Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Lynching became America's national pastime after the Civil War, at least in the South. From the 1880s to the 1930s the US averaged over 100 lynchings a year, mostly in the South, over 75% of the victims were black.

This book brings a powerful light to a dark dirty corner of the American experience and psyche. This book is savage, gut-wrenching, and profoundly and deeply disturbing. The photos bear witness to monstrous crimes against humanity. The charred and mutilated bodies of the dead are shocking, and the depraved lust-filled feral faces of the lynch mobs are truly disgusting.

The oppression of slavery gave way to the viciousness and animalism of Jim Crow, and for 100 years the "vicious racists" (as Dr. King called them) ruled supreme in the southern USA, as evil in their stupidity and cowardly fear as the Nazis of Germany were in their arrogance and megalomania.

There are Holocaust deniers. Here in the US we have slavery and Jim Crow deniers, and racism deniers. This book and these awful pictures certainly do not support the happy mythology of the Lost Cause or the "New South"; nor the myth of color-blind justice in the USA. The evil on these pages is the evil one imagines in a pack of wild rabid dogs - savage, arbitrary, unspeakably cruel.

This book is a powerful dose of anti-denial. Most people know what slavery was really about, and have an idea about lynching. But just seeing the "strange fruit of southern trees" is like Eve eating the apple in Eden. It moved me, and I cannot go back to the lies and denial and the forgetting. Kudos to Mr. Allen for bringing these postcards and photos to our faces, so that this pornography of evil, stupidity, self-righteousness and barbarism can be seen for what it was, what it is, and what it still might be, so we can say "Never Again" to this Holocaust too.

Once you see the pages, issues like racial profiling, proposition 209, Jasper, Texas, etc., and the continued discrimination of non-white people begins to make more sense.

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.

The facts of lynching should not be news to an educated American of any age. Pictures such as these may be found in most any history of civil rights book. Yet this is the only book known to me to collect these images in such a large, apparently well-researched collection. The images, many of which were actually made into souvenir postcards, are well-reproduced and annotated. The accompanying captions are sometimes garnished with quotations on lynching by famous black Americans like Richard Wright and James Weldon Johnson. Wherever possible, the date, location, circumstances, and identity of the victims are given. The text says that there were a little less than 5,000 known lynchings, though the number is probably higher.

The text of the book may be skipped without loss. It is mostly either psycho-political jargon, delivered in the hideous academic prose typical of higher education nowadays, or leftist agitprop, which does not shrink from implying that all modern conservatives are lynchers at heart. The pictures are the story here, not the commentary.

Photography delivers impact, not context. Yet there is no mitigation possible here. White American citizens, filled with righteous wrath, without fear of and sometimes with the complicity of law enforcement, regularly committed extra-legal executions within living memory. They stormed prisons, seized inmates, and killed them, sometimes in horribly baroque fashion. If this fact is too dark to bear, then you might also read something like _Speak Now Against The Day_, which tells how black and white citizens tried to co-operate for civil rights during the same time period. But see (not necessarily read) this book by all means. As a spiritual emetic, it will purge a lot of sugar-coating off of a lot of people's memories.