Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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ALLEN: I had trouble making it through a day in college, and so I left, and decided to do what really enthused me and energized me, and that was to get out and find great things. Several years later, we got the lynching postcard of Laura Nelson, and that made us aware of the fact that there was a tradition of this type of photography as well as violence.

BELZER: No, heard it on the squeek box, thought I'd stop by and take a look for old time's sake. I'm nostalgic for a good homicide. I got to tell you, this looks like a garden variety domestic accident to me. Without Sanctuary is a collection of 98 photographs of lynchings throughout America, culled from the archive of James Allen who, as an antique dealer, came across them in his travels. It is a strange and terrifying book. To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. They took Laura and her son to jail. Laura claimed that she did the shooting. She desperately tried to protect her son. She begged them to kill her in the prison. He was only 14 years old. They came in the middle of the night and took them by wagon, 40 men, and wagoned them 12 miles over this shiny new bridge over the Canadian River, and raped Laura Nelson and hung them from this bridge. James Allen (born 1954) is an American collector best known for his vast collection of photographs of lynchings in America. Some of his collected items are now located in the Smithsonian and the High Museum of Art.JAMES ALLEN, "WITHOUT SANCTUARY": One of the postcards that and the incidents that has really disturbed me with time is the image of Jess Washington of Waco, Texas. We have in our archives several images of that lynching. Particularly disturbing is the mass of people, 15,000 people, that came to relish the torture that day. And some of the photos were taken from the mayor's office window. I read something recently that reminded me that, in the time of Shakespeare, the standard punishment for a Jesuit priest, caught ministering to recusants in England, was to burn his entrails while he was still alive. ALLEN: I actually started on a street corner in Atlanta, Georgia, on the corner of Clifton and Ponce de Leon, and I would go to stores out in the country and borrow their furniture and line them up along the street with signs just like the old Burma-Shave signs. (laughs) "Old chairs for sale." And then the next telephone pole I'd put, "Oak table for sale." And people would pull over and buy things from me. And so I used that to buy my first van and to get into business where I could travel the country roads and find things.

The image is horrifying: it haunts us. But these are not our spectres. This public murder, perpetrated so far away from us in space and time, is not our crime. GROSS: Do you think that we can learn a lot about the history of lynchings, who was lynched, who was responsible for the lynchings, by looking at these photographs?ALLEN: Yes, absolutely. These postcards were the most common form of souvenirs of these lynchings that they correspond, in a sanitized way, to the harvesting and gathering of body parts and ashes, hair. Many victims were completely stripped as people took pieces of their clothings and their shoes. They mounted these in frames and made trophies of them. They put them in jars and put them in their store windows. They traded them like trade cards. GROSS: How did you find out the story? Was it reported in a newspaper? Were you able to find it there?

ALLEN: Well, the postmaster general actually outlawed any images that were inciteful, could incite violence. That was the general nature of that postal -- change of postal regulations. 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. ALLEN: I'll try to tell things that aren't as known. Leo Frank's case was extremely complex. He was doomed from the outset, from the moment that he was called in the middle of the night to come down to his factory, his pencil factory, till he was lynched, pulled out of a hospital bed on a prison farm where he was supposed to be protected -- he had had his throat slashed by an inmate -- and lynched.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth I think Lynching is a closed topic. And this book is the definitive explanation. First of all, without being absurdly cliche (minus the punctuation marks) about what a picture is worth, you only need to see the accidental photgraphic essay on Froggy's demise to grasp how big a deal this is. The essays at the beginning are also useful, too, though Hilton Als' is the only one that will stand up to the test of time. Without Sanctuary Pictures write-up has all the links and information related to the lynching pic collection book released in 2000.