The Last Witness

The photographs show centuries-old California oak trees, majestic and gnarled, in some cases downright haunting. “Beautiful,” Ken Gonzales-Day’s mother proclaimed when she first saw them. “Now what are they really about?” She knew that her son’s artwork typically addressed weighty issues of race, culture, identity, or sexuality.

The images on these pages are from the series “Searching for California’s Hang Trees,” part of Ken Gonzales-Day’s five-year study of lynching in the West. Chair of the Department of Art and associate professor at Scripps, Gonzales-Day began his last sabbatical by examining historical records and photographs of Latinos in mid-19th century California. What he discovered through his meticulous research was a little-known pattern of racially motivated lynchings in the West beginning in early California statehood and ending with the last recorded lynching in 1935. The number of such lynchings was previously recorded as 50; Gonzales-Day documented 252 instances of lynching—perpetrated largely against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.

Armed with historical records, Gonzales-Day embarked on a road trip to find California’s hang trees—what he calls “the last witnesses” to the practice of lynching in the West. The records provided clues about the locations of hanging sites—proximity to a river, town square, a court house—enabling Gonzales-Day to locate and photograph the actual or likely trees. Some of the remaining trees are in rural areas of California; others abut modern office buildings or railroad tracks. A number of the photographs, taken with a large-format Deardorff camera, appear in Lynching in the West 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006), Gonzales-Day’s groundbreaking book.

“I retraced the steps of the lynch mob and vigilance committee and these photographs became an irrefutable record of my journey. Standing at these sites, even the most beautiful landscape is undone,” explains Gonzales-Day.

As part of the Lynching in the West project, Gonzales-Day provides on his website an alternative walking tour of Los Angeles, one in which a trip beginning at Union Station and ending on Olvera Street revisits sites of 19th-century lynchings.

Though not previously part of the historical consciousness, these executions, at the time they took place, were sometimes documented in the form of picture postcards of the lynched subject that were collected in albums. Gonzales-Day photographed the souvenir postcards, digitally erasing the victim and the rope, but leaving the site—usually a tree—and the lynch mob, his artistic statement about the historical erasure of this dismal past.

Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West project, an important contribution to the knowledge in the field, was on exhibition in London at the Thomas Dane Gallery, in New York at the Cue Art Foundation, and at the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont this fall. Sometimes a tree is not just a tree, and a landscape photograph is something else entirely. Gonzales-Day’s photographs, book, and exhibitions dramatically bring to light a forgotten chapter in California history.