The Killing Fields

Between 1882 and 1930, thousands of people, overwhelmingly men, were lynched in the United States. In the West, mobs lynched 447 whites and 38 blacks; in the Midwest there were 181 white victims and 79 black. But these numbers are overshadowed by the figures from the South, where an estimated 2,828 people were lynched. Of the victims whose race was known, the vast majority--2,314--were blacks killed by white lynch mobs, but whites also killed 284 whites and black lynchers killed 155 people, all but seven of whom were black. "Without Sanctuary" is a collection of 98 photographs of lynchings throughout America, culled from the archive of James Allen who, as an antique dealer, came across them in his travels. It is a strange and terrifying book.

Many of these photographs were taken to be sold as souvenir postcards, but people also collected even more grisly keepsakes--fingers, toes and ears--from lynching victims, including sexual organs from those who had been alleged rapists. South Carolina governor Cole Blease received a finger of a lynched black man in the mail and promptly planted it in the gubernatorial garden. In Salisbury, N.C., a little old white lady, brought to see the bodies of several alleged black ax murderers, opened her purse, took out a knife and cut off a finger from one of their hands. Wordlessly, she put the knife and finger in her purse and walked away. Often there were scores, if not hundreds and sometimes thousands of spectators at a lynching. Far from an archaic holdover, Southern lynching was in many ways intertwined with and exacerbated by modern technology. Railroads sometimes ran special excursion trains to the sites; often spectators took photos--and also made sound recordings; the towns and counties in which lynchings took place usually had newspapers, telegraph offices and sometimes even radio stations that broadcast the killings, thereby expanding and intensifying the power of lynching in the white and black Southern psyche.