Welcome to the Freedom Center’s site for information, background and discussion about our exhibition, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The exhibition is showing from January 19 through May 31, 2010, in the Freedom Center’s Skirball Gallery.
The Freedom Center is showing Without Sanctuary along with senior partners BRIDGES For A Just Community, the Ohio and Kentucky Chapters of the NAACP and the Urban League of Cincinnati, as well as numerous civic, faith-based, cultural and community organizations throughout the region. Additionally, an Academic Advisory Board of leading scholars has been assembled to review all materials related to Without Sanctuary – including this online site – to insure accuracy, comprehensiveness and perspective.
The images of Without Sanctuary depict – in graphic detail – the brutal murders by lynching of thousands of individuals in the United States. The victims were white, black, old and young, men and women, Jews, gentiles, immigrants and aliens. But mostly, they were African Americans -- as many as 4,000 were slain at the hands of violent mobs between 1882 and 1968. Many of the victims’ bodies were mutilated or burned; an untold number of victims were tortured before they were lynched. Photographs taken at some of these horrible incidents were turned into mass-produced post cards that were distributed in the mail and shared among friends. Shockingly, the faces in the crowds gathered around the lynched victim often displayed broad smiles of enjoyment, as if they were on a holiday outing.
Why? What caused these violent, mob-driven events? Why were individuals dragged out of jails or plucked off the street in cities and towns in South Carolina, Minnesota, Indiana and California and executed without even a measure of mercy? What does this unfortunate chapter in our history have to do with modern times? How can people of good will act to insure that nothing like this ever happens again?
Probing for answers to these questions is at the heart of the Without Sanctuary exhibition. At the very least, the exhibition serves the valuable purpose of getting people to talk about the lessons contemporary audiences can derive from this ugly chapter in America’s long struggle for freedom.
