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Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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Kids,

Thanks for the birthday present I suggested, the book "Without Sanctuary," published last month. It arrived yesterday and I sat down and read it from cover to cover. The book is horrifying, fascinating and chastening. You might think it a strange or grotesque request from me. Its not, and I feel compelled to write a little "book report" to show how much I appreciate it.

If you did not know, the book contains photographs and several essays which document the practice of lynching in America, which reached its peak from 1890 through 1930. The victims, three-quarters of them black, were people you might be afraid of just because of the way they looked. We can all identify with that fear. If we had photographs from the Inquisition or a thousand other atrocities they would look much the same. You can always spot the victims in the photographs, but you cannot tell the perpetrators from the bystanders. This particular behavior, lynching, did not take place far away or long ago; that it is so contemporaneous makes it so excruciating. Looking at these pictures, which were taken during the years my grandparents and great-grandparents were in their prime, makes it difficult to view the events as extraordinary. This is America, these are people I could have met in church when I was young. These are people my parents and grandparents must have KNOWN, some of them anyway. I don't think my grandparents would have participated in such events, but I don't really know and they certainly would not have mentioned it to me. The bulk of the terror took place in the South, but the photographs show mob killings everywhere, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Indiana, California, everywhere.

After the second word war, historians tried to explain what was so different about Nazi Germany. What was so rotten in one of most advanced cultures that produced the Holocaust? If we could explain why Germany was uniquely cursed, then we would understand why such things could never happen here. Now the remarkable thing is how ordinary the Germans were. This is not to diminish the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust. But I think, whether as victims, oppressors or guilty bystanders, horrible things can overtake all of us everywhere.

When I was in my early twenties I interviewed General Lewis Hershey, who headed the military draft during the Viet Nam war. He was a devil to those of us who thought the war was stupid and pointless. We all knew his name and hated him; he personified the arbitrary and complete power of the draft over our lives. I was a really green reporter and he was a folksy, avuncular old pro. I didn't come away with a usable story, but the light came on in my head. I realized that evil people could fuss over their dogs and love children and seem very, very ordinary, just like my neighbors. I had demonized Hershey completely and here he was, human and likeable. Shuddering at my naiveté, I learned that decent, fine people were capable of sending you to die. Not evil at all, by his lights. Thirty years later, when I see the neighbors of some horrible murderer say on TV what a regular fellow he was and how they can't understand how he could have done such a thing, I understand.

I did not appreciate what a festive occasion lawless torture, mutilation and murder could be in the modern world. White people were killed too, but virtually never skinned, mutilated or burned. Usually just black people in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was fully-developed civil terror, calculated to spread fear and keep some people from doing anything which would call attention to themselves. It wasn't open civil war as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, present day Kosovo, or one of the other outrages in the news. But it was here, and it was us, and the attitudes that produced the lynchings aren't very far below the surface of in awful lot of ordinary, upstanding Americans today.

Leon F. Litwak in "Without Sanctuary:"

"The photographs stretch our credulity, even numb our minds and senses to the full extent of the horror, but they must be examined if we are to understand how normal men and women could live with, participate in, and defend such atrocities, even reinterpret them so they would not see themselves or be perceived as less than civilized. The men and women who tortured, dismembered, and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. Few had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the outburst of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians but the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another. For the men and women who comprised these mobs, as for those who remained silent and indifferent or who provided scholarly or scientific explanations, this was the highest idealism in the service of their race. One has only to view the self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they posed beneath black people hanging from a rope or next to the charred remains of a Negro who had been burned to death. What is most disturbing about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of the crimes were ordinary people, not so different from ourselves - merchants, farmers, laborers, machine operators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, policemen, students; they were family men and women, good churchgoing folk who came to believe that keeping black people in their place was nothing less than pest control, a way of combating an epidemic or virus that if not checked would be detrimental to the health and security of the community."

Change a few words and the book might be talking about ordinary Germans in the early 1940's. But its not. It speaks to us, here, now.

If we understand our history, we are not necessarily doomed to repeat it.

Love,

Dad

"Without Sanctuary brings to life one of the darkest and sickest periods in American history. . . . The photographs in this book make real the hideous crimes that were committed against humanity. . . .such atrocities happened in America not so long ago. These photographs bear witness to the hangings, burnings, castrations, and torture of an American holocaust." From the Foreward by Congressman and 1960's Civil Rights Leader, John Lewis. These lynchings are portrayed on picture postcards that were sent to friends and relatives of the lynch mobs. "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. . . .The degree to which whites came to accept lynching as justifiable homicide was best revealed in how they learned to differentiate between 'good' and 'bad' lynchings. . . .'The best people of the county, as good as there are anywhere, simply met there and hanged Curl without a sign of rowdyism. There was no drinking, no shooting, no yellings, and not even loud talking.' " The victims were Black and White, Male and Female, Young and Old. Some were burned after hanging, others were burned before hanging. California and Duluth, as well as Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina lynchings are all represented. Even the Jew, Leo Frank, is photographed. Only 4000 copies of this first edition have been printed. "We must prevent anything like this from ever happening again."

It did. 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. Evil walked the land HERE - not in far off Europe, HERE, under the Stars and Stripes.

Lynching became America's national pastime after the Civil War, at least in the South. 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.

This book brings a powerful light to a dark dirty corner of the American experience and psyche. This book is savage, gut-wrenching, and profoundly and deeply disturbing. The photos bear witness to monstrous crimes against humanity. The charred and mutilated bodies of the dead are shocking, and the depraved lust-filled feral faces of the lynch mobs are truly disgusting.

The oppression of slavery gave way to the viciousness and animalism of Jim Crow, and for 100 years the "vicious racists" (as Dr. King called them) ruled supreme in the southern USA, as evil in their stupidity and cowardly fear as the Nazis of Germany were in their arrogance and megalomania.

There are Holocaust deniers. Here in the US we have slavery and Jim Crow deniers, and racism deniers. 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 evil on these pages is the evil one imagines in a pack of wild rabid dogs - savage, arbitrary, unspeakably cruel.

This book is a powerful dose of anti-denial. Most people know what slavery was really about, and have an idea about lynching. But just seeing the "strange fruit of southern trees" is like Eve eating the apple in Eden. It moved me, and I cannot go back to the lies and denial and the forgetting. Kudos to Mr. Allen for bringing these postcards and photos to our faces, so that this pornography of evil, stupidity, self-righteousness and barbarism can be seen for what it was, what it is, and what it still might be, so we can say "Never Again" to this Holocaust too.

I first saw this book on a friend's coffee table, noticing the narrow black and white image, and taking note of the title, I opened the book. My first words were "Oh, my God", the next sentence was "Jesus Christ this book is horrible!" I believe that an image can speak volumes, Without Sanctuary virtually screamed at me. I have an undergraduate degree in African American history and a master's degree in American history, I am extremely familiar with the subject matter portrayed in these pages, but to see that horrifying collection of gruesome images, in a postcard format was almost more than I could handle. In spite of the jarring effect the pics have on the viewer, I feel it is an excellent reference book and sheds valuable insight on the attitudes that formed the historical relationship between blacks and whites in America. I would highly recommend it to all people, especially white people, who often shy away from the more grusome parts of their past.

Once you see the pages, issues like racial profiling, proposition 209, Jasper, Texas, etc., and the continued discrimination of non-white people begins to make more sense.

The title of this book is appropriate too for it speaks to the fact that Black people were literally without sanctuary in the face of a lynch mob.

Photography as a technological advance changed the way mankind looked at the world and himself. Photography provided concrete proof of instances long dissipated and gone under. The power of photography has not waned and the collection of photos and text entitled 'Without Sanctuary:Lynching Photography in America'(ltd.ed. of 6000) stands as cold proof. The cover of this volume is spare and stark, an offset excerpt of one man's demise. It is as though we have cracked open a previously untested door and, adjusting for the new light, find our eyes bringing to focus what we now know must be hell. Sometimes it is surprisingly hard to look away. When I was in the fifth grade the television mini-series 'Roots' gathered the nation on a Sunday evening for its first episode. In that episode the character of Kunta Kinte is bull-whipped for refusing to accept his slave name, 'Toby.' The savagery and degradation visited upon Lavar Burton's screen persona shook me to my core. I quietly went upstairs to the bathroom and sobbed. Perhaps a person can be so shaken and taken only once, for the unsettling chill that 'Without Sanctuary' produces in me has dampened my eyes not at all. The inhumanity and arbitrary bloodshed captured therein brings a strange calm, an understanding. To be mesmerized by these photos of mob violence is to in some small but undeniably important way put hands on the beast, to learn its contours and edges. A good many of the photos are taken from postcards which were printed as keepsakes. It is clear from such a scenario that the hell black deeds captured in these photos were meant for mass consumption and I am relieved to know that, with the advent of this collection, they are that much less likely to be forgotten. The message intended by those who manufactured these snapshots has thusly been usurped for a higher cause, namely, truth in recollection. 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. However, if I may say so, I find nothing ordinary or 'everyday' about these people who traipse about charred corpses as though they were at the county fair. Rather, I find that what this books shows through its keyhole is that men can be made ill and evil by their individual and communal beliefs, by their thoughtless brutalities. In closing, consider the following note written on the back of a postcard which depicts a badly burned and legless corpse.

"This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe."

There are no adjectives that do justice to the depravity that is documented in this book. No book I have read has been more disturbing to read or comment upon. The reason is the proximity in time and place of these events of pure evil.

Twenty-three States, one shy of 50% of the Continental United States, are represented in this book. Many of the States not involved are sparsely populated to this day. To say this genocide/holocaust was pervasive is more than reasonable. I use holocaust in its literal meaning of "wholly consumed by fire". I note the difference, as the events in Nazi Germany did not take place here. The burning of human victims on the soil of The United States has its own distinctive horror, which must be acknowledged as part of our History.

The word History often implies a buffer of time; a space to distance ourselves from what some would like to forget. I have read, "Blacks should get over it". This is generally a claim that all this sadism ended with Lincoln. It is true that "only" 75% of the lynchings in the book are of "Blacks", but as the number of lynchings decreased the percentage rose to 90%. This book shows a lynching from the 1960's, NOT the 1860's. If the authors chose to include other photos, the murder by dragging in Texas of a "Black" man would bring us if not literally to today, then a number of years so low in single digits, recounting it as a number of months ago may be more reasonable.

The other vacuous defense I have noted is, "I, my Family, my Grandparents, never did own slaves", and so on. And so what? What is documented in this book is less prevalent today because you will likely be caught and jailed/executed, because the world is watching, and now we care what others think. Do people suppose the basic nature of those that did or watched these acts, many of who are alive today has changed? Change doesn't happen in 40 years. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to sign anti-lynching legislation, while one million black soldiers fought for what this Country is supposed to represent, he sent a message not just about losing the Southern vote for his Presidency, but a much wider apathy.

The sport of lynching attracted huge crowds. Special trains would bring entire Families to watch. One murder and mutilation was witnessed by 15,000 people. One 9 year old who could easily be alive today, and if so I truly hope is sane and was only an unwilling victim of Parents stated "I have seen a man hanged" he told his Mother "now I wish I could see one burned".

What the book did not mention, and what would be devastating if done, is if the press chose to track down the participants and or the viewers. The photographs are there, the companies that made the postcards are probably gone, but the postcards were addressed. Some of the deviants of our species highlighted their faces when sending the cards to friends and Family.

What would that exposure accomplish, for what is in those pictures is part of all of us, it is our nature. We are the only species that tortures its own for pleasure and amusement. From the text;

"What was strikingly new and different in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the sadism and exhibitionism that characterized white violence. To kill the victim was not enough; the execution became public theater, a participatory ritual of torture and death, a voyeuristic spectacle prolonged as long as possible (once for 7 hours) for the benefit of the crowd".

And it gets worse, parts of victims displayed in store windows, the scramble for body parts as mementos. Piece of human bone on a watch chain perhaps? And if you can imagine, there is even more.

To this day our President can say nothing in terms of an official apology. Were he to do so the subject of reparations would arise, and that would be inconvenient now wouldn't it?

Mr. Randall Robinson wrote "The Debt What America Owes To Blacks" that I believe would interest those who have read this work. The book "The Unsteady March: The Rise And Decline of Racial Equality in America" by Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, also makes excellent reading.

Until we acknowledge as a people and as a Government, what happened in this Country for centuries, this book will be just that, a book. There will someday be a people capable of living in a Democracy and not abusing what it offers. If that Nation of People exists I have yet to read of them.

Germany took responsibility for it's crimes, why can't we. Why do we suffer as allies the Nation of Turkey that slaughtered Armenians by the millions, and to this day denied it happened?

The letter the man wrote below to his Children is beautiful. I wish I could agree with the thought that if we know our History we will not repeat it. We know what we have done, the style changes, but we as a people do not. We as a Nation do not require it of other Countries when we are arguably at our most influential. Not our business? Nonsense! Put our house in order, and if others desire our friendship, require the same. If we do not, History will repeat like the Seasons.

This book is a mirror held up to the face of America. As a European student of African American history I was not unfamiliar with its subject, yet it hit me with such force that I was left feeling numb. Numb, beyond angry.... "Without Sanctuary" belongs in every library, every household - and not just those in the United States. It is painful to view, but it reminds us who and what we, humans are.

If you think this book is solely about the past, a past overcome and left behind on the path of moral advancement, ask yourself why it was only the tiny Roth Horowitz gallery in New York that decided to exhibit the photographs from this collection (turned down by others). The exhibit subsequently moved to a bigger venue, and that, perhaps, gives us hope.

I pray for the souls of the victims, I am finding it impossible to pray for the perpetrators.

As one of the reviewers said "This book should be in every African-American home". True, but more importantly I think it should be in every WASP household and everyone elses. My father was a racist and born in 1911 and I am sure he was aware of these atrocities. (He later changed his attitude.) Well I wasn't! Sure the knowledge was somewhere in my mind, but this book has brought the horrible truth to the front of my conciousness. To have to acknowledge that people took such delight in such atrocities. That they celebrated such horror, leaves me sick at my stomach. But not speechless. Let history start reflecting our sins of the past so we may not repeat them. And thank "Touched By An Angel" for bringing this exhibit to my attention. As soon as I watched the broadcast I ran to the bookstore and purchased. (Sorry Amazon, couldn't wait.) And then went to the website. No other subject has moved me to action so quickly.

Your life will never be the same after seeing this book. I am an American Studies major, with an emphasis on African American History post-Reconstruction, and I could not make it through this book without weeping. I am also a white woman. I believe very strongly that it should be mandatory for all white people in this country to view the photographs in this book so that we may honestly confront racisim in our lives, and in the lives of those who came before us. The revolting part of this book is not so much the bodies in the trees, although it is horrible to look at them. It is more horible to look at the people doing the lynching and the smiles on their faces. This is the legacy that most white people can not bear to face and must. When white people order this book, open it and weep in genuine sorrow for the sins of our forebearers,this country will finaly begin to open an honest dialog about its bloody history. Order this book, confront yourself and begin to learn what it truly means to be American. A good companion book that really explains the historical and social aspects of lynching is Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind. These two books would be a good basic start to educating the reader about lyniching and its impact on all Americans.

I asked for (and received) this book for Christmas a few years ago and have been touched by it ever since. I've always kept it in the same spot and now that spot almost feels holy or haunted to me.

Within the covers of this book dwells the secret (but of course not secret) history of America. More than just a book of pictures... more than just a history book... this book is a stark commentary on the dreadful state of the U.S. educational system, since most school kids (even university) think lynchings were just that. A few people were hanged. The ritual, spectacle, "communal spirit", and various methods of torture and murder involved in these events are all but unknown to the majority of White America. Conveniently forgotten in the fog of time, although there hasn't been very much time yet. Just one more reason why the "hey the Civil War ended in 1865, get over it!" mentality continues. For most, the truth isn't known.

"There were postcards of the hanging" is just a Bob Dylan lyric to most people who know it... not knowing the true depth of the history behind that line. Lovingly framed, dated, autographed, etc... some of these pictures lived a life of cherished momento from a good old community picnic...er.. lynching. The two events being so interchangeable sometimes, it's tough to separate them.

The book is more than that, though. It's also a sacred offering to the people whose pictures are inside it, and to all those whose pictures are not, though they suffered similar fates but weren't photographed. It's a sad, grim "We haven't forgotten you" to them, their communities, and those still among us who lost loved ones this way.

In an earlier review I saw mention of not liking the layout of the book... the way the pictures are alone and then the last half of the book has the corresponding date, story, details, etc... Me, I love the way the book is set up. I think having the story right next to the picture may dillute the pictures for some readers. The people in these pictures suffered some of the ultimate violations. At the very least their pictures deserve their own space. The stories do indeed add layers of pain, brutality and American history to the pictures, but the pictures will also haunt you by themselves. I think this book is exactly as it should be. To keep the picture and it's corresponding story together, I just use 2 bookmarks when I read and re-read this book. One in the picture section, one in the stories section.

This book should be in every American History class.