia Records.
Josephson had introduced her to Meeropol’s song that he himself had heard either at Madison Square or at some political gathering. She performed “Strange Fruit” that very night. It would become an integral part of her live performance acts.
Because of the song’s striking poignancy, Josephson drew up a “ritual of respect.” Billie Holiday would bring the evening’s entertainment to an end with its performance, whilst the waiters stopped serving.
The room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on the singer’s face. During the musical introduction she stood still with her eyes closed, as if in prayer. There would be no encore.
Columbia, fearing a backlash by record retailers in the South, refused to record the song. In frustration, she turned to friend Milt Gabler (his father was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna), a jazz producer for Commodore Records.
Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” a cappella, moving him to tears. Columbia allowed Holiday a one-session release from her contract in order to record the song. Jazz trumpeter Frankie Newton’s eight-piece “Café Society Band” was used for the event.
After its release, the song became not just a hit, but a cause celebre (and in time her biggest selling record). It was labeled “Marseillaise of the South” and campaigners for an anti-lynching law posted copies to congressmen.
It was denounced by Time magazine as a “prime piece of musical propaganda” for the NAACP. Photograph, poem and song remain vivid symbols of racism, resonating all forms of discrimination and injustice that have affected the Black population.
Billie Holiday paid a price for her promotion of “Strange Fruit.” For two decades, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) pursued her on instruction of Commissioner Harry Anslinger, a known racist.
A drug user, she was an African-American singer who had the audacity to perform an “unacceptable” political song in front of a white audience. She was targeted in a harassment campaign that lasted until her death on July 17, 1959.
Illustrations, from above: 1875 postcard sent to and from Skaneateles, NY, with the message “Mrs. L. B Marshall requests the pleasure of your company for Wednesday eve, January 13, 1875”; Kodak no. 3A Folding Pocket Camera, introduced in 1903 (Southampton History Museum); The burning of Francis McIntosh (drawing) from Illustrations of the American Anti-slavery Almanac for 1840; Lawrence Beitler photo of the lynching Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Virginia; A performance by Billie Holiday at Cafe Society; and Commodore Records label for Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” 1939.
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