William “Roddie” Bryan’s video of Gregory and Travis McMichael shooting Ahmaud Arbery is not the first image Americans have seen of whites killing African Americans.
In recent years, videos made by witnesses on cellphones or body cameras worn by law enforcement officers have circulated via social media and news sites. Like Bryan, the makers of these images have sometimes also been participants, and in this way, these videos have a great deal in common with lynching photographs made regularly from the 1880s through the 1930s.
What is different, however, is that Bryan has been arrested and charged with felony murder because of his participation. For what may be the first time, these kinds of images are actually being used as evidence to charge their maker with alleged crimes.
The history of lynching is essential to the conversation about Bryan’s complicity. One problem is that too many Americans, if they have heard the term much at all, have a limited and narrow understanding of lynchings as hangings conducted by mobs. Yet as African American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells and the NAACP long ago made clear, lynchers have killed their victims in a variety of ways.
While anti-lynching activists in the first half of the 20th century never completely agreed on a definition, three characteristics were usually required to label an act of violence a lynching: The victim had to die, two or in some cases three or more people had to participate in the murder and the killers had to operate under the pretext of delivering justice or upholding tradition. Most lynchings have been carried out by small groups of accomplices acting in relative private by perpetrators who believe they are justified because they are somehow upholding the social order.
Arbery’s killing allegedly fits these characteristics that make a murder a lynching. Travis and Gregory McMichael and Bryan were at the scene when Arbery died and their public statements as well as police reports and other documents suggest they understood their acts as just. In a letter to the Glynn County Police Department explaining why he did not recommend they press charges, District Attorney George Barnhill described the McMichaels as “following, in ‘hot pursuit,’ a burglary suspect, with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop.” Through his lawyer, Bryan has said he was simply trying to get a good picture in case the suspect got away.
Likewise, the lynching images that survive are powerful illustrations of racial violence and its enablers. Most depict a type of crime I have labeled “spectacle lynchings.” In these grisly affairs, white mobs tortured and killed African Americans in front of large crowds, and participants and witnesses collected and purchased what journalist H.L. Mencken called “souvenirs,” pieces of the corpse, links of the chain or segments of the rope and even bits of wood chopped off hanging trees or scaffolds. Enterprising local photographers took advantage of this market and shot, quickly printed and sold photographs as postcards to people who attended these murders.