Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

By: James Allen

"Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe--don't want to believe--that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust." -John Lewis, US Congressman

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 Black Americans between 1882 and 1950. Many times, a photographer was present to capture these events. Without Sanctuary preserves...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0944092691
• ISBN13: 9780944092699
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Twin Palms Publishers
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 2.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.9" x 10.2"

Customer Reviews

A gift

This is a powerful book. I am gifting this book to ALL of my nieces and nephews to remind them of the senseless acts of White-Americans towards Black people. To let them know that they should not take life for granted and shoot for the stars!

A Slap in the Face by Reality, a Stark and Horrific History Everyone Should Know

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... but what a sin it would be for those victims in these images to have suffered so and fade into obscurity. In this book are a barrage of assaulting images of atrocities humanity has perpetrated. Both executioners and victims are here frozen in time. I cannot say I enjoyed this book, but I appreciate the efforts of the author and publisher to preserve what is left of this proof, lest we forget. (contains graphic and deeply disturbing images and any available context for the same)

Must read

I wanted this book too give away but it cost the same here no saving really. Im saying to everyone buy this book you will not regrets adding this well written history to your library.

It CAN happen here

It did. I live in Atlanta, just a few miles from some of the trees in this book, just a few miles from Stone Mountain were they lit crosses up until the 1960s. Evil walked the land HERE - not in far off Europe, HERE, under the Stars and Stripes. 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.

truly "without sanctuary"

I first saw this book on a friend's coffee table, noticing the narrow black and white image, and taking note of the title, I opened the book. My first words were "Oh, my God", the next sentence was "Jesus Christ this book is horrible!" I believe that an image can speak volumes, Without Sanctuary virtually screamed at me. I have an undergraduate degree in African American history and a master's degree in American history, I am extremely familiar with the subject matter portrayed in these pages, but to see that horrifying collection of gruesome images, in a postcard format was almost more than I could handle. 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 would highly recommend it to all people, especially white people, who often shy away from the more grusome parts of their past.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.

There's Hell on the Other Side of this Keyhole

Photography as a technological advance changed the way mankind looked at the world and himself. Photography provided concrete proof of instances long dissipated and gone under. The power of photography has not waned and the collection of photos and text entitled 'Without Sanctuary:Lynching Photography in America'(ltd.ed. of 6000) stands as cold proof. The cover of this volume is spare and stark, an offset excerpt of one man's demise. It is as though we have cracked open a previously untested door and, adjusting for the new light, find our eyes bringing to focus what we now know must be hell. Sometimes it is surprisingly hard to look away. When I was in the fifth grade the television mini-series 'Roots' gathered the nation on a Sunday evening for its first episode. In that episode the character of Kunta Kinte is bull-whipped for refusing to accept his slave name, 'Toby.' The savagery and degradation visited upon Lavar Burton's screen persona shook me to my core. I quietly went upstairs to the bathroom and sobbed. Perhaps a person can be so shaken and taken only once, for the unsettling chill that 'Without Sanctuary' produces in me has dampened my eyes not at all. The inhumanity and arbitrary bloodshed captured therein brings a strange calm, an understanding. To be mesmerized by these photos of mob violence is to in some small but undeniably important way put hands on the beast, to learn its contours and edges. A good many of the photos are taken from postcards which were printed as keepsakes. It is clear from such a scenario that the hell black deeds captured in these photos were meant for mass consumption and I am relieved to know that, with the advent of this collection, they are that much less likely to be forgotten. The message intended by those who manufactured these snapshots has thusly been usurped for a higher cause, namely, truth in recollection. Much will be made of the 'everyday' nature of the perpetrators, the smiling children giggling beneath dangling bodies, the easy non-chalance of men in straw hats and derbies slumped against convenient trees while another man burns. However, if I may say so, I find nothing ordinary or 'everyday' about these people who traipse about charred corpses as though they were at the county fair. 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. In closing, consider the following note written on the back of a postcard which depicts a badly burned and legless corpse."This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe."