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Prologue Searching for a Troubled Past In 2000, a book was published that pictorially represented the history of lynching in the United States. I neither recall when I first heard of this work, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, nor the date that it arrived at my home as a mail order. Nonetheless, as a student of history, I felt compelled to peruse the book and add it to my collection. From beginning to end, the work is a grim journey through the darkness of America’s racial past. It is a graphic rendition of nearly a century’s worth of hangings, burnings, shootings, and butcherings of African Americans—and a few others—by mobs, abetted by the failure of the country’s leaders and citizenry to make meaningful efforts to halt such extralegal executions. Comprised of postcard photos, newspaper snapshots, and other images, I found Without Sanctuary powerful, even overwhelming, in its unrelenting visual statements about the possible depths of human depravity. I also found the volume, wrapped in its solemn black dust jacket, a disturbingly grotesque undertaking, but one that I felt necessary. After all, while there is arguably no tasteful way to present the appalling distasteful, I could appreciate what the author was asking the reader to see and to contemplate. As I turned the pages and fixed my eyes upon the next picture and subtitle, I tried to imagine what the white faces that gazed back at me represented as they grinned beside smoldering or hanging corpses. I wanted to know and, at the same time, did not want to know what they were thinking. There was too much going on in some of the images to psychologically digest all at once. Some of the photos had obviously been taken in urban settings with stores and paved streets, while others captured lynchings conducted in backwoods and remote rural stretches. There were crowds of all sizes, with i-xx_1-228_Cleg.indd 11 9/15/10 11:36:29 AM xii Prologue many self-consciously aware of the photographer and others entranced by the gruesome spectacle that they had created. People posed dramatically, leaned against trees and posts, tugged on the leashes of hunting dogs, and angled for a better view of the camera. Children are present in several of the images, undoubtedly brought to the lynching site by curious parents, some of whom were likely perpetrators of the murder. Many of the pictures suggest a broad communal participation in the killing or at least its observance, judging from the presence of women, the professionally dressed, and the unmistakably festive atmosphere. The black-and-white coloring of the photos conveys a sense of age, of things long past. However, the racial configuration of the images is undeniable in its pattern and message. To be sure, the book infrequently portrays the lynching of white men, and at least one black woman suspended from a bridge, her neck, like so many others, bent unnaturally into almost a ninety-degree angle by the hangman’s noose. Still, the bulk of the book—as were the vast majority of known lynchings —is about black male victims and white (mostly male) mobs. For me, it was these images that were the most difficult to mentally process, given their explicit portrayals or veiled suggestions of dismemberment, disfigurement, and other tortures. One has to look hard at these pictures simply to have a chance at believing them. And to believe them means to be horrified and brutalized by them, prompting a reflexive desire to quickly turn the page. I looked at more of the pictures and read their descriptions—Texas, Florida , Georgia, Indiana, on and on. There are very few states in the country unsullied by this past, with some more steeped in this history of mob murder than others. As a historian, I had known about this quintessentially American phenomenon and had even taught classes on African American history that treated lynching in some detail. But none of this prepared me for one of the images that I came across as I thumbed through this most arresting volume. The picture itself, rendered in sepia tones as opposed to black and white, is not the most macabre in Without Sanctuary. In relative terms, it might strike the intrepid viewer—that is, those who could endure viewing the full contents of the book—as a typical lynching scene involving black men and their white tormenters at the turn of the twentieth century. Immediately one notices the...

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