Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

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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. https://ximage.c-spanvideo.org/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJwaWN0dXJlcy5jLXNwYW52aWRlby5vcmciLCJrZXkiOiJGaWxlc1wvYjM2XC8xODcyNDUtMDQtbS5qcGciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsiZml0IjoiY292ZXIiLCJoZWlnaHQiOjUwNn19fQ== Mr. Allen, editor of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Publishers), talked about the June 13, 2005, Senate resolution apologizing for the Senate’s failure to enact federal anti-lynching legislation and about his book on the history of lynching in the U.S. Mr. Allen was in Washington, D.C., on June 13 at a news conference with Senate sponsors of the resolution as well as survivors and family members of lynching victims. He also responded to viewer comments and questions. BELZER: Special Victims Unit, but I was murder police for 20 years. Once a murder police, always a murder police. 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. Ultimately I was guided by Congressman Lewis’s claim that “...many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe – don’t want to believe – that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to...an American holocaust.” ALLEN: That -- we're very concerned about that, and we are looking over the years, we'll find a permanent home for the collection. We do not think of this as a collectible. We discourage other people from thinking of it as a collectible because they truly are national documents that should not be bought and sold like trade cards.

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And when I called him, a man I'd never met, he said to me, "Remind me to show you the pictures of the nigger I blew away myself." GROSS: So you're supposed to call him and ask him to do your family photos after seeing this lynching? It's daytime, there's no shame. It's as if they didn't care at all, as if it was a nonevent. But yet they have to hang around. They have to be in the photographs. 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. They had to open up the funeral parlor for three days to let the citizens in to calm them, to show them that Leo Frank was really dead. GROSS: What are you doing to make sure that you're not furthering the kind of profit motive behind the cards?

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. Despite the typically explosive alchemy of race and sexuality, the details of the charges against presidential candidate Cain seem to have elicited little more than a shrug. The only book I can think of, that comes even close to this in its up-front and photographic depiction of human evil, is The Auschwitz Album, which reproduces photographs that the Nazis took of Hungarian Jews as they arrived at the death camp. But even these photos do not depict the actual murder of the victims, the gas chamber, and the crematorium. And somehow during this process, the son shot the deputy sheriff with a squirrel rifle. He crawled outside the cabin. A gun battle ensued in which Laura and her son kept the posse away for a couple hours, and the deputy sheriff died outside because the posse couldn't reach to help him.TV critic David Bianculli has a review and an explanation of why the series is showing up on the UPN network.