Without Sanctuary by James Allen, Jon Lewis, Leon Litwack, and Hilton Als

This book contains a few essays and almost 100 images of postcards produced at lynchings across the South and the West of the United States from the 1880s to the 1930s. One of the essays gives a moving history of lynching, highlighting the offenses (many minor, many non-existent except in the minds of the lynchers) for which prominent members of the white community often brutally tortured and killed men, women, and children. Another reflects a little on what it means to collect these postcards and display them (the book accompanied an exhibit put together by the man who collected these postcards).

The power (and, in some ways, the point) of lynching lay in its ability not only to inflict pain, suffering, and death on one person, but in its terrorist hold over an entire race of people--sometimes these lynchings occurred only because one hadn't happened in a while. Thus, the postcards became an essential part of the lynchings' work: they let everyone who hadn't been at the lynching see exactly what had happened. Although towns eventually grew embarrassed by the postcards, and some went so far as to prohibit their sale, and though some anti-lynching organizations published similar images to show the brutality that was happening throughout the South, these postcards still objectify and subject the black male body to a viewer's gaze.

I think it is very important to remember and grapple with the (not-that-long-ago) history of lynching as part of our past, and I think the preservation of postcards such as these helps us do that, but I remain divided on the value of putting them all in a book and selling them.