When the first public exhibition opened in New York in 2000, The New York Times said the images “burn a hole in your heart.

The review ignited a hotbed of commentary over what some believed was the glorification, even the pornographication of violence against African-Americans. Allen for bringing these postcards and photos to our faces, so that this pornography of evil, stupidity, self-righteousness and barbarism can be seen for what it was, what it is, and what it still might be, so we can say "Never Again" to this Holocaust too.Much will be made of the 'everyday' nature of the perpetrators, the smiling children giggling beneath dangling bodies, the easy non-chalance of men in straw hats and derbies slumped against convenient trees while another man burns. In spite of the jarring effect the pics have on the viewer, I feel it is an excellent reference book and sheds valuable insight on the attitudes that formed the historical relationship between blacks and whites in America.

org offers links to books featured on the C-SPAN networks to make it simpler for viewers to purchase them. To accompany the spirit of public lynchings then, people bought and sold and circulated picture-postcards of these lynchings, and sent them to family and friends accompanied by handwritten notes that said things like, “This is the barbecue we had last night.

All across the former Confederacy, blacks who were suspected of crimes against whites—or even "offenses" no greater than failing to step aside for a white man's car or protesting a lynching—were tortured, hanged and burned to death by the thousands. We have principles that should guide us, but that are honored as nice ideas but not as boundaries or even as goals. John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence from capital punishment to life imprisonment, a mob kidnapped Frank, who was Jewish, and murdered him in Marietta, Georgia. 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 newpapers, 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. This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws.