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243 of 254 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excerpts from a letter to my adult children, March 16, 2000
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
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by Harriet A. Washington
by Kashif Malik Hassan-El
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