Lynching party - The visual

Hey,

today we began our new sequence and we commented on the first part of the picture below (bottom part).

Here is what we said about it:

How to locate things in a document

- At the top
- In the background
- On the left
- In the middle
- On the right
- In the foreground
- At the bottom
- In bottom right-hand corner

The document is a black and white picture. It looks rather old.The quality is "vintage".
It represents / depicts / shows / features a crowd / party of people who are having a party.They are well-dressed and they are smiling = they look rich / wealthy: a woman is wearing fur around her neck.
There is the contrast between the people on the left and the ones on the right. Some are looking at us while others are looking at the background / what a man in the middle is pointing at.
It looks like a family reunion. It may be a christening or a wedding because the people don't seem to know each other.
There is also a contrast with the man who is standing in the foreground. He is staring at the camera intensely. He may be the "leader" of the mob.

Additional vocabulary:

- fur
- trousers / pants
- tie
- coat
- dress
- pregnant  

HW: find more information about the historical period of segregation in the US.

- Civil War

- Jim Crow Laws

More information about this lynching party here: 

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were two African-American men who were lynched on August 7, 1930 in Marion, Indiana. They had been arrested the night before, charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker and raping his girlfriend. A large crowd broke into the jail with sledgehammers, beat the two men, and hanged them. When Abram Smith tried to free himself from the noose as his body hauled up by the rope, he was lowered and then his arms broken to prevent him from trying to free himself again. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching. A third person, 16 year old James Cameron, narrowly escaped lynching thanks to an unidentified participant who announced that he had nothing to do with the rape or murder. A studio photographer, Lawrence Beitler, took a photograph of the dead bodies hanging from a tree surrounded by a large crowd; thousands of copies of the photograph were sold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching