Lynching

Many community leaders such as Ida B. Wells and James Weldon Johnson dedicated their lives to social justice and equal rights. These leaders went on to create organizations like the NAACP to ensure the civil and political rights of African Americans. Nevertheless, many southern African Americans are still haunted by the aftermath of lynching. “The horror of these crimes still weighs heavily on black communities in the South, where lynching memories are often vivid. The anguish is made worse by the realization that some of the killers are still alive and may never be prosecuted” . Between the years of 1882 and 1968, there were more than 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced to congress. Yet, there was not ever one passed. However, in 2005 the United States Senate showed remorse for not acting during this time. “The Senate is apologizing not for something it did, but for something it failed to do. It never approved a law against lynching” . Had action been taken in the late 1800s or early 1900s, or had the Dryer Anti-Lynching bill passed, lynching’s would have been classified as a felony allowing the federal courts to prosecute cases, taking it out of the hands of state and local…

“The Lynching” by Claude McKay is a poem written in 1922 describing the cruel murder of a black man by a white mob and the aftermath of the event. McKay uses visual imagery, irony, dark diction and an incoherent rhyme scheme to emphasize his emotions when writing of dark, uncompassionate cruelty, disturbing murder and how racism is a continuous, inevitable cycle. When using visual imagery to describe setting and integrating pathetic fallacy and irony, McKay emphasizes the cruelty of murder and…

swingin’ in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees” (3-4). The poem “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol was published in 1937. It sets a deep tone on how racism occurred back in the 1930s. Meeropol was an ordinary high school teacher who went on to teach English for seventeen years. He was also a poet and social activist. Meeropol was troubled at the racism going on in America. He was inspired to write this poem after seeing a photograph of two teenagers; Thomas Shipp…

transmission is music. Feelings, ideas, movements, and trends can all be conveyed through a single song. Kanye West’s song, Blood on the Leaves, is a timeless piece that is meant to reach anyone who will listen, and tell a story of lost love and history. The quiet piano riff that introduces Nina Simone’s voice in the beginning. This signals the fragility of the song, but the high pitched drums and horns bring us back to West’s plot line. The integration of Nina Simone’s rendition of Strange…

The song Strange Fruit was first sang by Billie Holiday, who was a new performer on stage at Cafe Society, a new and popular cabaret club. The song was written in 1937 by a man named Abel Meeropol to criticize the racial discrimination in American South. Abel Meeropol, who was a Jewish-American school teacher from New York City, wrote Strange Fruit after seeing a shocking photograph of a lynching in a magazine. This song became very popular in 1939, the year where racial tension was at its…

believed to have been published in the Marxist publication The New Masses" (Heft 5). Meeropol had graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he later went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, Meeropol was disturbed and upset about the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a picture of a lynching put him over the edge. A man named Pelison Who wrote about Meeropol writes "Meeropol once said the photograph "haunted" him "for days." So he wrote a poem…

the loss of their colored customers. Wells research led her to discover many other cases where lynch mobs had murdered African American men and women. She recognized the lack of public awareness and the need for laws against lynching. Most difficult for her to understand, were the excuses for these “crimes” where men and women had been put to death. In one of her articles she explains the excuses of the white man. “The first excuse given...for the murder of unoffending Negroes was the…

several years ago, this poem captures a great feeling of acceptance since it shows how African-Americans of the past were not accepted or treated as people; which is something relevant and relatable to this day. “Strange Fruit” protests against African-American lynching during the 1930s as it was common in the South. It narrates the sadness, desperation, and sorrow of many African-Americans that were oppressed by the white supremacy of the Jim Crow laws. Through the use of irony and metaphor,…

were sent about the stance on lynchings. Claude A. Clegg III writes, “It simultaneously signaled that lynchings were becoming unacceptable expressions of extralegal retribution and confirmed that local and state authorities were limited in their willingness to pursue lynch mobs.” Hall’s prosecution brought to light a union of political and cultural trends that had distinguished southern history since the slave emancipation in 1865. As a social phenomenon, lynching had gradually developed to…

journalist and one of the early leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, investigated the reasons behind these lynchings. According to Wells, whites used a variety of excuses to justify their murders, claiming that they were stopping race riots, protecting the “White man’s government,”…