Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe—don't want to believe—that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. However, if I may say so, I find nothing ordinary or 'everyday' about these people who traipse about charred corpses as though they were at the county fair.

GROSS: Have you found postcards that were passed down as family memorabilia, where the families are still kind of proud to have them, proud of what they represent? While I completely agree with the observations of Litwack, the book's photos show a propensity for lynch justice against all sorts of minorities: Italians, Jews, and poor whites etc. GROSS: What do you know about what happened to the bodies of the people who were lynched after they were cut down? ALLEN: I had trouble making it through a day in college, and so I left, and decided to do what really enthused me and energized me, and that was to get out and find great things.

So Atlanta was enraged and thrilled with the possibility of a Yankee Jew, dirty Jew, wealthy man, to take out their hatred and complaints on.

ALLEN: There was plenty of evidence that Jim Connolly, the black custodian, had committed the crime. I was not totally ignorant of the lynching phenomenon in the United States, as my parents and grandparents told me all about it from the time I was young (and yes, they were all opposed to it. This picture, believe it or not, was the only positive element in reading this collection--someone tried to mail that cruel travesty as a postcard, and over the stamp on the other side was written "unsendable.

When I was in the fifth grade the television mini-series 'Roots' gathered the nation on a Sunday evening for its first episode. ALLEN: The -- mostly African-American -- mostly what we collect are African-American objects and paper, and the objects we're most interested in, handmade items such as carved walking sticks and quilts. How did that type of parenting affect the children of the torturers (whether attending or not) and what does that mean for the people they encountered in business and their professions? Not only of course are l*nchings inhumane, but learning about how these became events with ballads written and handed out to onlookers, people traveling in to see it, having literal live theatre productions of this where you could pay to shoot the victim, taking pieces of the victims for souvenirs, racial infighting, and ultimately passing around these horrific images as postcards to send to people you know. Some of these lynchings were photographed, and the photos were saved as souvenirs, and were even sometimes used as postcards.

At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man. ALLEN: We went to gun shows, as we also go to Civil War shows, because we realized early on that there were still, and I put this in quotes, "defenders of the Southern way of life" who see violence and African-Americans -- violence as appropriate and African-Americans as unstable aspects of American life, and less valued than whites. The review ignited a hotbed of commentary over what some believed was the glorification, even the pornographication of violence against African-Americans. Lynching is something that I hold akin to the Holocaust to me: it existed, and I might have known it happened, but I didn't really know what it means. I fear that some appalling violence will be depicted (some no doubt Tarantino's anachronistic fantasy) that will prompt her to ask me, "Were white people as cruel as this to black people?

The collection includes images of the lynching in 1911 of Laura and Lawrence Nelson, in Okemah, Oklahoma, and of Leo Frank in 1915 near Marietta, Georgia. We took out ads in national papers, magazines, trade papers, photograph collectors, postcard journals. How else did Thomas attain his appointment to the Supreme Court, and, for that matter, why hasn't he been impeached? GROSS: Do you think that we can learn a lot about the history of lynchings, who was lynched, who was responsible for the lynchings, by looking at these photographs? These grotesque souvenirs of the late 1800s and early 1900s show mostly African-American men strung up as crowds of whites watched.

His collection of lynching photographs are on exhibit at the New York Historical Society and are collected in the new book "Without Sanctuary. We have a -- and it is in the exhibit -- we have a framed image of the lynching of Abram and Smith, two African-American men from Marion, Indiana. O'Connor, always smarter than I'll ever hope to be, would have shared Melissa Harris-Perry's view of the now commonly used term "lynching" in regard to political figures, which she invoked recently in the NATION, citing both Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain. Most threads on this platform were initiated in the past and discussed how some people used the postcard of lynching photos to send messages to their loved ones.That's what got them to do "Oz" for HBO long before David Chase made a similar leap of faith with "The Sopranos. The hacking off of fingers and other body parts for souvenirs reads like some ghoulish detail of a horror novel. It's very important that we all see these images and see the possibility for racial violence in ourselves, and in what way we actually at out violence in areas perhaps not with violence but with thought and word and deed and also with silence in our communities today. We mailed out thousands upon thousands of flyers to anyone that we thought might eventually run into this material. Ordinary people, ordinary children, ordinary crowds, ordinary postcards, but when we look back at them now, they have the power to, as Allen says, “turn the living to pillars of salt.