I would highly recommend it to all people, especially white people, who often shy away from the more grusome parts of their past. James Allen is an American antique collector, known in particular for his collection of 145 photographs of lynchings in America, published in 2000 with Jon Lewis as Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. TV critic David Bianculli has a review and an explanation of why the series is showing up on the UPN network. Cecil plays Mike, who's just popped the question to his girlfriend, played by Poppy Montgomery (ph), and Ruffalo plays Zane, who's just invited his new girlfriend, played by Heather Burns, to move in with him, even though she's clearly a dangerously unstable woman.

The reasons are, one, Heather Burns's strong work as the wacky girlfriend; two, to support UPN in its uncharacteristic experiment with quality television; and three, because Fontana and Levinson are employing many familiar faces from their other series as guest stars, like this sudden drop-in from next week's show, who pops up while Mike and Zane are standing over a dead body at a domestic murder scene. Folks whose lives revolve around such things as collecting lynching photos, O’Connor wrote, “carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity.But it is with a great deal of caution that I recommend this great book to my daughter or to any other sensitive reader. John Lewis, US CongressmanThe Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 Black Americans between 1882 and 1950. This is a book I'd rather didn't exist in that it documents with a clear eye the monstrous torture of black Americans by white Americans through lynching, burning, stabbing, and mutilating, all done with great cheer and vigor, with family and friends, church members and community stalwarts, grinning as the camera focuses on their deeds and their whole-hearted approval. I was surprised to see that the first photos are of white men, several of which are in the west - California, Kansas and Minnesota.

GROSS: One thing I want to mention about the photograph of this lynching is that, you know, as you said, the person's body was burned before it was lynched. A particular image in that series is Jess Washington hanging from a recently raised telephone pole, and he has been -- this is after he was tortured and burned alive at the stake -- that they dragged him six miles to Robinson, Texas, and hung him up for a crowd to see. The evil acts are rooted in FEAR; and as long as white FEAR exist the potential for that evil to re-exist will be present.Most of the pictures of lynchings are pictures of men being lynched, but there are a couple of women. The collection includes images of the lynching in 1911 of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and of Leo Frank in 1915 near Marietta, Georgia. I thought of Als’s essay for a long time before finishing this piece, before choosing to refer to the image that I have, before exposing these bodies to another set of eyes in another place far away. GROSS: Have you found postcards that were passed down as family memorabilia, where the families are still kind of proud to have them, proud of what they represent?

What is almost more horrible than the pictures of the corpses is the faces of the spectators at these scenes of ritual violence. Tens of thousands of African-American men, women, and children were lynched by mobs in the United States between 1882 and 1968.ALLEN: Grew up in Winter Park, Florida, a large family, large Catholic family, 11 kids and a loving mom and dad that were very open to current events and new ways of thinking and very, very anti any form of racism.

But the good church-going Christian mobs who committed the atrocities described here had no such prohibition in mind. One person interviewed in the book comments that in the late 19th and early 20th Century, it was always "open season" on Negroes, who were viewed as less than human - and they were tortured with methods not even used on animals. But it really came out of the prolific number of images that were being sold that proved to be an embarrassment to state governments and city governments, and to regions like the South, that was being harmed by the rash of lynchings over the decades, both nationally and internationally.

Every one of the cards of Leo Frank were made in the thousands and sold on the streets outside the funeral parlor where his body was taken to. The stars of "The Beat" are Derek Cecil and Mark Ruffalo, who play uniformed cops whose lives are hectic on and off the job. ALLEN: We have talked to families that do have them, and consider them an important part of their family history that they're not ashamed of.