Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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Just a terrible, tragic history that needs to be exposed so we can be reminded of what we do when our community approves of our monstrous behaviors. Leon Litwack’s introduction contextualizes these displays as violence aimed to reinforce white supremacy and leads the reader through the reality of these events and their lasting consequences on race relations.

Lynching – murder with public sanction and political backing – pits the powerful against the powerless; pits a teeming mob against individual bodies, where regardless of guilt or innocence, those bodies stand not a chance. They give one a deeper and far sadder understanding of what it has meant to be white and to be black in America. The first lynching photo Allen saw, sometime around 1982, was a postcard-sized image of Leo Frank, wrongfully convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker in the Atlanta pencil factory Frank operated. To view these images, at an even greater remove from us, is to feel complicity in our bones; to understand that there is no “them” when it comes to the lynching public, to understand that when public morality and political complicity allow for lynching to become a frequent and acceptable form of violence, we become the crowd.A poor condition book can still make a good reading copy but is generally not collectible unless the item is very scarce. His 1979 book Been in the Storm So Long won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize and the National Book Award.

Reviewing WITHOUT SANCTUARY for the SCENE, which frightened me so badly I wrapped the book in plastic and left it on the Boss's front porch--it seemed so evil I didn't want it in my house, I explained, though I'm sure he thought I was crazy--but I'm going to post this with my piece on NBCC/Goodreads, for I've honestly never considered this POV. The collection includes images of the lynching in 1911 of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and of Leo Frank in 1915 near Marietta, Georgia. This book contains images of lynched Italian immigrants and several white lynching victims (much to my shock. These images have been collected over the past decade by James Allen, and antiques dealer from Atlanta, along with related material like anti-lynching pamphlets and newspaper reprts, which are also on display. For weeks thousands of visitors have crowded in for a glimpse of a dimly lit chapter of American history.The hacking off of fingers and other body parts for souvenirs reads like some ghoulish detail of a horror novel. Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday, tried to focus more on lynching within the communities where it occurred, and less on the violence victims suffered. One person interviewed in the book comments that in the late 19th and early 20th Century, it was always "open season" on Negroes, who were viewed as less than human - and they were tortured with methods not even used on animals. When laws finally forbade mailing such postcards, an underground, hand-to-hand market sprang up, fed by the 1920’s resurgence of the Klan, which favored the postcards as a means of warning African Americans thought to challenge the status quo.

When, after all, did one ever hear of men of either color being lynched to protect vulnerable African-American women? I noticed there were some white people who were victims, to me that makes the level of animal like conduct more apparent. Because many white people need to be taught about the horror and traumatic past of racism that still haunts people of color and photographs dont lie. And this applies to elites as much as to the “uneducated mob” we may think of, in our ignorance, as the chief perpetrators of these acts. One probable victim of the Klan was seized for wearing a silk top hat; perhaps he’d ignored a lynching postcard left at his home, its obverse reading “Warning//The answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to black brutes who would attack the Womanhood of the South”—a phrasing that suggests an additional twist to what we normally term Gothic.They depict the lifeless forms of black men and women hanging from trees, bridges, from telegraph poles, often tortured or mutilated. What I really appreciate about the memorial, from what I’ve seen is the way it forces us to participate and feel implicated as spectators, and the way it takes the spectacle of the body out of it,” she said.

In short, Allen’s collection of photographs reveals lynching postcards to be racial pornography of the most extreme sort, equivalent to stills from racial snuff films. This of course is a legitimate criticism, but as the comments moved away from questioning the merit of the work (or the book itself) and into personal attacks, I scrapped the review and decided to start again. The message intended by those who manufactured these snapshots has thusly been usurped for a higher cause, namely, truth in recollection.John Lewis, beaten on Bloody Sunday in Selma on March 7, 1965, who said the photographs “shocked me. Without Sanctuary is a collection of 98 photographs of lynchings throughout America, culled from the archive of James Allen who, as an antique dealer, came across them in his travels. I live in Atlanta, just a few miles from some of the trees in this book, just a few miles from Stone Mountain were they lit crosses up until the 1960s.