Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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In short, Allen’s collection of photographs reveals lynching postcards to be racial pornography of the most extreme sort, equivalent to stills from racial snuff films. I recently visited the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York City to gaze again at that photograph, and 59 other images of lethal brutality meeted out to blacks by the vigilante's noose.

But you weren't part of the crowd that gathered after the lynching in 1915 of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tenn. Many of these photographs were taken to be sold as souvenir postcards, but people also collected even more grisly keepsakes—fingers, toes and ears—from lynching victims, including sexual organs from those who had been alleged rapists. Cole Blease recerived a finger of a lynched black man in the mail and promptly planted it in the gubernatorial garden. 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. Although this material has been available to scholars for two years, this is the first time any of it has been exhibited.I noticed there were some white people who were victims, to me that makes the level of animal like conduct more apparent. The evil on these pages is the evil one imagines in a pack of wild rabid dogs - savage, arbitrary, unspeakably cruel. The 60 photographs are of American lynchings that took place between 1883 and 1960, mostly, but not always in the South. In spite of the jarring effect the pics have on the viewer, I feel it is an excellent reference book and sheds valuable insight on the attitudes that formed the historical relationship between blacks and whites in America.

I was not totally ignorant of the lynching phenomenon in the United States, as my parents and grandparents told me all about it from the time I was young (and yes, they were all opposed to it. In a climate where lynching was an acceptable expression of the hatred of a more-powerful community against a less-powerful one, viewing lynchings became another fun family activity, a festival of hate.

Without Sanctuary provides a photographic record of the phenomenon of lynching, reproducing 98 images, many of them from postcards made as commemorative souvenirs. Looking at the photographs of the broken, burned and mutilated victims in Without Sanctuary—some of whom, themselves, may have committed atrocious crimes—the terrible truth, the only "explanation" of lynching, is that given half a chance, too many men will act brutally.