Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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GROSS: My guest, James Allen, has collected picture postcards of lynchings in his new book, "Without Sanctuary." 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. A place to take your nine-year-old to see hangings and burnings and things further still. ALLEN: Absolutely not. Couldn't have believed it. You can't believe it. It just doesn't fit into our sensibilities today.

GROSS: Now, are you concerned that you're driving up the price for these things and that -- for people who -- for those people who are racist and own these cards, that you're helping to make them wealthier? And we realized that if we want to gather as many of these as we can, we need to find them from all sources, and that includes people who collect these, because they glorify, they're still glorifying the event.What was the function of these lynching postcards? Was this supposed to, like, commemorate the hanging that you attended? Without Sanctuary is 98 four-color plates from the Without Sanctuary Collection of lynchings photographs in America. GROSS: There's one photograph from January of 1916, the lynching of John Richards. And Richards is hanging from a tree with his pants pulled down. And several of the guys responsible for the lynching are smiling over an open coffin that is waiting for Richards. And this is a photograph from Goldsboro, North Carolina. Diann Blakely: Very, very provocative. Reviewing WITHOUT SANCTUARY for the SCENE, which frightened me so badly I wrapped the book in plastic and left it on the Boss's front porch--it seemed so evil I didn't want it in my house, I explained, though I'm sure he thought I was crazy--but I'm going to post this with my piece on NBCC/Goodreads, for I've honestly never considered this POV.

Mr. Allen, editor of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Publishers), talked about the June 13, 2005, Senate… ALLEN: Oh, absolutely. The people who were ashamed of these lynchings left, people who were disgusted with the theater and the painful torture, brutality, they're not in these photos. The people who are left are the people who were proud, they gloried in the event just like a dog that rolls around in dirt. They wanted to be there, and they wanted people to see them.ALLEN: They were -- besides the obvious function of sensationalism and the profitable nature of these images for photographers, many of them were sold on the streets, in drugstores, through the mail, a photographer could, I'm sure, gain an annual income off of a single lynching incident. They served to bond the white community together in supremacy. They also were news events that were highly covered by the press, so these images were small newspapers that people posted through the mail and sent to their relatives to say, This is what happened in our home town.