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Public Spectacle Lynchings

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Public Spectacle Lynchings. Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killingsthat featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim. White pressjustified and promoted these carnivallike events, with vendorsselling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs. These killings were bold, public acts that implicated the entire community and sent a message that African Americans were sub-human, theirsubjugation wasto be achieved through any means necessary, and whites who carried out lynchings would face
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