Strange Fruit Makes a Comeback
His name was Trey Reed. He was 21 years old and a student at Delta State University in Mississippi. Last September he was found hanging near the campus. Authorities called it suicide.
Juliana Nzita, 16, was a young immigrant from a country in Africa. She too was found hanging from a tree in May.
To’Nea Nicole Miller, age 27, was found hanging from a tree in June this year, near Miami. Her death was also called a suicide.
Justice Kai James, 21, was found hanged outside a building in Georgia, also in June. Another “suicide.”
Jay Jackson, an Illinois resident who traveled to Michigan to attend a festival, went missing and was found hanging from a tree in a wooded area near the festival on June 30th. State police called it a suicide. He was 28 years old.
Tasia Fortune, the mother of four children, was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned house on August 3rd in Jackson, Mississippi. The police department there still has an open investigation at this writing, but one thing is certain. No Black mother hangs herself and leaves four kids alone.
And no Black people hang themselves. It’s a cruel and insane claim to make. What’s happening now is a continuation of a long history of lynching.
As the NAACP notes, “Lynchings as a disgraceful and barbaric practice from the past continues to this day. In 1998, James Byrd was chained to a car by three white supremacists and dragged to his death in the streets of Jasper, Texas. In 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia. The three white men charged with killing Arbery claimed he was trespassing. The killing of George Floyd was also a lynching.”
Ida B. Wells must be turning in her grave. Known as a fearless investigative reporter and anti-lynching crusader in the late 19th and early 10th centuries, she risked her life to expose the horrors of racial violence in the south and helped found the NAACP. She then traveled to other parts of the country documenting hundreds of lynchings beyond the south and the eastern seaboard.
In 1892 she lost three friends to lynching. They were owners of a grocery story in Memphis and white men, likely KKK, who thought they were threatening local white grocers. That led to her intensive researching of lynching which she reported in her published pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which described how lynch mobs were formed and exposed the excuses white officials used to justify mob rule.
Later, Billie Holiday, noted Black jazz singer, recorded a song in 1939, called “Strange Fruit.” It exposed what became called “the window to the soul of white supremacy,” The title referred to lynching. It’s first verse was this: “Southern trees bear a 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.”
Holiday didn’t write the lyrics. They were written as a poem by a schoolteacher who used a metaphor of fruit hanging from a tree to describe the brutality of lynchings. Her rendition of the poem became the first anti-racism protest song, and a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Why is there no coverage of the new wave of lynchings. That is likely a rhetorical question, but it’s staggering to know that lynchings are happening in this moment of racism writ large. It should stun each of us that a veritable epidemic of lynching is being ignored by the media. Surely people of conscience should be made aware of what’s been happening, which is obviously why I am writing about it.
Historical data is available and outrageous but data about lynchings in the recent past are hard to find, and as Axios reports, "The moment a case is ruled a suicide, it's no longer investigated as a potential homicide."
Wells described lynching as the "national crime" of the United States, highlighting that it was “a systematic, brutal violence rather than a random outburst.” That is still relevant.
Rosa Parks remembered the pervasive fear and violence of her time, describing the terror of hearing about the Klan as well as learning about lynchings as a child. And Martin Luther King Jr. pleaded for legal protection.
As other leaders have noted, lynching is central to understanding racial inequality in America. It cannot be ignored or overlooked at this crucial time in our history. It provides critical context to present day racism. Shining a light on the tragedy of lynchings is deeply important if we are ever to heal as a nation. Telling the stories of what is happening, and saying the names of victims would be a good start.
# # #
Elayne Clift writes from Brattleboro, Vt.
