Lynching is something that I hold akin to the Holocaust to me: it existed, and I might have known it happened, but I didn't really know what it means. I try to learn all that I can about the Holocaust, because even today, we learn new and terrible things about what was done in the Holocaust. ALLEN: Grew up in Winter Park, Florida, a large family, large Catholic family, 11 kids and a loving mom and dad that were very open to current events and new ways of thinking and very, very anti any form of racism. You -- we couldn't even use the word Jew in terms of a description of someone. Would have been very painful, difficult for me to even say somebody was Jewish, because I'd be so afraid of hurting their feelings. 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." — Congressman John Lewis

Without Sanctuary is now available exclusively through D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers worldwide. twin palms publishersThey took Laura and her son to jail. Laura claimed that she did the shooting. She desperately tried to protect her son. She begged them to kill her in the prison. He was only 14 years old. They came in the middle of the night and took them by wagon, 40 men, and wagoned them 12 miles over this shiny new bridge over the Canadian River, and raped Laura Nelson and hung them from this bridge. There's a very disturbing image, perhaps just for its simplicity, of the Will James lynching of Caro, Illinois. And the image on the front of the card is a tinted, glorified image of Commercial Avenue, which was the main stream to Caro. There's a steel girder that arcs over the main street that was used to hold parade flags, circus, announcements for the circus. ALLEN: I'll try to tell things that aren't as known. Leo Frank's case was extremely complex. He was doomed from the outset, from the moment that he was called in the middle of the night to come down to his factory, his pencil factory, till he was lynched, pulled out of a hospital bed on a prison farm where he was supposed to be protected -- he had had his throat slashed by an inmate -- and lynched. Views Program ID: 187245-4 Category: Call-In Format: Call-In Location: Washington, District of Columbia, United States First Aired: Jun 18, 2005 | 9:19am EDT | C-SPAN 1 Airing Details Without Sanctuary is 98 four-color plates from the Without Sanctuary Collection of lynchings photographs in America.

ALLEN: Exactly. Fifteen thousand people would have been a tremendous amount, percentage, of the population of that county to be there at that incident, and the mayor's main concern during the incident was that the tree, the central oak tree, that it -- what they used to chain him to and to raise him in and out of the fire so they could prolong his death, would not be harmed. To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.Without Sanctuary presents the pictures in a way that workss against the utterly casual and disdainful spirit in which they were taken...[It is] a powerful document of repressed history. The Village Voice - C. Carr

Diann Blakely: Very, very provocative. Reviewing WITHOUT SANCTUARY for the SCENE, which frightened me so badly I wrapped the book in plastic and left it on the Boss's front porch--it seemed so evil I didn't want it in my house, I explained, though I'm sure he thought I was crazy--but I'm going to post this with my piece on NBCC/Goodreads, for I've honestly never considered this POV. NPR, CNN, CSPAN, New York Times, LA Times Frequently Asked Questions about Lynching: Q: What is a lynching?To view these images, at an even greater remove from us, is to feel complicity in our bones; to understand that there is no “them” when it comes to the lynching public, to understand that when public morality and political complicity allow for lynching to become a frequent and acceptable form of violence, we become the crowd. And this applies to elites as much as to the “uneducated mob” we may think of, in our ignorance, as the chief perpetrators of these acts. As James Allen says, in all these photographs, “…the communities’ best citizens lurking just outside the frame.” 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.