Conclusion
From the time the private collection of lynching postcards and photographs became a public exhibition, a book and a website, its consumption has been controversial. Although the curation of the exhibitions gradually contextualized the images alongside narratives of the considerable resistance to lynching, the deliberations of the Emory faculty demonstrated historical reservations.
The evidence from W. Fitzhugh Brundage did demonstrate affinities with the general narrative of racial persecution, although the Woodward school suggested the political economy of segregation can also be seen as being attached to the wider exigencies of modernity.
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Source: Ed. by James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America ( Santa Fe : Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) and http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html
Grace Elizabeth Hale picked up on this theme. As the US embraced modernity, the consumer goods and technological apparatus available began to reach the peripheries and hinterlands of the South. Consumerism eventually consigned lynching to history. Anti-lynching activists recognized the power of national and international consumerism. They used the ever-improving technological media to disseminate the evidence and images of barbarity to a larger body of people who did not buy in to the idea of white supremacy.