Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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I was really struck when I attended the exhibit when you look at the postcards in person, it’s a much deeper experience,” she said. I don't see how anyone can do that or deny it after reading this book; after seeing what is still going on today, just in a new way. The photos are part of the Allen/Littlefield Collection and are on deposit in the Special Collections Department, Robert W. though it's unclear if that's entirely true) that looks like he just stepped out of the Gap was lynched in 1960 doesn't need to be explained.

C., on June 13 at a news conference with Senate sponsors of the resolution as well as survivors and family members of lynching victims.

As James Allen says, in all these photographs, “…the communities’ best citizens lurking just outside the frame. It is a photograph washed in sepia tones that lend its scene—the 1930 lynching of Tommy Shipp and Abe Smith and an approving white mob—an otherwordliness. This book contains images of lynched Italian immigrants and several white lynching victims (much to my shock. These are the crowds that would routinely come to view and participate in the lynchings of the time, creating an atmosphere that was cheerful, celebratory, festive. Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society.

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. One thing that is never talked about is the post-trauma that the collective black community has to deal with everyday; it is a trauma that is never allowed to heal due to fear. Perhaps because Allen is a self-proclaimed “picker,” a pejorative Southernism term applied to a man with no apparent job other than wandering the roads of his home state to acquire things deemed “telling.After all, it was O’Connor who noted of the Southern grotesque, in its human incarnation, the lack of mere humor or quirky diversion that characterized “Gothic” or “grotesque” elements in other regions’ literature.

In fact, Klan members, masked and working under cover of night, are somehow less troubling than the “ordinary” white citizens of Dixie seen in these pages—men, women, and children who were photographed while participating, actively or complicitly, in the torture, mutilation, burning alive, and/or hanging of black citizens in broad daylight and in public. To question the legacy of this trauma and the human incubation of such parenting is to approach answering why we continue to "deal with" racism today. The power of photography has not waned and the collection of photos and text entitled 'Without Sanctuary:Lynching Photography in America'(ltd.Indeed, at times these “best citizens” chose to walk right into the frame; very often they set the stage.