aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America

Last week a panel of Georgia lawmakers signed off on a plan to create a Confederate heritage month here in the peach state. This week our Senate put off its resolution apologizing for slavery. Initially expected Monday, now they say maybe later in the week.

In that context I note two posts this week from Andrew Sullivan. One points to a Thinkery post about an art exhibit in Tallahassee depicting the lynching of the confederate flag. The other to the website Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America.

For some background on the Without Sanctuary photo exhibit - and the book and Emory University conference that was organized around it - see Peter Rachleff’s Lynching And Racial Violence: Histories & Legacies Report From A Conference:

In the 1980s, James Allen, a white southerner sympathetic to the struggle against racism, began to collect these photographs and postcards while making his rounds of antique and junk shops, flea markets, and private dealers across the South.  The images captured the horrible history of lynchings in trees, bridges, and towers, and atop bonfires. 

He also purchased posed shots of the mobs, their members staring unabashedly into the camera’s lens.  As Allen’s collection grew, the idea of exhibiting the images publicly occurred to him, and, in 1999, they made their first appearance in a small museum in New York City--thirty-odd worn snapshots and postcards, collectively titled “Without Sanctuary.”

Viewers had to get close to see the images, and they had to stand close to each other.  Waiting lines circled the block, even in cold, wintry weather. The exhibit eventually transferred to the New York Historical Society, where a collection of anti-lynching movement tracts, posters, and materials from the 1890s through the 1930s were added, with notebooks provided for viewers to record their thoughts and emotions.

I’m with those who are ambivalent about an apology. Who needs it; way too little, way too late. I particularly oppose it if it turns out to be nothing but cover - or “balance” - for a Confederate heritage month.

Back in 2005 as the United States Senate was considering its resolution apologizing for slavery - passed that June, not unanimously - Nightline did an excellent piece on lynching. In it Ted Koppel said:

Records can be found for about 5,000 lynchings between 1882 and 1968. The actual number is almost certainly much greater. And the dragging death of a black man, James Byrd jr., by a southern white man in 1998 should serve at least to keep an awareness of lynching alive into the lifetime of every American Adult alive today. For whatever reasons, racial sensitivity, National shame, lack of curiosity, lynching has never received the historical attention it deserves.

An apology is lip service; a national monument better; but still only the least we can do.