Help with identifying this photo from "We Didn't Start the Fire" video

Cafe Society
1

I’m a child of the 80’s, and, despite knowing by heart the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, I don’t know the significance of one of the photographs in the video. The youtube version of the video is here.

The black and white photograph that I don’t know is at 1:27-1:28 and 1:32-1:33 in the background. It appears to be a photo of a torture victim with arms bound far behind his back and his head and torso bound to a tree.

Can a helpful soul identify this photo for me, and help me understand its context?

2

It’s a lynching. I’ve seen the photo before – it’s relatively famous. I’ll try to track down the source.

3

Pochacco, don’t worry about it. I just naively went to google images to search for “lynching” and discovered immediately that I didn’t really feel the need to review hundreds of lynching photos for that particular one. You needn’t either. Thank you very much for identifying the image for me.

4

Too late. It’s from an old issue of Life magazine. The caption was “Accused in 1937 of murdering a white in Mississippi, this black man was tortured with a blow torch and lynched.”

Here’s a Flickr link to a scan of the image.

5

Oh my dear lord. That’s simply horrifying. I don’t know what else to say.

Thank you again Pochacco - I appreciate your help in finding that photo for me.