Burning of Smith

On February 1, 1893, a black man named Henry Smith was tortured and burned at the stake by an enormous mob in Paris, Texas. Smith was accused of the rape and murder of Myrtle Vance, the three-year-old daughter of the town's deputy policeman. Smith was captured in Hope, Arkansas, and brought back to Paris by train. When he arrived, there was a mob of 10,000 waiting for him, including many from the surrounding towns and countryside. The officials and townspeople together organized the lynching; as a reporter for the New York Sun wrote, "unruly mobs were dispersed, schools were dismissed by a proclamation from the mayor, and everything was done in a business-like manner." Smith was brought on a carnival float from the train to an open prairie near the station, where a ten-foot-high scaffold was built for the spectacle. He was tortured with red-hot iron brands for almost an hour, as the crowd cheered, and then doused with kerosene and set on fire.
The NAACP commented on the commercial circulation of lynching images in its Second Annual Report, published in 1912: "Postcards ... which reproduce in horrible detail lynchings in the South, are circulating in the United States. They are for sale in Southern towns, and are sent about as one sends a souvenir of a cathedral or a landscape ... These pictures, put up for sale at news stands, viewed, as they must be, by women, by boys and girls ... show, beyond any writing, the small regard in which America holds a Negro's life."