Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
An American Pastime
By David Levering Lewis
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
by Philip Dray
Random House, 528 pp., $35.00
A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America
by James H. Madison
Palgrave/St. Martin's, 204 pp., $24.95
As I write this review, the extraordinary collection of lynching photographs that transfixed crowds at the New-York Historical Society in the summer of 2001, Without Sanctuary, is now on exhibit in Atlanta, a metropolis much publicized during the civil rights struggle of the late twentieth century as 'too busy to hate.'[1] In image-conscious Atlanta, initial worries by some among the city's business and civic establishment that such an exhibit might do more harm than good (as Southerners, white, black, and now brown, are wont to say about race) quickly dissipated once it became clear that the general public was capable of absorbing the stupefaction, vicarious guilt, remorse, or reflective anger evoked by what can only be described as one of the most spectacular displays of unrelieved gruesomeness ever assembled in the history of photography. As the Georgia congressman John Lewis said, '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.'[2]
Review, 4852 words
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