New York Times, January 13,2000
These images make the past present. They refute the notion that photographs of charged historical subjects lose their power, softening and becoming increasingly aesthetic with time. These images are not going softly into any artistic realm. Instead they send shock waves through the brain, implicating ever larger chunks of American society and in many ways reaching up to the present. They give one a deeper and far sadder understanding of what it has meant to be white and to be black in America. And what it still means.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 4,742 blacks between 1882 and 1968. This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909. Through all this terror and carnage, someone- many times a professional photographer- carried a camera and took pictures of the events. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. Historians have also detailed the carnival atmosphere and the social ritual of a lynching, which was often announced in advance and drew thousands of people from the surrounding area. Most disturbing is the sight of the white people, looking straight at the camera as if they had nothing to be ashamed of, often smiling.

These images are some of photography's most brutal, surviving to this day so that we may now look back upon the carnage and perhaps know our history and ourselves better. The almost one hundred images reproduced here are a testament to the camera's ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

These pictures are shocking visual testimony to the unspeakable ferocity of violence against blacks in this country in the not-too-distant past. The photos are part of the Allen/Littlefield Collection and are on deposit in the Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University. James Allen provides notes on the content and context of the photos; Congressman John Lewis provides a foreword; writers Leon F. Litwack and Hilton Als contribute commentary. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Roberta Smith - The New York Times

The photographs that go on view tomorrow at Roth Horowitz, a gallery on the Upper East Side, may never fit comfortably in the history of art, or for that matter, of photography. This is because they are so deeply embedded in the history of hatred, specifically the American history of hatred, which is often a matter of race. They manifest this hatred shockingly, remorselessly, tragically.
The 60 photographs are of American lynchings that took place between 1883 and 1960, mostly, but not always in the South. Most of them were taken by professional photographers immediately or a short while after the lynching, sometimes during. All but a few of the victims were African-American men and women.
These images have been collected over the past decade by James Allen, and antiques dealer from Atlanta, along with related material like anti-lynching pamphlets and newspaper reprts, which are also on display. Everything in the show is from the Allen-Littlefield Colleciton, on depsit in the special collections department of the Robert. W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. The show was initiated by Andrew Roth when he learned that Twin Palms Publishers was planning a book about the Allen-Littlefield collection. A book published this month, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America reproduces 98 images from the collection, with essays by the Georgia congressman John Lewis, the historian Leon F. Litwack, the writer Hilton Als and Mr. Allen, who has annotated each image. Although this material has been available to scholars for two years, this is the first time any of it has been exhibited.
These images, most of which are postcard-size, are incendiary; they will burn a hole in your heart. They depict the lifeless forms of black men and women hanging from trees, bridges, from telegraph poles, often tortured or mutilated. They depict charred corpses held aloft like banners and relatively intact ones arranged like hunting trophies.

Richard Lacayo - Time Magazine

You probably think murder is something to be ashamed of. But you weren't part of the crowd that gathered after the lynching in 1915 of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tenn. "Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene," an observer wrote later in the Crisis, the publication of the N.A.A.C.P. "People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. Picture-card photographers installed a portable printing press at the bridge." Lynching was a form of terror, which is murder with a message to send...It took a number of years to decide to collect pictures like this," says James Allen. "They're too painful to look at. But once you've seen these, you can't talk about race without factoring in the reality of what African Americans really went through."...These are pictures that have drifted back to us like bodies dumped in a river...There were lynchings in the Midwestern and Western states, mostly of Asians, Mexicans, Native Americans and even whites. But it was in the South that lynching evolved into a semiofficial institution of racial terror against blacks. 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...Without Sanctuary is a great and terrible book. It's an album of peacetime atrocities, during which hundreds of Kodaks clicked.

Benjamin Schwarz - Los Angeles Times

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 Gov. Cole Blease recerived 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 axe 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 lunching 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 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...Looking at the photographs of the broken, burned and mutilated victims in Without Sanctuary—some of whom, themselves, may have committed atrocious crimes—the terrible truth, the only "explanation" of lynching, is that given half a chance, too many men will act brutally.

Michel Marriott - The New York Times