In both incidents, the victims had been accused of murdering whites and taken from jail by mobs as authorities stood by. Many reviewers have pointed to Without Sanctuary 's resonance with contemporary hate crimes, invoking such names as Rodney King, James Byrd, Abner Louima and Matthew Sheppard. Allen, whose companion John Littlefield financed many of the purchases for the collection, acknowledges that his own sexuality shaped his impulse to pursue the project. This isn't ancient history. Vestiges of this are alive today and these things happen because of a community.
People feel they have approval to do it, and their masculinity demands it and is enhanced by it.
John Lewis of Atlanta and Pulitzer-prize winning historian Leon Litwack help place the photographs of Without Sanctuary in context. We still have an epic battle going on over the Confederate flag. As horrifying as it is, we need to look at it as history. Earlier this year, Ward and his colleague Kim Rogers were fellows this year at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where they worked on an oral history project recording the memories of elderly members of rural black communities in the Mississippi Delta. The photographs in Without Sanctuary are not something I want to look at, but it's something as a culture we need to face up to.