Guardian by Julius Lester Page A

of the hanging or burning body, and purchased “souvenirs,” i.e., bones of the victim.
    In the first decades of the twentieth century, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and other organizations publicized lynchings widely and tried to get the U.S. Congress to make lynching a federal crime, since the arrest and prosecution of lynchers was a rare occurrence. Indeed, the verdict of practically every lynching was that the person met his death “at the hands of persons unknown.” To its shame, a federal law against lynching was not passed. In 2005 the United States Senate passed a resolution apologizing for never passing antilynching legislation. However, even in 2005, eight senators refused to sign the resolution.
    The lynching described in this novel is not based on any particular one. And the lynching I describe here does not begin to describe the full horror of what actually occurred at lynchings. For those interested, I refer you to the books in the bibliography.
    Having grown up with the prospect of being lynched as part of my awareness as a black child whose parents wanted me to reach adulthood, I have thought about lynchings often, from the point of view of what it was like to be lynched as well as what it was like to witness, to be a part of a lynching.This may sound a little macabre, but as a writer, part of my responsibility is to wonder, “What was it like when…?”
    Several years ago a movie producer contacted me about the possibility of making a film based on my novel The Autobiography of God . Having been contacted several times in the past about making a movie from one of my books, I knew not to get excited because nothing had come from previous entreaties.
    The producer called one evening to see if I would be interested in another idea. He had seen an article in the New York Times about an exhibit of postcards depicting lynchings of blacks. I knew of the exhibit and had the book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by James Allen.
    As noted above and in this novel, photographers went to lynchings to take photographs of the victims as well as photographs of people posing next to the bodies of those lynched. These photographs were turned into postcards, purchased by those pictured at the lynching, and mailed to relatives and friends. James Allen, a white man from Georgia, spent twenty-five years searching for these postcards with their horrific images. (What does it say about America thatsuch postcards had no problem being sent through the mail, but a postcard depicting a woman’s breasts would have resulted in the arrest of the sender for using the mail for obscene material.)
    The Hollywood producer wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing a film with lynching as the subject matter. I said yes, but that I wanted to write something from the point of view of a white boy. In looking at the postcards in Without Sanctuary , I had been struck by the number of them that showed children, boys and girls, present at lynchings. I remembered having had an exchange of letters in 1970 with George Woods, then children’s book editor at the New York Times , about black children’s books. Our letters were printed as an article in the Sunday New York Times Book Review on May 24, 1970. In my last one, I wrote: “White writers are so dishonest. Seldom have they written what they could have and should have, which is, the white side of racism. I’d like to see a children’s novel about a little white boy who goes with his father to a lynching.”
    This notion had come to me reading Ralph Ginzburg’s 100 Years of Lynching when it was published in 1962. The book was a compilation of actualnewspaper articles describing lynchings.
    Over the course of my forty plus years as a writer, I have been struck, time and again, by how often I’ve had the germ of an idea for a book but have waited years, and sometimes decades,