Printer-friendly versionLearn how 10 years of collecting lynching photographs led to a public dialogue about this dark episode in American history.
According to the most conservative estimates, some 5,000 people — mostly African American men — were lynched in the United States between 1882 (the first year reliable statistics were gathered) and 1968 (the year in which many scholars believe the classic forms of lynching disappeared).
Today, in Duluth and other communities across the nation, the very photographs that earlier generations of White citizens took and distributed as postcards as a way to affirm the oppressive message of racial violence are now helping activists and educators address the lingering impact of such incidents.
In addition to the stories carefully preserved in some families and rejected by others, newspaper accounts and other evidence of lynchings have often been available in local library archives, for those willing to do the research.
The photographs, however — which in ensuing decades often disappeared from public collections and passed out of private circulation — exert a force that no written description can match.
Atlanta antique dealer James Allen had long recognized the documentary value of lynching photographs. In 2000, his decade-long journey of canvassing the South for copies of these rare and disturbing pictures culminated in a traveling exhibit and accompanying book, titled Without Sanctuary ($60).
Like the Duluth postcard, which is included in the book and exhibit, many of the photographs in Without Sanctuary depict brutality on two levels: the crimes themselves and the treatment of the murders as carnival spectacles.
The public display of these images — to no small controversy — has opened a new phase in the acknowledgement of and dialogue about this dark episode in American history.
Despite its recent and terrifying reign, the nation's legacy of lynching remains less known than either slavery or segregation.
"This is not an easy history to assimilate," historian Leon F. Litwack writes in the introduction to Without Sanctuary. "Obviously, it is easier to choose the path of collective amnesia, to erase such memories, to sanitize our past."
To purchase a copy of the book:
Twin Palms Publishing
TwelveTrees Press
54 1/2 East San Francisco St.
Santa Fe, NM , 87501
(800) 797-0680
www.twinpalms.com
For information on the traveling Without Sanctuary exhibit, visit www.withoutsanctuary.com.
