Feb 14, 2015 3 min read

About 15 years ago, a book was published called “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” which, as the title suggests, is a gruesome and compelling compendium of photographs taken during and in the immediate aftermath of lynchings of African-Americans between 1882 and 1950.

It’s enough to fuel your nightmares even more efficiently than the latest Stephen King thriller or a marathon of “Halloween” movies just before bedtime. It depicts vigilante hordes craning their necks, gleeful and vengeful, attending the barbaric public executions that were once horrifically commonplace. Most of them were carried out without the benefit of any kind of judicial process and most were based on perceived insults the victim might have committed against the social order, where segregation and black inferiority were assumed and enforcement was meted out brutally.

No corner of the country was necessarily immune – lynchings happened in Wyoming, in Minnesota and in New York. Two black men were taken from a jail in Marion, Ind., in 1930, beaten and hanged from a tree. Thirty years before, an African-American man was reported lynched in the community of Dunbar in Fayette County. But the overwhelming majority of these crimes were committed in the South, in the span of time between the end of the Civil War and the first stirring of the Civil Rights Movement in the middle part of the last century. And a new report released last week by the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama found the volume of lynchings that occurred below the Mason-Dixon Line was much higher than many previously believed.

The organization estimates 3,959 people were lynched in the South over an 83-year span, at least 700 more than previous tallies. The report calls the use of lynching “a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African-American community,” and it was one of the main drivers that led to the migration of many African Americans from the South to the North.

It also states most of the perpetrators of these crimes were never held to account – indeed, community grandees often turned out proudly for these spectacles.

“Large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands and including elected officials and prominent citizens, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim,” the report states. It goes on to say local newspapers offered up tidy rationalizations about lynchings and, indeed, promoted them. They were frequently “carnival-like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs.”

The report also points out these acts of terror, and the history behind them, were swept under the rug throughout the South, even as many town squares and village greens lovingly maintain statues for Civil War generals and memorials for those who fell in “the Lost Cause.” The authors of the report argue convincingly similar memorials need to be placed at the sites where lynchings occurred, to serve as a reminder of the “blood on the leaves and blood at the root,” as the Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” put it so well, and to caution all of us about being swept up in the fury of the mob.