Lynching Photographs Sold as Postcards Demonstrate Perpetrators' Impunity

Photographs of lynchings were commercially produced and sold as postcards throughout the early twentieth century. Perpetrators — many identifiable by face — freely mailed these images to family members and friends with cheerful annotations. No perpetrator was prosecuted based on photographic evidence. The postcards were eventually banned by the Post Office in 1908 from being sent through the mail, though the photographs continued to circulate. The uninhibited commercial distribution of lynching images demonstrated the complete impunity perpetrators enjoyed, as well as the complicity of wider white communities who treated these as entertainment.