Legacy of Lynching--Bill Moyer's Journal

Bill Moyers does absolutely wonderful shows, accessible by website and by podcast, as well as on television-- although, probably like many of you, I follow very few things on actual television broadcasts anymore.  No time.

In any case, since we are on the subject of lynching photographs, Moyers has an excellent site posted November 23, 2007, which recaps some of the research and commentatory on lynching, as well as providing an excellent visual display of some lynching images with annotation at www.pbs.org/moyers/journal11232007/profile2.html.

This summation includes a series of photographs compiled by Ken Gonzales-Day, including lynchings of Native Americans, Chinese and Latinos, Emmett Till and his mother, as well as an overview including the keeping of lynching statistics at the Tuskeegee Institute from 1882-1968 and the anti-lynching crusade of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Apparently, in 2005, Congress formally apologized for failing to act on some 200 anti-lynching bills.  The resolution states that the Senate "expresses the deepest sympathies and solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of the victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the Constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."  

Without Sanctuary--Lynching Photographs

The Without Sanctuary Website which offers on display the lynching photographs which serve as one entire starting point for this work on photography I am herein engaged.

The point about these photographs is their horror, and the degree to which the crimes they represent are both unspeakable and unforgettable.  It is impossible to blot out their image in the mind and yet they are in some manner completely forgotten even as the pictures were taken, even as the acts they document were being committed.  

Like battle scenes and executions, some things are too awful to occupy permanent residence in consciousness.  To hold any one of these scenes firmly in the mind's eye, is to go slowly mad unless one possesses the temperament of the sociopath or of a forensic investigator.  

And so instead of deeply considering the photographs, themselves, those of us who sincerely wish to prevent such acts in the future, reassure ourselves and others with an endless catalogue of the facts, of the circumstances surrounding such acts, of the precise and statistical probabilities of such things happening again--where they are happening even now (I am speaking of genocide, torture and unjust murder), and how we would stop it.  

I don't know.  You had better take a look at these photos on this website one more time.  Just to be on the safe side.  Or perhaps not.  

Copyright of James Allen and John Littlefield 2000-2005, Twin Palms Publisher