"Strange Fruit Hanging From The Poplar Trees": An American Photographic Essay - Not Just In The Deep South! - RI10 Repub

“Strange Fruit

Hanging From The

Poplar Trees”:

An American

Photographic Essay

- Not Just In

The Deep South!

- RI10

Originally published September 11, 2006

Tabacco: Lest we forget our past in all the euphoria over the Barack Obama election to the White House, I republish this Pictorial Essay of the not-too-distant past in the United States of America. We have come a long way as a people, but if we do not continue our struggle without cessation, the past may also become our future.

While few Blacks will say so publicly, I am certain that I am not the only one, who remembers Martin Luther King, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X and who fears for the safety of the President-Elect and 44th President of our country.

http://www.jazz-aftershave.ch/images/Billie_HOLIDAY.jpg
Go to this site in a different Browser Window to hear Billie Holiday sampler of “Strange Fruit” as you view this Post - Tabacco
http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/artist_id_holiday_billie.htm

Lewis Allen, writer
Billie Holiday, singer

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/billie+holiday/strange+fruit_20017859.html




The most recent photo in the exhibit is of a man being lynched in McDuffie County, Georgia, in 1960
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/01/18/lynching.photography/slide.3.jpg

 

From Correspondent Maria Hinojosa

January 18, 2000
Web posted at: 9:24 p.m. EST (0224 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A horrible chapter in American history is the focus of a New York gallery exhibit that illustrates the cruelty -- and bizarre revelry -- at many lynchings in the United States.

All photos show voiceless victims of hate: men and women stripped, lashed, beaten, burned and hung. Often their only crime was one they could not control -- the color of their skin.

"Many times they would lynch someone by a railroad track so that passing trains would see and pass the word on and also as a form of intimidation to people in surrounding black community," said the curator of the exhibit, James Allen.

Allen spent 15 years collecting the photos.

"We hope people will walk away with the idea that this was a very frequent act of violence," said Allen. "We won't be able to deny it any longer."

The most recent photo was made in McDuffie County, Georgia, in 1960.

Many of the photos are actually postcards that were bought and sold decades ago as souvenirs.

"People wanted souvenirs, souvenirs of the spectacle," explained Andrew Roth, who co-owns the gallery exhibiting the work.

"There were thousands upon thousands of people that came to many of these events that bought these photos, not only as souvenirs, but as reminders of history," said Roth.

Sometimes, even more horrific trophies were taken away from lynchings. These trophies included body parts.

"The individual who framed this," pointed out Allen, "has preserved his proud locks of the victim's hair. He's also written underneath the first mat, in a sort of dialect: 'Bo pointing to his nigger.' "

What drove Americans to do this to their own? Desperate to see, perhaps desperate to understand, people now stand in line to bear witness.     

"It's so easy for so many people to forget what the history of this country is about," said one woman after viewing the disturbing photographs.

"It's a very ugly sort of history because people felt the need to photograph these heinous moments," said another viewer.

Some felt the need not only to photograph -- but to actively participate, to smile at a camera ... in the presence of death.

"After you get through the shock," said Allen, "what lingers are the images of the perpetrators, and not of the corpses, and that's where the focus needs to be."

The gallery also displays a poster from 1922 on which the NAACP wrote: "To maintain civilization in America, you cannot escape your responsibility." The exhibit is a harsh reminder of America's responsibility for a horrible chapter of racial hatred.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/01/18/lynching.photography/

1st century Christians fed to lions or
20th century Niggers fed to Christians?
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0309/lm18.html
DOUBLE LYNCHING IN MARION
Double lynching of Abram Smith 19, and Thomas Shipp 18 --Lynched to death in Marion, Indiana August 7, 1930.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic6.htm

http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/

Go to http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
for movie in Flash format with audio and text accompaniment.




Bennie Simmons

Bennie Simmons, alive, soaked in coal oil before being set on fire.  June 13, 1913. Anadarko, Oklahoma.

Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 31/4 x 5 in.

Etched into negative, "Edies Photo Anadarko Okla."
http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/04.jpg



REX THEATRE
    Fusing race pride and realism, black Mississippians generally accepted Jim Crow institutions as a fact of life. Segregation was often preferable to exclusion, and separation was not in itself degrading to a race that countered white discrimination with a group identity of its own. From Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow by Neil R. McMillen, 1990.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic15.htm

Tabacco: Some Personal History
I was born in 1942.  My family was from Glade Spring, VA. We went there every summer.  In the late 40s and early 50s in Glade Spring, I used to go to the only movie theatre there – Negroes had to sit in the balcony.

My uncle, Will, who raised me as his son, was a dining car waiter on the Southern Railroad.  His run was Cincinnati to Jacksonville.  Once he took me with him to Jacksonville.  We bought a local newspaper and got a room in a motel.  Every movie I wanted to see, “daddy” said we couldn’t see.  Being a child, I didn’t understand why not and didn’t ask him.  It was just as well because daddy didn’t want to have to explain it to me.  We saw Claudette Colbert in “Cleopatra”.

In the late 50s, daddy’s run was Cincinnati to Atlanta. A group of young folks my age were driving me to see Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, convicts chained together in “The Defiant Ones” at the Fox Theatre.  Suddenly Glade Spring reared its ugly head in my mind, and I inquired if we “had to sit in the balcony”.  The answer was, “Yes”.  I told them to stop the car.  I got out of the car and spent the afternoon teaching the latest dance craze, “The Madison”, to Atlanta’s youth in a gazebo in ?Mosby Park?  I enjoyed the afternoon.

Years later, I saw a TV program about Martin Luther King, who also had declined to attend the Fox Theatre in Atlanta because of its racist policy of segregation.

To this day my memories of segregation in the Deep South prevents me from considering ever living there.  Tabacco does not forget, nor does he forgive!

To all my Readers, particularly the Blacks, please make certain your young people see these pictures and be prepared to explain this dark era of American history to them.  Daddy was embarrassed to do so.  Jews are NEVER hesitant to explain their Holocaust to their children; for that I applaud them.  It’s time for Blacks to borrow a logical practice from our Jewish brothers and tell our children about the Black Holocaust. 

Black school kids forced to ride the “Back of the Bus” in Mississippi happened again in 2006!




I'LL KILL THE FIRST NIGGER
    "I'll Kill the First Nigger That Crosses That Line!" from The Leopard's Spots, Thomas Dixon Jr. 1902.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic17.htm



PERPETRATOR AND VICTIMS
    Three men lynched in Duluth, Minnesota, circa 1920.
   (photo courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society)
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic23.htm
Tabacco: That’s M-I-N-N-E-S-O-T-A, not M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I!


Frank Leo

PARADE Lynching Pictures

When Leo Frank was murdered on 17 August, 1915, his killers and their collaborators took photographs of their crime. It was nothing extraordinary to take photographs of lynchings, and the pictures were often sold after the murder. There is an excellent (albeit very sobering) collection of such postcard-pictures here. No one was ever arrested for Mr. Frank's murder, despite the many photographs of the body and the killers that common stores sold.

This murder- and many like it- happened in our own country, the "land of the free and the home of the brave." It's not just in Germany, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Our ancestors committed these crimes, and the only way we can attempt at atonement is to accept what they did and make certain it never happens again. Education is the best- and in this case, only- defense.

You've been warned... these pictures are pretty brutal...
http://theatre_chick.tripod.com/parade-pix-lynching.html



1919 lynching William Brown in Douglas County, Nebraska
Tabacco: Note the GLEE on faces of White bystanders!
http://www.liu.edu/CWIS/CWP/library/african/2000/lynching.htm



Proud perpetrator posing Photo postcard sent through the mail Mississippi--early 1900s.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic1.htm



FIRST SPECTACLE LYNCHING
The lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas 1893
First modern spectacle lynching influenced by modern American consumerism
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic3.htm




KIRVEN, TEXAS BURNINGS   
Three Negroes burned to death on May 6, 1922 while tied to a plow. Accused of the brutal slaying of seventeen-year-old Eula Ausley, white, at least one of the men was castrated before death ensued.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic8.htm



GUS GOODMAN
Gus Goodman was lynched in Bainbridge, Georgia on November 4, 1905. Lynching was relatively common in Georgia during the early twentieth century.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic12.htm



STRANGE FRUIT
The lynching of Rubin Stacy, July 19, 1935, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From Strange Fruit: Biography of a Song, David Margolick, 2001.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic20.htm


THREE KLANSMEN   
Mississippi Klansmen arrested by federal authorities in 1871 for the attempted murder of an entire family.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic9.htm


BRANDED BY KLAN
After preaching a sermon condemning Klan cross burning near Berkley, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, Reverend Oren Van Loon received this indelible souvenir in 1924.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic11.htm

NIGHTRIDER
This nightrider was involved in the lynching of a black family and a white lawyer in two separate incidents near Reelfoot Lake in Western Tennessee. Night Rider masks generally were made from meal sacks and pointed at the bottom to resemble a beard. Photo circa 1908.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic18.htm


UNION MEN
Angelo Albano and Castenge Ficarrotta, still handcuffed together, on the morning after they were lynched in 1910. University of South Florida Special Collections.
http://www.americanlynching.com/pic22.htm

www.billie-holiday.net/images/front.jpg



Tabacco: “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”!  Just a few of the proud moments in America’s illustrious history.  Why is it when politicians tell us how great America is, they NEVER MENTION SLAVERY & LYNCHINGS?  Convenient Amnesia!

Comments made to September 11, 2006, Post

Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.

In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".

T.A.B.A.C.C.O.  (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization) – Think Tank For Other 95% Of World

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