Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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Without Sanctuary presents the pictures in a way that workss against the utterly casual and disdainful spirit in which they were taken. I sometimes say I can't understand the depravity and wickedness of humanity in that we do these things AND also claim to be a great nation--but it is who we are, and nothing will change about our present until we both look at the past and repent, and change our behaviors today. Looking at this picture, looking at the rest of the pictures in the book if we ever do (something that most of us will never do, something that only some of us should ever do), thinking of that nine-year old child, the question we should ask ourselves is this: what does it take to become one of the crowd? Ordinary people, ordinary children, ordinary crowds, ordinary postcards, but when we look back at them now, they have the power to, as Allen says, “turn the living to pillars of salt.

Forces whites to get out of dry drunk addict denial when they look at and read the captions of this very important book.Many of the photos from Allen’s collection are now anthologized or routinely used in news reports and documentaries. One of the photographs depicts my known family ancestor, so I wrapped my arms around him and thanked him for his life, for his contributions, for the smiles he must’ve given his beloveds. I am gifting this book to ALL of my nieces and nephews to remind them of the senseless acts of White-Americans towards Black people. More than 35 years after he first saw a photograph of a lynching, James Allen says the images haven’t lost their ability to outrage him.

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. When, after all, did one ever hear of men of either color being lynched to protect vulnerable African-American women? Some years later, Allen came into the possession of a photo showing the lynching of Laura Nelson and her 14-year-old son from a bridge in Oklahoma in 1911. Or, for that matter, a decapitated and dismembered man photographed, with a warning about not speaking to white women.

The oppression of slavery gave way to the viciousness and animalism of Jim Crow, and for 100 years the "vicious racists" (as Dr.

Leon Litwack (1929–2021) was a professor of American History at the University of California in Berkeley from 1964 to 2007. The essays at the beginning are also useful, too, though Hilton Als' is the only one that will stand up to the test of time. While I completely agree with the observations of Litwack, the book's photos show a propensity for lynch justice against all sorts of minorities: Italians, Jews, and poor whites etc. Spoiler must of the time in the book you will se white people smiling while the brothas are bieng hanged, that should tell you something!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. 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. 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. This picture, believe it or not, was the only positive element in reading this collection--someone tried to mail that cruel travesty as a postcard, and over the stamp on the other side was written "unsendable. 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.