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For African Americans, Justice Was Often at the End of a Rope: Without Sanctuary; Lynching Photography in America
THIS HANDSOMELY PRODUCED, folio-size book of photographs showing African Americans and others being lynched is not the kind of volume that should be left lying on a coffee table. The images it contains are disturbing, even gut wrenching. The distended necks, mutilated bodies, and charred remains of what had once been human beings are hard to look at. Many people might prefer not to see them at all. In a recent New York Times essay Brent Staples, having just viewed an exhibit of these pictures at the New York Historical Society, confessed that he could "not bear seeing them." He concluded that "the ultimate effect" of "having these horrendous pictures loose in the culture" might be "to normalize images that are in fact horrible." The author of one of the book's introductory essays, the African-American writer Hilton Als, seems to agree. He assumes, he tells us, an "aggressive tone to establish a little distance from these images of the despised and dead, the better to determine the usefulness of this project, which escapes me [italics added], but doesn't preclude my writing about it." What he saw in the pictures was not just history but "the way I'm regarded by any number of people: as a nigger. And it is as one that I felt my neck snap and my heart break while looking at these pictures." On the other hand, Congressman John Lewis, in his brief foreword, expresses the "hope that Without Sanctuary will inspire us, the living, and as yet unborn generations, to be more compassionate, loving, and caring. We must prevent anything like this from ever happening again."
James Allen of Atlanta, the collector of these photographs, is not heard from until the afterword that closes the volume. There he describes himself as "a picker," who travels about acquiring antiques and other objects of interest or curiosity from families that want to make room in their attics or cellars. After he came upon the fast postcard of a lynching, he made a special effort to acquire more. "Ironically," he writes, "the pursuit of these images has brought to me a great sense of purpose and...