Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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This book and these awful pictures certainly do not support the happy mythology of the Lost Cause or the "New South"; nor the myth of color-blind justice in the USA. The very existence of these photographs, the fact that they were taken at all, is evidence of the almost pathological depravity of those who committed these terrible crimes. Get some friends and put together a discussion group around the reading, and bring lots of napkins, and expect surprises - especially when viewing the photos. As James Allen says, in all these photographs, “…the communities’ best citizens lurking just outside the frame. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance.

Far more than a new addition to an encyclopedia of the Southern Gothic, WITHOUT SANCTUARY stands alone as a chronicle of shame and tragedy, one that controverts the received wisdom that most Southern lynchings were the sole work of the disgruntled “white trash” comprising the Ku Klux Klan. I try to learn all that I can about the Holocaust, because even today, we learn new and terrible things about what was done in the Holocaust. The things I was so pissed off about was these people and institutions and states, the state governments had buried this,” he said. 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? Much will be made of the 'everyday' nature of the perpetrators, the smiling children giggling beneath dangling bodies, the easy non-chalance of men in straw hats and derbies slumped against convenient trees while another man burns.After all, it was O’Connor who noted of the Southern grotesque, in its human incarnation, the lack of mere humor or quirky diversion that characterized “Gothic” or “grotesque” elements in other regions’ literature.

I noticed there were some white people who were victims, to me that makes the level of animal like conduct more apparent.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. This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws.

At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man. We have principles that should guide us, but that are honored as nice ideas but not as boundaries or even as goals. In 1996, a New York Times photographer visited Allen and took stories of the collection back to New York. But once you've seen these, you can't talk about race without factoring in the reality of what African Americans really went through.

But it is with a great deal of caution that I recommend this great book to my daughter or to any other sensitive reader. Many of the photos from Allen’s collection are now anthologized or routinely used in news reports and documentaries.