Lynching Blues and Emmet Till

These are some of the drawings from my " Lynching Blues " series about the horrors and terrors of  Jim Crow and the racially motivated killings of African Americans during this period. This series was a pretty intense one to process and complete. I worked on it for about three years, off and on, as I took periodic breaks to work on other ideas.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

                                                                                                                                                                    

1. Emmet Till #1 is inspired by the death of the young teenager who was accused of whistling at a white woman. The boy was kidnapped and later found at the bottom of a river with a boat fan tied around his neck. The white men accused of the heinous crime were put on trial before a jury, and not charged. Emmet's mom Mammie later said she remembered the sound of fire works as the celebration followed. The documentary I watched a few days before drawing this, made me feel as if I had just watched a horror movie that night, as it disturbed my attempts at trying to sleep.

2. Emmet Till #2 references how Emmet's face was disfigured and bloated when he was discovered, with a bullet hole in his head. His mom Mammie, wanted to have an open casket viewing of his body, so people could see just how horrific and cruel the scene was of her murdered son. The footage showed blacks responding hysterically, and overwhelmed with emotion as they left the viewing.

3. Lynching Blues #10 is a bird's eye view of a lynching in the night of the woods by a white mob. It has been one of my favored and most mentioned, by those who have seen this series.

4. Lynching Blues #26 is one of my favorites, and I consider it to be one of the most intense drawings of the entire series, I created. It probably is one of the most intense and emotional drawings, I've ever done so far. A black man is chained and bound to burn slowly in agony as a white mob watches for entertainment purposes.

5. Lynching Blues #7 is one I think turned out well, technically on my part as a draftsman. A black man hangs from a tree in the crescent moonlight, by the hands of the KKK. I remember working on this piece in the break room, of my place of employment at the time, during lunch. A coworker walked in and looked at it, and mentioned how " beautiful it was, but in a really f*#^ked up way!" That pretty much summed it up for me as well.