The cartoon was published in The New Yorker in 1934, and republished in The Crisis (the NAACP's journal),[1] and depicts a mob in a rural part of America at a lynching.
The mob consists of white people, men and women with wide-brimmed hats and bonnets, with a farmhouse in the back; they are watching events on the viewer's left, outside of the picture.
[5] The image shows lynching as a communal event, staged for entertainment purposes, and how women, usually considered to be peaceful and nurturing, participate in the violent affair and initiate their children into it.
[6] The scene works, according to Andrew Ritchey and Barry Ruback, by way of deindividuation: the blurry faces and bodies that make up a single mass indicate that the participants have lost themselves in a greater group, which is given by many scholars as the most important reason lynchings, in all their norm-breaking atrocity, could happen.
[7] According to Matthew Teutsch, the little girl resembles a young white boy in volume 2 of the comic book March, who is being taught by his father to perpetrate violence on Jim Zwerg, one of the Freedom Riders, on May 20, 1961, in Montgomery, Alabama.