Once Upon a Time There Was a Land Without Sanctuary…Here

@ The New York Historical Society

by Theresa Herron

A man's head hangs to the side as if disconnected from its body, his limbs are limp, his facial expression is in repose, the repose of the recent dead. The taut rope creates a thin straight line between his neck and the post overhead. Spectators, mostly men, surround him. Their faces are not in repose, but grimace jack-o-lantern style or laugh. Some are stern-faced and others have a gleam in their eyes as if they just came from a great boxing match. News photographers scurry around the site flashing pictures for the next breaking cover story. Later it is found that the man with his face in repose was innocent of crime. Innocent and without sanctuary, he was lynched by a mob.

Such an image is the main subject matter of "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," an exhibition this summer at The New York Historical Society, featuring primarily black and white photography of lynchings, portraits of activists against lynching and various pamphlets and paraphernalia related to such injustice. Lynching is the atrocity of putting to death persons who are presumed to have committed a crime or offense, by vengeful mob action without legal sanction, without a hearing, without trial by jury. Some victims are hung, some burned, some shot several times and then dragged to death. In this show hangings were the most prevalent imagery.

This is not a pleasant or pretty show to see unless one has a penchant for the macabre. However, because it is so difficult to view is exactly why it is so good. It addresses gross truths about our own U.S. history with a clean, documentary, non-schmaltzy style. It makes viewers, especially American viewers, squarely face that which they may not wish to confront but need to confront. The photographs of lynchings do not stand out for their aesthetic uniqueness or impressiveness so much as for their starkness of subject matter.

Lynching became most popular in the U.S.A. from the Reconstruction period after the Civil War until the mid-twentieth century. The timeframe with the greatest concentration was 1890-1917 with an estimated 3,436 lynchings taking place. This figure includes only those that were reported. But what about countless other back street or village lynchings that took place and were kept mum? The practice was especially instigated by people angered by the new freedom available to African-Americans following the Civil War. The southern states were the usual sites of most of the lynchings in this exhibit, however, victims were lynched in the Midwest and as far away as California also.

Many victims are "unidentified" as are many of the photographers of such victims. Most of those put to death were black men, a few white men and a couple of black women. Plaques with the stories of the lynchings accompany the photos. Often the cause was that a person was suspected of a crime or of "causing trouble" as in the case of a few discontented sharecroppers who conducted a meeting in a private home in 1908. They had expressed approval of another man's efforts to protect himself against a white employer. The police entered the home and arrested the men claiming they were "disturbing the peace." The men were then lynched.

U.S. Navy veteran James Stephenson, Jr., 19, was lynched when he tried to protect his mother in an altercation over the repair of her radio. One of the few women, Laura Nelson, was later proved innocent after her death as she had been trying to protect her son's life by taking the rap for him.

A section of the exhibit is devoted to portraits of major activists who tried to fight for anti-lynching and anti-jim crow legislation. Most were involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Committee on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). Portraits of William Pickens, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Frederick Douglass are included.

Amongst the most interesting of the texts is a petition to the United Nations for relief charging the U.S. Government with genocide against the Negro people. After the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals and revelation of the atrocities performed on the Jews, the United Nations redefined genocide to include the following aspects: killing members of a particular group, causing bodily or mental harm to them, deliberately inflicting conditions of life that are destructive physically, imposing measures to prevent births and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Additionally, related objects on display included a wooden cane with the head of a lynched Chinese man from circa 1900 and a leather and carved wood whip with the head of a screaming black man from the mid-1800s.

Hopefully in the future we will see more exhibitions of such caliber as this one at The New York Historical Society.