Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe – don’t want to believe – that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago.

The narrative ultimately is about getting the entire community to reconcile itself with its history, white and black,” he said. My review of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America took about the longest time for me to mull over, and ultimately I am left only with the comment that there is nothing I could possibly say about it that other reviewers haven't already said more eloquently and persuasively. Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe--don't want to believe--that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago.

Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. So at least someone in an Oklahoma post office may have had some decency regarding the wrongness of lynching. The ways in which the victims' bodies were mutilated, both before and after death, makes for sickening reading and viewing.

From the 1880s to the 1930s the US averaged over 100 lynchings a year, mostly in the South, over 75% of the victims were black. How did that type of parenting affect the children of the torturers (whether attending or not) and what does that mean for the people they encountered in business and their professions?

As James Allen says, in all these photographs, “…the communities’ best citizens lurking just outside the frame. I fear that some appalling violence will be depicted (some no doubt Tarantino's anachronistic fantasy) that will prompt her to ask me, "Were white people as cruel as this to black people?

But the good church-going Christian mobs who committed the atrocities described here had no such prohibition in mind. Two plates display the charred remains of African American men whose legs were chopped off at the knee before they were burned beyond recognition and hanged. Just think, a nine year old attending a public torturing in 1950 would be 75 years old in 2016 and would have been a youthful 24 in 1968.It is far easier to view what is depicted on these pages as so depraved and barbaric as to be beyond the realm of reason. Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe—don’t want to believe—that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. Repentance and reconciliation is the believer's hope; so good that nothing is too big for a crucified and risen again Christ and his genuine people. A comment a bit too editorial to have come from Flannery O’Connor’s pen, but Allen would surely be at home in one of her stories.

It was also discussed at length in my college African American Poetry and Drama class in the year 2000. When, after all, did one ever hear of men of either color being lynched to protect vulnerable African-American women? In the white mobs gathered around the mutilated bodies — their faces cheerful, or impassive, or smug — Allen, who is white, saw the white men who made his earlier years growing up as a gay youth an ordeal. The memory of lynching brings America face to face with "our problematic history with due process and the rule of law," said William Kornblum, sociologist at the City University of New York's graduate school, "Even today we can't face part of it.But it is with a great deal of caution that I recommend this great book to my daughter or to any other sensitive reader. Als, in a searing and legitimate critique of the entire project itself – objectifying as it is of the bodies of lynched African-Americans – finds himself ultimately “unable to determine the usefulness of the project”. Many of these photographs were taken to be sold as souvenir postcards, but people also collected even more grisly keepsakes—fingers, toes and ears—from lynching victims, including sexual organs from those who had been alleged rapists. Perhaps over the past years some of us have wondered how a 14-year-old child could stand to film a murder as it was being committed by his uncle, and make of it a viral video on WhatsApp? People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope.