aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Lynching
Last night Nightline looked at lynching. Next month the U.S. Senate is expected to pass a resolution of apology. Ted Koppel explains why:
The senate has a great deal for which to apologize. Between 1890 and 1952, seven U.S. Presidents petitioned Congress to put an end to lynching. Nearly 200 Anti-lynching Bills were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th Century. Three strongly-worded measures even made it through the house. None reached a vote in the senate. Southern filibusters killed them all....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.
The photo exhibit featured in the Nightline report is no longer available online but the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America is. For an account of the exhibit, its history and a conference 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.”
