Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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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.

Between 1877 and 1950, more than 360 African-Americans were murdered by mobs in Alabama and more than 4,000 were killed nationwide. But the ground slowly drops, until the spectators find themselves under the names of the dead – hanging over them.While I still adhere to the need to face the past fully and honestly if the US is to move forward, I don't have a ready answer for the question "At what point does documentation of horror become pornographic/exploitative?

Some years later, Allen came into the possession of a photo showing the lynching of Laura Nelson and her 14-year-old son from a bridge in Oklahoma in 1911.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.

O'Connor, always smarter than I'll ever hope to be, would have shared Melissa Harris-Perry's view of the now commonly used term "lynching" in regard to political figures, which she invoked recently in the NATION, citing both Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain. I'm a white man, so I cannot pretend to understand the sort of horrors that minorities have faced throughout history in America. I noticed there were some white people who were victims, to me that makes the level of animal like conduct more apparent. A Tiktok creator mentioned this book by name as notable photographic evidence of events in the timeline of human history that most would prefer to forget.While I completely agree with the observations of Litwack, the book's photos show a propensity for lynch justice against all sorts of minorities: Italians, Jews, and poor whites etc. Or, for that matter, a decapitated and dismembered man photographed, with a warning about not speaking to white women.