Explicit images of lynchings often provoke strong reactions, from cringing and deep sorrow, to terror or guilt. A controversial exhibit, “Without Sanctuary,” which features more than 225 photos and postcards and 11 boxes of letters, newspapers, books and other documentary materials, was first exhibited in New York in 2000, where it drew worldwide media attention.

“Without Sanctuary,” toured widely, including in Atlanta, where it drew 176,000 visitors to the King National Historic Site, but didn’t have a permanent home. In October, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin committed to purchasing the collection for the Center for Civil and Human Rights Partnership, which has raised nearly half of the $125 million needed for the project. “We wanted to make sure we were telling the complete story – the horrible as well as the uplifting,” Franklin said in an October 19 article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We don’t want this to be a theme park.”

Some 5,000 Americans were lynched in the United States from the 1870s to the 1970s, 80 percent in the South, almost all of them black, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

“The notion of housing the lynching material in the same institution as, say, Martin Luther King’s sermons and speeches strikes some as jarring. But this is just as it should be,” wrote Brent Staples in a December 22 column in The New York Times.

Read more about the Atlanta acquisition.

Learn more about the project.