Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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Another image of a lynching that took place in Durant, Oklahoma, of Lee Hall (ph), I believe, has scratched into the negative the words, "Coon cooking." We are not good because we have great principles. We have principles that should guide us, but that are honored as nice ideas but not as boundaries or even as goals.

The image is horrifying: it haunts us. But these are not our spectres. This public murder, perpetrated so far away from us in space and time, is not our crime. GROSS: So you're supposed to call him and ask him to do your family photos after seeing this lynching? Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America pdf Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in AmericaAccording to one post, Abe Smith was the last person to be lynched in the North of the country. Most Images of lynching are disturbing, and minors should avoid watching these pics. Social Media Links: ALLEN: Grew up in Winter Park, Florida, a large family, large Catholic family, 11 kids and a loving mom and dad that were very open to current events and new ways of thinking and very, very anti any form of racism. You -- we couldn't even use the word Jew in terms of a description of someone. Would have been very painful, difficult for me to even say somebody was Jewish, because I'd be so afraid of hurting their feelings.

GROSS: There's one photograph from January of 1916, the lynching of John Richards. And Richards is hanging from a tree with his pants pulled down. And several of the guys responsible for the lynching are smiling over an open coffin that is waiting for Richards. And this is a photograph from Goldsboro, North Carolina.

The faces of white men, women and children gathered at these scenes express a certain satisfaction. What is more chilling is tha unmistakable air of celebration, evil posed as righteousness. GROSS: Have you found postcards that were passed down as family memorabilia, where the families are still kind of proud to have them, proud of what they represent? Without Sanctuary presents the pictures in a way that workss against the utterly casual and disdainful spirit in which they were taken...[It is] a powerful document of repressed history. The Village Voice - C. Carr BIANCULLI: If you're a "Homicide" fan and can catch Richard Belzer in a surprise appearance like that, then "The Beat" can't be beat. To view these images, at an even greater remove from us, is to feel complicity in our bones; to understand that there is no “them” when it comes to the lynching public, to understand that when public morality and political complicity allow for lynching to become a frequent and acceptable form of violence, we become the crowd. And this applies to elites as much as to the “uneducated mob” we may think of, in our ignorance, as the chief perpetrators of these acts. As James Allen says, in all these photographs, “…the communities’ best citizens lurking just outside the frame.”

Hilton Als (born 1960) is a writer and theater critic. He holds professorial positions at the University of California in Berkeley and Columbia University, and serves as a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker. In 2017 he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Als has also curated several group art exhibitions including Forces in Nature at Victoria Miro Gallery and Alice Neel: Uptown at David Zwirner Gallery. GROSS: I'm glad you mentioned Leo Frank. You have, I think, a couple of pictures of him in your collection. He is perhaps the most famous victim, the victim whose story a lot of people already know. The messages add a -- like reading a diary, a heightened awareness to the attitudes of the people of the time. NPR, CNN, CSPAN, New York Times, LA Times Frequently Asked Questions about Lynching: Q: What is a lynching? ALLEN: Absolutely not. Couldn't have believed it. You can't believe it. It just doesn't fit into our sensibilities today.But the reality of these gruesome photos is something I was totally unprepared for (my textbooks didn't exactly have any pictures in them.) GROSS: My guest, James Allen, has collected picture postcards of lynching in his new book, "Without Sanctuary." Is this a place we could go, or a place we have already been? Perhaps over the past years some of us have wondered how a 14-year-old child could stand to film a murder as it was being committed by his uncle, and make of it a viral video on WhatsApp? Or how people could take selfies next to a bound-up adivasi man before he was beaten to death?