Without Sanctuary. - Review - book review

WITHOUT SANCTUARY James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack Twin Palms Press, February 2000, $60.00, ISBN 0-944-09269-1

In 1960, two young Georgia boys were riding bikes on a country road when they saw the body of a black man hanging from a tree branch. Local officials investigated and decided that the victim killed himself. The photograph of his dead body is the last lynching chronicled by Allen, Als, Lewis and Litwack, the earliest recorded in this book took place in 1870 in Montana. Twenty-three states, including several in the North, are represented in this sobering, historically important anthology.

Most lynching victims were black men, but black women and non-blacks were also lynched across the country in this final, brutal act of power. Many of the black men were also castrated and burned to death. Laura Nelson, from Oklahoma, was raped and then hung from a bridge alongside her teenaged son. Crowds of white men, women and children, many in holiday dress, eagerly consumed the agony of the victims. Nearly one hundred photographs and postcards displayed in this book represent only a fraction of the thousands of victims "officially" counted between the 1880s and 1960s. Whether posed or spontaneous, all of the photographs capture a horrific public ritual that determined the limits of white supremacist privilege.

The historical essay by Leon F. Litwack, along with reflections and background information by Hilton Als and James Allen, help to contextualize the images within the development of a post-Civil War American society. As Congressman John Lewis writes, "these photographs bear witness to the hangings, burnings, castrations and torture of an American holocaust."

Barbara Lewis is currently editing an anthology entitled Spectacular Savagery: Lynching in America.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group