This Is the End

The South between 1880 and 1930 was in tremendous flux. Poor blacks and whites alike had been uprooted. Long-prevailing rules of conduct between the races had been shredded, yet no new and more just order had been devised. It was in this climate that fearful whites felt compelled to make a hideous example of black miscreants, particularly those alleged to pose a sexual threat to white women. As Jacqueline Dowd Hall illuminated in Revolt Against Chivalry, her award-winning 1979 study of lynching, the white Southern matriarchy gave implicit and at times explicit approval to extralegal atrocities. None of which justifies even one lynching, but it does make the plague of them that took place over half a century ago more comprehensible. To give such crucial subtext short shrift is to present an overly polarizing view of the past.

Litwack‘s sins, however, pale beside those of Als, who can’t get beyond his concern that he was chosen to contribute to Without Sanctuary for no other reason than that, as he puts it, ”I am a Negro.“ After much inane noodling on the accident of his skin color, Als finally takes up his assignment, citing the ”lynchings“ he‘s suffered from white editors, women, guests at parties and casual acquaintances. Another, more talented -- or less self-indulgent -- black writer might have been capable of making something of this, but Als is so keen on striking an ironic tone that he not only embarrasses himself, but demeans the fates of his thousands of brothers and sisters for whom lynching was more than a metaphor. He should be ashamed of what he has written here.

Not that any of this, in the end, mars Without Sanctuary. The book succeeds because of the images James Allen so scrupulously assembled and documented, and Twin Palms has so beautifully published. Here is a visual record of a horrible wrong men and women once did to each other in this country in the name of right. On almost every page are photographs that will bring tears. Steve Oney’s forthcoming book on the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank near Atlanta will be published by Pantheon.