Obama's Public Support of Michael Vick

[Nat]

Originally Posted by betenoire

For the people who haven't heard the song that Aj mentioned:

In addition -

http://www.theamericanmuseum.org/february.10.fifth.html


Strange Fruit

First Published In
The New York Teacher
1936

Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan
(1903 – 1986)

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.

"On August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, black men arrested the previous day on robbery, rape, and murder charges, were forcibly taken from their jail cells by a white mob, beaten savagely [possibly to death], then hanged [or hung] from a tree. Marion police officers took part in the kidnapping and murders. The photograph was taken by Lawrence Beitler. Beitler worked almost around the clock for ten straight days, printing thousands of copies of the picture, which he sold for fifty cents each. Abel Meeropol was moved to write Strange Fruit when he saw a copy of the photograph. The poem was set to music, and became the piece Billie Holiday sang to close her performances. Samuel Grafton said of the song, in 1939, "If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise." In 1999, Time Magazine named Strange Fruit the song of the century.
...
[Editor's note: Marion was not in the South. Indiana was not a Confederate state, nor did it even share a border with any of the states that seceded or remained neutral 70 years before the lynchings. Although it is comforting to believe that the demon of savagery borne of hatred lies only in the Southern character, in fact, Marion, Indiana, lies farther north than New York City.]"

NPR recently took a retrospective look at these events - worth listening to.

Strange Fruit: Anniversary Of A Lynching