Lynching photo helps Marion residents deal with past

MARION - A gruesome black and white photograph of a double lynching a woman's grandmother kept for decades is helping some people in this north-central Indiana town come to terms with a past fractured by racism.\nTerry Backs was in her early 20s when her grandmother first showed her the torn, tattered photo of the bodies of Abram Smith, 19, and Thomas Shipp, 18, hanging from a tree on the lawn of the Grant County Courthouse.\nThe photo shows a crowd of white onlookers, some smiling, and one pointing at the bodies of the black teenagers, who were dragged from the county jail and lynched on Aug. 7, 1930 by a white mob.\nThe teens were killed before they could face trial on charges accusing them of killing a white man and raping his female acquaintance.\nBacks, 48, describes her grandmother as "of her generation" in that she was prejudiced toward blacks. She will not repeat what her grandmother said when she first showed her the photo.\n"My grandma and I used to sit on the couch and look through albums," she said. "I was just shocked. All I could say at the time was just, 'My gosh.' It's just so shocking."\nWhen her grandmother died in 1991, Backs considered honoring her mother's wishes and destroying the photo. Instead, she put it in a bag and stuck it in a closet, where it remained until she retrieved it last October.\nThat's when she joined about 400 churchgoers on the lawn of the Grant County Courthouse in a reconciliation service after more than 73 years since the lynchings.\nThe photograph is now pasted inside a reconciliation scrapbook that is Backs' way of assuaging her family's prejudiced past.\n"Going through the reconciliation service made me realize how awful it was that these things happened," she said. "It was bothering my conscience, knowing I owned something like this. I decided instead of destroying it to turn it into something good."\nBacks believes the photograph might be one of the originals taken by professional photographer Lawrence Beitler, who sold the photos for 50 cents.\nAfter visiting her pastor to discuss the photo, she decided to make the album, which includes a collection of newspaper clippings, historical information and personal thoughts about the lynching and its aftermath. The photo is its centerpiece.\n"I think this is a very redemptive approach that she's taking," said David Vardaman, congregational life pastor at College Wesleyan. "She is, in my opinion, effectively transforming the prejudice of a grandparent into an inclusiveness or brotherhood or openness."\nThree months after the service, efforts to improve relations between the races in Marion and Grant County are continuing.\nBill Munn, a history teacher at Marion High School, said photographs such as the one taken by Beitler likely remain hidden in closets and attics throughout Grant County.\n"It's sort of like finding dirty pictures in Grandpa's bureau. That's a hard thing to deal with, at least for most people," Munn said.