Rating: 
Summary: The camera didn't forget
Review: I asked for (and received) this book for Christmas a few years ago and have been touched by it ever since. I've always kept it in the same spot and now that spot almost feels holy or haunted to me.
Within the covers of this book dwells the secret (but of course not secret) history of America. More than just a book of pictures... more than just a history book... this book is a stark commentary on the dreadful state of the U.S. educational system, since most school kids (even university) think lynchings were just that. A few people were hanged. The ritual, spectacle, "communal spirit", and various methods of torture and murder involved in these events are all but unknown to the majority of White America. Conveniently forgotten in the fog of time, although there hasn't been very much time yet. Just one more reason why the "hey the Civil War ended in 1865, get over it!" mentality continues. For most, the truth isn't known.
"There were postcards of the hanging" is just a Bob Dylan lyric to most people who know it... not knowing the true depth of the history behind that line. Lovingly framed, dated, autographed, etc... some of these pictures lived a life of cherished momento from a good old community picnic...er.. lynching. The two events being so interchangeable sometimes, it's tough to separate them.
The book is more than that, though. It's also a sacred offering to the people whose pictures are inside it, and to all those whose pictures are not, though they suffered similar fates but weren't photographed. It's a sad, grim "We haven't forgotten you" to them, their communities, and those still among us who lost loved ones this way.
In an earlier review I saw mention of not liking the layout of the book... the way the pictures are alone and then the last half of the book has the corresponding date, story, details, etc... Me, I love the way the book is set up. I think having the story right next to the picture may dillute the pictures for some readers. The people in these pictures suffered some of the ultimate violations. At the very least their pictures deserve their own space. The stories do indeed add layers of pain, brutality and American history to the pictures, but the pictures will also haunt you by themselves. I think this book is exactly as it should be. To keep the picture and it's corresponding story together, I just use 2 bookmarks when I read and re-read this book. One in the picture section, one in the stories section.
This book should be in every American History class.
Rating:
Summary: truly "without sanctuary"
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: truly "without sanctuary"
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: distrubing
Review: I have to say this is truly a horrifying book, because it isn't made up or staged, there are almost 100 plates and they are real photographs from our history. and as horrifying as the pictures are, i think the plate descriptions of the circumstances are even more horrifying. this is a very important book, and one you definately should have. the other thing i have to say about this book is the cover design: it's excellent for the subject matter. a plain black cover, with a narrow strip, only slightly larger than the hanging man, set off to the right.
Rating:
Summary: early photo collector must!
Review: If you are a collector of early photos,and you also collect books on early photo collections,this book is a must as an extremely important part of your collection.It contains several pages of readable text on some noted lynching events in small but sufficient enough detail,descriptions of plates and their photo types in the back,and what other early historical photo collection book are you going such a wealth of this type of portrait?I rate this one up there with Stanley Burn's sleeping beauty(another important photo collector book).There is no doubt that this book is a must!Just get it!
Rating: 
Summary: gruesome yes, unusual through history, no
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: It CAN happen here
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Excerpts from a letter to my adult children
Review: Kids, Thanks for the birthday present I suggested, the book "Without Sanctuary," published last month. It arrived yesterday and I sat down and read it from cover to cover. The book is horrifying, fascinating and chastening. You might think it a strange or grotesque request from me. Its not, and I feel compelled to write a little "book report" to show how much I appreciate it. If you did not know, the book contains photographs and several essays which document the practice of lynching in America, which reached its peak from 1890 through 1930. The victims, three-quarters of them black, were people you might be afraid of just because of the way they looked. We can all identify with that fear. If we had photographs from the Inquisition or a thousand other atrocities they would look much the same. You can always spot the victims in the photographs, but you cannot tell the perpetrators from the bystanders. This particular behavior, lynching, did not take place far away or long ago; that it is so contemporaneous makes it so excruciating. Looking at these pictures, which were taken during the years my grandparents and great-grandparents were in their prime, makes it difficult to view the events as extraordinary. This is America, these are people I could have met in church when I was young. These are people my parents and grandparents must have KNOWN, some of them anyway. I don't think my grandparents would have participated in such events, but I don't really know and they certainly would not have mentioned it to me. The bulk of the terror took place in the South, but the photographs show mob killings everywhere, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Indiana, California, everywhere. After the second word war, historians tried to explain what was so different about Nazi Germany. What was so rotten in one of most advanced cultures that produced the Holocaust? If we could explain why Germany was uniquely cursed, then we would understand why such things could never happen here. Now the remarkable thing is how ordinary the Germans were. This is not to diminish the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust. But I think, whether as victims, oppressors or guilty bystanders, horrible things can overtake all of us everywhere. When I was in my early twenties I interviewed General Lewis Hershey, who headed the military draft during the Viet Nam war. He was a devil to those of us who thought the war was stupid and pointless. We all knew his name and hated him; he personified the arbitrary and complete power of the draft over our lives. I was a really green reporter and he was a folksy, avuncular old pro. I didn't come away with a usable story, but the light came on in my head. I realized that evil people could fuss over their dogs and love children and seem very, very ordinary, just like my neighbors. I had demonized Hershey completely and here he was, human and likeable. Shuddering at my naiveté, I learned that decent, fine people were capable of sending you to die. Not evil at all, by his lights. Thirty years later, when I see the neighbors of some horrible murderer say on TV what a regular fellow he was and how they can't understand how he could have done such a thing, I understand. I did not appreciate what a festive occasion lawless torture, mutilation and murder could be in the modern world. White people were killed too, but virtually never skinned, mutilated or burned. Usually just black people in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was fully-developed civil terror, calculated to spread fear and keep some people from doing anything which would call attention to themselves. It wasn't open civil war as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, present day Kosovo, or one of the other outrages in the news. But it was here, and it was us, and the attitudes that produced the lynchings aren't very far below the surface of in awful lot of ordinary, upstanding Americans today. Leon F. Litwak in "Without Sanctuary:" "The photographs stretch our credulity, even numb our minds and senses to the full extent of the horror, but they must be examined if we are to understand how normal men and women could live with, participate in, and defend such atrocities, even reinterpret them so they would not see themselves or be perceived as less than civilized. The men and women who tortured, dismembered, and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. Few had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the outburst of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians but the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another. For the men and women who comprised these mobs, as for those who remained silent and indifferent or who provided scholarly or scientific explanations, this was the highest idealism in the service of their race. One has only to view the self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they posed beneath black people hanging from a rope or next to the charred remains of a Negro who had been burned to death. What is most disturbing about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of the crimes were ordinary people, not so different from ourselves - merchants, farmers, laborers, machine operators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, policemen, students; they were family men and women, good churchgoing folk who came to believe that keeping black people in their place was nothing less than pest control, a way of combating an epidemic or virus that if not checked would be detrimental to the health and security of the community." Change a few words and the book might be talking about ordinary Germans in the early 1940's. But its not. It speaks to us, here, now. If we understand our history, we are not necessarily doomed to repeat it. Love, Dad
Rating:
Summary: There's Hell on the Other Side of this Keyhole
Review: 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."
Rating:
Summary: How close? How far?
Review: The review guidelines here at Amazon say: "Your comments should focus on the book's content and context." This book's content is no less than the sum total of who we are as humans. It is a book not about photographs, but about what photographs are about. How far we have come. Some of these photographs are less than 50 years old. Some of the folks pointing and jeering in the crowd shots could have been my grandparents. Yes, we've come a long way, but this book should also remind us of how close we still are. "Memories" was the theme of Kodak ads of a decade ago. Photographs are memories but unlike memories in our minds, or captured in text, photographic memories have a timeless reality about them. We live in a time of images. We've seen just about every conceivable horrific image imagineable: a man's brains being blown out on a Saigon street, Kent State College students mortally wounded on the campus sidewalk, the Holocaust, and not to fret, still more to come tomorrow. Questions. Photographs like these ask questions. It is inconceivable that I, or any of my friends, or that any of the readers of these reviews could do such a thing or even be a party to such a thing. Why? Are we that fundamentally different from our grandparents and great grandparents? Are we who we are or are we a product of our time? If our times change do we? I think in many of these other pictures where we see this kind of injustice and brutality, we quickly identify with the victim. That could be you or me bleeding on the sidewalk at Kent State. I would never be party to such acts as these, and I find it appalling to even contemplate it, but try as hard as I can not to, I can see myself in the crowd in the lynching pictures. These were ordinary people in ordinary places in ordinary times. Why would I have been any different? There is where the real horror lies. Question: What to do with the book now. Hide it away with my other collection of photo books? Put it on the coffee table to demonstrate: my bad taste in art?, my superior morality?, my love of photography?, my unshockability?, or will I put it there to trap and shock the shockable? This book does not have an easy place to exist. This is not a photography book. The book is about more than the photographs. The pictures are about more than lynching. It is a powerful book and one that should cause one to think. Photography can do that sometimes.
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