Pre-service history teachers are exposed from schooling to a familiar canon: a story of American exceptionalism, linear social progression, and cultural homogeneity--referred to as a "freedom-quest narrative." Myopic and Eurocentric, this story follows students into their teaching careers; perpetuating a lack of critical understanding and engagement of historical race relations in social studies. Critical of this approach, history educators propose that learners engage alternative source material and move away from the freedom-quest narrative in order to transform their historical understandings of race and history. Photographs, as one such material, offer representations that can simultaneously affirm and complicate our historical understandings, making them ideal alternative pedagogical resources. Lynching photography, once viewed as symbolic souvenirs of white supremacy, have increasingly been reconstituted by historians and social science researchers as evidence against the false progressivism of race relations in the United States. While research has documented the use of photography to foster historical understanding, few studies examine how this instructional medium can be simultaneously incorporated into history teacher education in order to encourage a more complex understanding of race within history. Six pre-service history teachers enrolled in a graduate-level secondary social studies methods course visited the "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" exhibit. As part of an instrumental case study, participants were asked to interrogate the complexity of our nation's racialized past. The purpose of this case study was to examine how preservice teachers' exposure and engagement with lynching photography informed pre-service history teachers' understandings of the United States' racialized history and provided opportunities to reconsider the context and purpose of historical meaning making.