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The poem, written in 1937 darkly paints a vivid image of the brutality and injustice of lynching in America. The poem does not use the word "lynch" directly but, alludes with imagery, ironic language and metaphoric speech.

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"Strange Fruit" is a poem written by Abel Meerepol. Throughout the poem, the poet Abel Meerepol describes black people who have been murdered and hung up to the poplar trees by the...

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This is a haunting, powerful and disturbing poem written by a white, Jewish man named Abel Meeropol. He wrote it in protest to white supremacy and the inhumane treatment inflicted upon African Americans. The the poem was written as a response to a photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith who were from Indiana.

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One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to another watershed moment in America's history.

The man behind "Strange Fruit" is New York City's Abel Meeropol, and he really has two stories. They both begin at Dewitt Clinton High School, a public high school in the Bronx that has an astonishing number of famous people in its alumni. James Baldwin went there. So did Countee Cullen, Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon, Richard Avedon and Ralph Lauren.

Meeropol graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, says Gerard Pelisson, who wrote a book about the school.

In the late 1930s, Pellison says, Meeropol "was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge."

Meeropol once said the photograph "haunted" him "for days." So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner - who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.

When Holiday decided to sing "Strange Fruit," the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Pastoral scene of the gallant South, Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
In 1999, Time magazine named "Strange Fruit" the "song of the century." The Library of Congress put it in the National Recording Registry. It's been recorded dozens of times. Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller did an instrumental version, with Miller evoking the poem on his mournful bass clarinet.

Miller says he was surprised to learn the song was written by a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. "Strange Fruit," he says, took extraordinary courage both for Meeropol to write and for Holiday to sing.

"The '60s hadn't happened yet," he says. "Things like that weren't talked about. They certainly weren't sung about."

New York lawmakers didn't like "Strange Fruit." In 1940, Meeropol was called to testify before a committee investigating communism in public schools. They wanted to know whether the American Communist Party had paid him to write the song. They had not - but, like many New York teachers in his day, Meeropol was a Communist.

Journalist David Margolick, who wrote Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, says, "There are a million reasons to disparage communism now. But American Communism, one point it had in its favor was that it was concerned about civil rights very early."

Meeropol left his teaching job at Dewitt Clinton in 1945. He eventually quit the Communist Party.

And that's where the second part of Meeropol's story begins. The link is the pseudonym he used when writing poetry and music: Lewis Allan.

"Abel Meeropol's pen name 'Lewis Allan' were the names of their children who were stillborn, who never lived," says his son, Robert Meeropol. He and his older brother, Michael, were raised by Abel and his wife, Anne Meeropol, after the boys' parents - Ethel and Julius Rosenberg - were executed for espionage in 1953.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs had also been Communists.

The couple's trial and execution made national headlines, and there was also something of a salacious element, given that the Rosenbergs were a married couple. News accounts described it as "the first husband and wife to die in the electric chair."

At the time, the Rosenberg sons, Robert and Michael, were 6 and 10, respectively. News photographs of the boys show them dressed in suits visiting their parents in prison.

"They're these little boys and they're wearing these caps, and they look so young and so vulnerable. It's really a very poignant image," says Margolick.

Robert Meeropol says that in the months following his parents' execution, it was unclear who would take care of him and his brother. It was the height of McCarthyism. Even family members were fearful of being in any way associated with the Rosenbergs or Communism.

Then, at a Christmas party at the home of W.E.B. Du Bois, the boys were introduced to Abel and Anne Meeropol. A few weeks later, they were living with them.

"One of the most remarkable things was how quickly we adapted," Robert says. "First of all, Abel, what I remember about him as a 6-year-old was that he was a real jokester. He liked to tell silly jokes and play word games, and he would put on these comedy shows that would leave me rolling."

There is something else about Abel Meeropol that seems to connect the man who wrote "Strange Fruit" to the man who created a loving family out of a national scandal. "He was incredibly softhearted," Robert says.

For example, there was an old Japanese maple tree in their backyard, which sent out many new seedlings every year.

"I was the official lawnmower," Robert says, "and I was going to mow over them, and he said, 'Oh, no, you can't kill the seedlings!' I said, 'What are you going to do with them, Dad? There are dozens of them.'

"Well, he dug them up and put them in coffee cans and lined them up along the side of the house. And there were hundreds of them. But he couldn't bring himself to just kill them. It was just something he couldn't do."

Abel Meeropol died in 1986. His sons, Robert and Michael, both became college professors. They're also both involved in social issues. Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children. And he says that even after all these years, he still finds himself unable to kill things in his own garden.

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The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit'

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One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to an iconic event in America's history.

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A loop with a running knot, tightening as the rope or wire is pulled and typically used to hang people or trap animals. It's known as the hangman's knot or noose and symbolizes the powerful use of fear and the brutality of death. What does a noose represent today? Some say nothing, others strongly disagree saying it represents racism and hate.

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Two nooses were found hanging at high schools in Los Angeles County on Oct. 15 and 16. At Bellflower High, the hangman's knot was accompanied by graffiti declaring that God hates black people. At nearby Mayfair High, the noose wasn't captioned, and a Sheriff's Department sergeant told The Times, "A noose in itself is not making any correlation to anything."

Hanging has been a method of execution for thousands of years. In colonial America, on the Western frontier and well into contemporary times, records show that at least 9,324 people have been hanged legally in this country. In 1996, Billy Bailey of Delaware became the last to be executed by hanging.

Mob lynchings dissipated after the 1930s, but the noose never died. It became a stand-in for vigilantism, for murder by community, an unveiled threat and a symbol to brandish to keep blacks, especially, "in their place."

On May 3, 1939, in Miami, a Klansman held a hangman's knot outside a car window during a "parade" through an African American neighborhood the night before a municipal election. In the late 1950s a noose was mailed to NAACP Secretary Roy Wilkins. And on Sept. 11, 1956, in Texarkana, Texas, a noose appeared, dangling in a schoolyard tree during a battle over desegregation.

In Jena, La., in 2006, white students hanged two nooses from a tree in the schoolyard. The white students were surprised by the horrified reactions from black students; they claimed they didn't know the history of lynching - a history with deep roots in their home state. No matter: Jena was roiled by racial turbulence and division.

I've been tracking such contemporary incidents since 2010 and can account for almost 100 of them across the country. In October 2010, a few weeks after moving into a predominantly white neighborhood in Noblesville, Ind., an African American family found a noose in their yard. In the weeks before the 2012 election, some of the many noose incidents directed toward President Obama involved hanging chairs - a reference to Clint Eastwood's GOP convention speech in which he addressed an empty chair representing the president. In April 2013, a black mayoral candidate in Meridian, Miss., found a noose hanging outside his office.

Jack Shuler is an English professor at Denison University and the author of "The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose."

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Two nooses were found hanging at high schools in Los Angeles County on Oct. 15 and 16. At Bellflower High, the hangman's knot was accompanied by graffiti declaring that God hates black people. At nearby Mayfair High, the noose wasn't captioned, and a Sheriff's Department sergeant told The Times, "A noose in itself is not making any correlation to anything."

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1903-1986: Meeropol was an American writer, teacher, songwriter and poet born in the Bronx, New York. His pseudonym publishing name was Lewis Allen which was the names of his two stillborn children.

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Abel Meeropol (February 14, 1903 - October 29, 1986) was an American song-writer and poet whose works were published under his pseudonym, Lewis Allan. He wrote " Strange Fruit" (1937), which was recorded by Billie Holiday. Meeropol was a member of the American Communist Party, but would later quit.

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A national memorial dedicated to over 4,000 that were lynched in Montgomery, Alabama. This museum remembers all those who have been long forgotten. The hope is to tell the story about lynching and to never allow racism and bigotry to happen again.

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A lynching memorial remembers the forgotten

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The  film was made for the 2002-2003 Atlanta exhibition and is based from a photograph album of the historical atrocities of lynching. The film interviews various people who communicate and contextualize the photographs and the emotional state of mind during this time.

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The Personal Story of Elwood Higginbotham

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The Personal Story of Elwood Higginbotham

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Tina Washington tells the story of her grandfather's lynching in 1935 while on trial for charges of killing a white farmer. She speaks honestly, emotionally, and factually about how her grandfather was lynched by a mob of 100 to 150 people as his jury deliberated.

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"So, who is your daddy's mama?"

"I don't know my grandmother on my daddy's side," he said.

"When did granddaddy and grandmama get married?"

"I don't know when my parents got married."

Higginbottom knew little because his mother and extended family fled Mississippi after the lynching. They raised E.W., the eldest, and his siblings, Flora and Willie Wade, in Forrest City, Ark., and later in Memphis. Higginbottom's mother told the children their father had been hanged but didn't share many details. And she almost never spoke of her dead husband's character, habits or looks - the stories of his life. Maybe grief kept her quiet. Or fear. Either way, Higginbottom knew better than to mention his daddy. Sometimes he asked his cousins Dorothy and Olivia about him, but they told him to leave it alone. Don't mess around in that, they said. You might get hurt.

Higginbottom had occasionally returned to Oxford when he was younger, chaperoned by uncles who wanted to visit relatives or take in a service at the family's former church. But it had been a long time. He stared at the fields consumed by kudzu, the gravel drives, the hardwoods lush with summer growth, and saw only a foreign country. "I was trying to see something I recognized around here, but I don't," he said. "It don't look like I ever lived down here." As they sped closer to Oxford, he kept gazing out the window, scanning the landscape for even a spark of memory.

What does it mean to confront the past? This is a question that has dogged Washington and her family their whole lives, but also one that's increasingly urgent for a country that has yet to achieve the equality many thought would follow the civil rights movement. African-Americans lag behind white Americans in almost every conceivable measure of well-being: educational attainment, homeownership rates, income, health outcomes, life expectancy. Black men are far more likely than their white counterparts to fall into poverty, to be incarcerated, to be shot to death by the police. "Black and brown people are still presumed dangerous and guilty," said Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal-aid organization in Montgomery, Ala., that has led recent efforts to re-examine the lynching era. "There are these terrible disparities in quality of life for people of color, and you begin asking questions about why these things persist, and I think it inevitably leads to wanting to talk more concretely about history."

Washington's grandfather was one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas. Although racially motivated lynchings also took place in other states, they were far more common in the South. Black men accused of violent crimes - many of whom were very likely innocent - were frequent targets. But other black men, and women and even children, too, were lynched for insisting on their rights, or for minor violations of the racial caste system, like failing to step off a sidewalk to make way for a white person. On April 26, Stevenson's organization will open the country's first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice, in Montgomery.

E.J.I.'s National Memorial for Peace and Justice will feature 800 suspended columns - one for each county where documented lynchings occurred - engraved with victims' names. The design is intended to convey scope but also, more ambitiously, to reshape a Southern landscape awash in Confederate symbols by asking each of those 800 counties to claim a duplicate marker and erect the six-foot monolith on its home soil. "In Berlin, you can't go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps," Stevenson said. "And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we've done the opposite. We've actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century."

Stevenson has advocated fuller acknowledgment of the impact lynching had on African-Americans, both in terms of the trauma sustained and the concrete ways lynching disadvantaged communities. In some places, lynchings were accompanied by mob destruction of black business districts, adding economic devastation to sorrow. And African-Americans who migrated north or west to escape the threat of violence had to start over. Many left social networks, homes and businesses, making it extraordinarily difficult for families to build intergenerational wealth.

E.J.I.'s point of view stems from earlier scholarship and activism that tried to foster lasting conversations about lynching and puncture popular myths about the practice, like the notions that lynchings were isolated aberrations, pioneer justice or the work of social outsiders like the Ku Klux Klan. The unsettling "Without Sanctuary" exhibit, for example, made its debut in New York in 2000 and featured graphic photos of burned and mutilated black bodies surrounded by jubilant white crowds, some of which swelled into the thousands. Among the most disturbing images were those of white children in the crowds, some with expressions of smug delight on their faces. "If you want to talk about what stands in that place of distrust between blacks and whites, that's part of it - not that there are just individuals, but hundreds or thousands of white witnesses who might stand beside and fail to stop this," said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the author of "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century." "This is powerful, to unpack the complicity of those who remained silent and stood by and watched. That always has to be reckoned with, and we have to deal with that today."

The gruesome nature of lynchings, Ifill noted, was the main point; they were meant to haunt and intimidate, and to thus ensure the continuation of white supremacy. Stevenson makes a point of calling them "racial terror lynchings." The killings rippled beyond individual victims and their families to shroud entire communities in fear and shame. In some places, lynching memories suppressed black voter participation for decades. Even today, Ifill and Stevenson said, memories of racial violence can be so traumatic that survivors, witnesses and inheritors stay locked in silence - much like Higginbottom's mother, who took her husband's memory to her grave. "There are thousands of African-American families with histories of horrific victimization and racial oppression that have never openly talked because it hasn't felt safe or healthy to have those conversations," Stevenson said. "We're just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it's sequential. You can't get to reconciliation until you first get to truth."

Washington - and her five siblings - wanted to get to the truth about their family long before they ever imagined returning to Oxford. When they were kids, their father was too angry to talk about his father at length, and other relatives spoke only hesitantly, if at all, about the killing. So the children spun their own stories, embroidering fragments of truth with scenarios lifted from movies and books. Over the years, the theories hardened into beliefs. Wright felt certain that someone - maybe her mother? - had said that white men lynched her grandfather because he protested when they tried to force his wife to work the cotton fields. Her brother, David Higginbottom, worried that his grandfather might have been murdered for having an interracial romance. Washington thought about her grandmother's light skin and wondered if she had been the object of a dispute. "We grew up thinking that maybe somebody liked my grandmother and maybe it had something to do with her," Washington said a few days before returning to Oxford. "Maybe it was her fault - you know, not her fault. But maybe somebody liked her and tried to get to her, and my grandfather tried to protect her."

The trip to Oxford's Winter Institute, which was housed inside a Brutalist hulk of a building on the University of Mississippi campus, marked the culmination of a monthslong unraveling of their grandfather's story. Earlier in the year, a Northeastern University law student named Kyleen Burke emailed Washington's cousin Tyrone Higginbottom, who then put her in touch with the rest of the family. She told them that she had done extensive research on their grandfather's life and death as part of Northeastern's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which investigates Jim Crow-era cold cases, and she shared some of what she learned so far. As Washington settled into the Winter Institute's high-ceilinged meeting room, she - and her sister, father, brother-in-law and children - were still processing Burke's avalanche of new information and wondering what else might be revealed.

A few interested community members, black and white, trickled into the room to listen. Tyrone, a son of E.W.'s brother, Willie Wade, who died in 2005, also joined them. Framed photographs of the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Memphis sanitation workers' strike hung on the walls, and the leaves of an enormous magnolia tree could be seen fluttering through a window. A tiny woman in her 40s introduced herself as April Grayson, the Winter Institute's community-building coordinator. Grayson, who is white, grew up in Rolling Fork, Miss., and has done reconciliation work in some of the state's most divided places, including Neshoba County, where she helped grass-roots activists who pushed to reopen the cases of the Freedom Summer volunteers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were abducted and murdered in 1964. In 2005, a ringleader and former Klansman who had escaped justice, Edgar Ray Killen, was finally convicted and sentenced to 60 years for the crimes. Grayson read a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, "Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone," and then she invited the family members to introduce themselves.

"I'm glad to be here, and so excited about learning information, having never met my grandfather," Wright began. Wright, who is 55, has a beautiful singing voice and an outgoing nature despite the grief she has experienced. Her first husband and her eldest son died young; the son was shot and killed before he turned 30. Sometimes she thinks about her grandfather and wonders if a curse hovers over the family's men. "I'm just ready to get some information so I can talk to my grandkids, because I have seven," she said.

Burke was there, too, in the form of a disembodied voice emanating from a phone speaker. Grayson asked her to provide an overview of the lynching, and everyone turned to face a beige landline propped on a chair. Irven Wright aimed his cellphone camera at the room, so he could stream video for family members who couldn't be there. From his home in Killeen, Tex., David, a 56-year-old Army and Marine Corps veteran, watched and listened. He scrutinized his father, a man who dropped out of school in seventh grade and picked cotton so his mother and siblings could eat, who fought in the Korean War and who for decades worked backbreaking jobs to support Morline Lowe, the Arkansas beauty he married in 1955, and their children. The older man had removed his newsboy-style cap and sat apart from his daughters and grandchildren. "I try to put myself in his shoes," David said. "I try to be him. I thought, What would my heart feel right now?" As Burke began to speak, David's father sat bolt upright in his chair, as if braced for a blow.

Higginbottom's father, Elwood Higginbotham, was around 28 in 1935, working as a sharecropper in the Woodson Ridge area northeast of Oxford's city limits. (It's unclear how father and son came to spell their surnames differently, but the family believes Higginbotham's widow may have changed the spelling to cover their tracks after fleeing.) Higginbotham shared a three-bedroom house with his 22-year-old wife, Melissa, and their three children. The youngest, Willie Wade, was still a baby.

In the 1930s, Oxford and the surrounding areas of Lafayette County remained, in many ways, hardly different from the time of Reconstruction. Cotton reigned as the dominant crop. The county's population was around 20,000. But change was afoot. Main streets gleamed with pavement rather than dirt. Men found work, even during the Great Depression, building a government-funded dormitory at the University of Mississippi campus, which remained segregated until James Meredith began attending in 1962 amid notoriously violent protests. The town's most famous literary son, William Faulkner, had already written "The Sound and the Fury," and he lived a short walk from the busy town square. Nearby, African-Americans nurtured a middle class in a vibrant Freedmen Town that offered taxis, grocery stores and a Rosenwald School; one former resident described the neighborhood as "a black man's city in a white man's town."

But Oxford was still a white man's town, as Higginbotham would discover. Archival documents offer differing accounts of the killing, as is the case with many lynchings. Often newspapers document that a lynching occurred but otherwise prove unreliable. Reporters frequently omitted key facts or filed sensationalized tales of black criminality. Some explicitly sanctioned lynching, even going so far as to announce killings in advance. The Oxford Eagle delivered lackluster coverage of Higginbotham's death. As recorded in the papers of the civil rights worker Jessie Daniel Ames, an editor at The Eagle later explained to an anti-lynching investigator that "he had to live in Oxford and that he wanted to get along with the people there, and that the race situation made it practically impossible to carry the facts about the killing."

Those facts began on the night of May 21, 1935, months before Higginbotham was killed, according to an investigation by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an anti-lynching organization founded in Atlanta in 1919. Higginbotham and his wife, the commission reported, were in their bedroom that spring evening when a white farmer and neighbor named Glen Roberts arrived. He had at least one other man, his brother, in tow, and according to other records, he was armed. The sharecropper and Roberts had quarreled earlier; Higginbotham had objected to Roberts's running cattle over his rented field. Now Roberts wanted to whip him for it. When Higginbotham refused to open the door, Roberts broke down an exterior shed room with an ax. Then he chopped his way into the hallway. Higginbotham, the investigators wrote, warned Roberts to stop. Roberts crashed into the bedroom next, at which point Higginbotham shot and killed him.

The gravity of that moment must have registered with Higginbotham immediately. Roberts was a prominent member of the Oxford community: He enjoyed a reputation as a crack fox hunter, he played fiddle at local celebrations and he was white. Higginbotham fled, and the sheriff rallied hundreds of men to pursue him. They trailed bloodhounds across forests and fields, arrested another black man on suspicion of helping Higginbotham escape and severely beat one of Higginbotham's sisters. Higginbotham evaded them for two nights before the searchers found him submerged in a creek across the county line.

The search parties might have lynched Higginbotham right then and there, but the Pontotoc County sheriff sent him to Jackson, Miss., 150 miles away, for safekeeping. A district attorney and the county attorney, who was Roberts's nephew, arrived at the Jackson jail the next day. They left, boasting of having obtained a written murder confession from Higginbotham despite the fact that, according to census records, he could neither read nor write. "We have a clear-cut case of coldblooded murder against the Negro," the district attorney told a reporter. "The Negro is a vindictive type." They sought the death penalty.

Although he had supposedly confessed, Higginbotham pleaded not guilty when he returned to Oxford three months later for trial on Sept. 17. Melissa testified, an act that would have exposed her to possible retribution and that undoubtedly influenced her decision to leave. The hearing lasted a mere afternoon, but records suggest that some jurors doubted the prosecution's story. The judge issued careful instructions to the jury, advising them that if they believed that Roberts had entered the home in "a rude, an angry manner, and then and there held a pistol pointing toward the defendant," that they should find Higginbotham not guilty. Hours later, the jury had yet to reach a verdict, and two jurors were rumored to be holding out for acquittal.

What might have become a victory for Higginbotham and for the rule of law instead devolved into an extrajudicial killing. Not far from the white courthouse at the center of Oxford's square, a mob formed early in the evening outside the jail. Estimates put the crowd at as many as 150 men. Anyone walking to or from the heart of town would have witnessed the lynching party. They would have seen the killers enter the jail, where, through force or persuasion, they bypassed three sheriff's deputies and the jailer before pulling Higginbotham from his cell. They would have seen the men force Higginbotham into a car and begin driving up North Lamar Boulevard. The caravan swept by the grand homes of Oxford's wealthy, then past the edge of town and the lonely Three-Way intersection, before stopping in the woods off old Russell Road. Higginbotham, one newspaper reported, stayed quiet during the ride. The men took the sharecropper out of the car, hanged him from a tree and shot him.

As Burke summarized Higginbotham's story - his fateful encounter with Roberts, the "ridiculously quick trial" and the lynching itself - his elderly son remained dry-eyed. His mother never told him about his father's desperate escape or about the trial. Higginbottom's stoicism didn't surprise his son David, and it didn't fool him either. "He taught us that men don't cry," David said. "But I can tell when he's emotional." He saw pain registering on his father's face. "It would look like he kind of just left the room," David said. "He looked like he sort of just left the room, and then he'd come back in." Wright didn't weep, either. She was still trying to grasp the meaning of everything she was learning. "I may have been in a little bit of shock," she said. "Like, really? This is what really happened?"

Washington, for her part, had already read Burke's written report and was more familiar with the story than her siblings. But there was one revelation she never tired of hearing about: that before his death, her grandfather might have been a labor activist. "It's possible," Burke said, "very possible, that Elwood Higginbotham was actually involved in union organizing within a Communist labor group, trying to build power among the local sharecroppers, particularly the black sharecroppers in the area." Lynchings to eliminate African-Americans who advocated political, social and economic reforms peaked in the early 20th century, and a union affiliation provided an additional motive for Higginbotham's lynching - perhaps he had been targeted before the argument with Roberts. But Washington cared more about what a labor role suggested about her granddaddy's character than what it said about his killers. The image of her grandfather as a labor organizer, a man fighting for his people, made her think of Cesar Chavez. "Here he was, only 20-something years old," she said. "To be that brave and young in the South? Brave."

Burke's research brought David Higginbottom great relief. His grandfather, it turned out, hadn't cheated on their grandmother, as in the tale his young mind had invented. "You sort of feel a little proud, in a crazy sort of sense," he said. "Proud that he's not the guy that you perceived that he had been." The chronology, horrible as it was, also helped David better understand his own father. E.W. Higginbottom's hatred of Mississippi was family legend, and that antipathy made sense now that the family was talking more openly about the killing. So did other things. As an adolescent, David spent what felt like every waking moment at his father's side, traversing Memphis in a red 1964 Malibu, going from one lawn-mowing job to the next. He hated it; he felt smothered. But the more he thought about his grandfather's death, the more he saw his father's behaviors - the angry flashes and the hovering - as fear for a black son in a hostile world: "His thoughts were, If I can keep you around me working, I don't worry."

Wright asked Burke about her family tree. "Kyleen, you said his family was big? How many?" she asked. "I'm wondering how many siblings my grandfather had." Burke read nine names: Dela, Hosey, Rella, Jumilla, Walter, Bee, Hulette, Queen and Evelena. She also knew the name of Wright's great-grandparents: Robert and Katie.

Conversation flowed toward the future. Lafayette County has two Confederate soldier statues, erected in 1906 and 1907, standing in prominent locations. One faces south behind the courthouse. The other statue - whose creators conceived it as a monument to "heroes not forgotten" - looms above a grassy circle on the University of Mississippi campus. It's now accompanied by a "contextualization plaque" installed in 2016 at the insistence of student activists and faculty, who observed that the statue's creators wanted not merely to remember the dead but to extol white Southern nationalism and reframe the Civil War as a defense of states' rights. Not long before the Higginbottoms' visit, the Lafayette County board of supervisors heard public comments about the Confederate statue on the square, some of which called for removal. "There is a growing movement of people in the state who seem very committed to bringing this up," Grayson said. "As we're in conversation about Civil War memorials, Confederate memorials, how do we broaden that discussion to memorializing people like Elwood Higginbotham?"

There's no marker to him or to the six other men who were lynched in the county, one of whom remains unidentified. John Ashworth, the project manager for the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, which is trying to partner with E.J.I. to erect markers to 37 lynching victims in Shelby County, said that remembering men like Higginbotham is delicate work. He has researched cases in which family members had no idea their relative was lynched or didn't wish to revisit the traumatic story, and he has seen others in which the killing grounds have been obliterated by parking lots or office buildings. But for descendants who can and do participate in memorialization efforts, he said, the process can be healing. "It is a validation of their humanity," Ashworth said. "At least somebody cares about what happened."

Washington was thinking about hearing those family names - Robert and Katie - for the first time. "That's my great-grandparents," Washington said. She and her family followed Grayson downstairs to a rear parking lot and climbed into a rented blue van. Another cousin, a brother of Tyrone's, had arrived late, which brought the total of Elwood Higginbotham's gathered children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to eight. They represented just a fraction of Higginbotham's direct descendants, and in the months to come, Washington and Wright would describe for many of the others - their four siblings who couldn't attend that day, as well as children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and cousins - the places they were about to see.

The inhumanity of lynching is hard enough to fathom, but the culture of impunity that allowed the killings to continue for so long is perhaps even more mind-boggling. Seventeen years before Higginbotham died, for example, a lynching party dragged another black man, Nelse Patton, from the Oxford jail. Afterward, a former Mississippi representative and senator, William Van Amberg Sullivan, boasted about his involvement to The New York Times: "I directed every movement of the mob, and I did everything I could to see that he was lynched. ... I saw his body dangling from a tree this morning, and I'm glad of it."

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national memorial for peace and justice (montgomery  ala)

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"So, who is your daddy's mama?" "I don't know my grandmother on my daddy's side," he said. "When did granddaddy and grandmama get married?" "I don't know when my parents got married." Higginbottom knew little because his mother and extended family fled Mississippi after the lynching.

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In 1939, Holiday was the first to set the poem to music during the Harlem Renaissance period. She sings in an eerie and haunting melody with the knowledge that her rendition can have the power to facilitate change.

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In 1978 Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[4] It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Meeropol had seen Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem under the title "Bitter Fruit" in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though he had often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set "Strange Fruit" to music himself and the piece gained a certain success as a protest song in and around New York.

Barney Josephson, the founder of Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub, heard the song and introduced it to Billie Holiday. Other reports say that Robert Gordon, who was directing Billie Holiday's show at Cafe Society, heard the song at Madison Square Garden and introduced it to her. Holiday first performed the song at Cafe Society in 1939. She said that singing it made her fearful of retaliation but, because its imagery reminded her of her father, she continued to sing the piece making it a regular part of her live performances. Because of the poignancy of the song, Josephson drew up some rules: Holiday would close with it; the waiters would stop all service in advance; the room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on Holiday's face; and there would be no encore. During the musical introduction, Holiday would stand with her eyes closed, as if she were evoking a prayer.

Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about the song, but the company feared reaction by record retailers in the South, as well as negative reaction from affiliates of its co-owned radio network, CBS. Even John Hammond, Holiday's producer, refused. So she turned to friend Milt Gabler, whose Commodore label produced alternative jazz. Holiday sang "Strange Fruit" for him a cappella, and moved him to tears. Columbia allowed Holiday a one-session release from her contract in order to record it and Frankie Newton's eight-piece Cafe Society Band was used for the session.

Because he was worried that the song was too short, Gabler asked pianist Sonny White to improvise an introduction so that Holiday only starts singing after 70 seconds. Gabler worked out a special arrangement with Vocalion Records to record and distribute the song.

The song was highly regarded and the 1939 record sold a million copies, in time becoming Holiday's biggest-selling record.

In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday suggested that she, together with Meeropol, her accompanist Sonny White, and arranger Danny Mendelsohn, set the poem to music. The writers David Margolick and Hilton Als dismissed that claim in their work, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song writing that hers was "an account that may set a record for most misinformation per column inch". When challenged, Holiday-whose autobiography had been ghostwritten by William Dufty-claimed, "I ain't never read that book."

Numerous other singers have performed the work. In October 1939, Samuel Grafton of The New York Post described "Strange Fruit": "If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its 'Marseillaise'."

1999, Time magazine called it the song of the century.
2002, the Library of Congress honored the song as one of 50 recordings chosen that year to be added to the National Recording Registry.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed the song as Number One on "100 Songs of the South".
Bob Dylan cited "Strange Fruit" as an influence in the 2005 documentary No Direction Home.
Serbian rock musician, journalist and writer Dejan Cukić wrote about "Strange Fruit" as among 45 songs that changed the history of popular music in his book 45 obrtaja: Priče o Pesmama.
In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the "Top 20 Political Songs".
-Wikipedia
LYRICS ::

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

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Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about the song, but the company feared reaction by record retailers in the South, as well as negative reaction from affiliates of its co-owned radio network, CBS. Even John Hammond, Holiday's producer, refused. So she turned to friend Milt Gabler, whose Commodore label produced alternative jazz.

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Nina Simone Rendition of "Strange Fruit"

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Nina Simone Rendition of "Strange Fruit"

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Simone covered the song 26 years later in 1965 during the civil rights movement. Her chilling version is even more astounding because of the use of brutal and sobering images while the song plays in the background. She simply states at the beginning of the song, "This is a black and white problem."

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In 2015, R&B singer Andra Day connects with Holiday and Simone in an emotional, painful version of the famous protest song. Her version is just as harrowing with her soulful vocals as she visually ties the song to social injustices by wearing broken handcuffs around her wrists and a hat lined with metal chains.
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Today, Grammy award nominated artist Andra Day is joining EJI to raise awareness for our work with the release of her recording of the iconic protest song, Strange Fruit.

Earlier this summer, EJI launched Lynching in America, an interactive digital experience created in partnership with Google. The website features EJI's full report in both digital and downloadable formats, with more data, information, and analysis than was previously available online. The site brings together EJI's extensive research and resulting data with the stories of lynching victims, as told by their descendants. Through audio stories and short documentaries like Uprooted, visitors can experience a detailed examination of the tragic legacy of racial terror lynching in America and its continuing impact on families and issues today.

With interactive maps that include the locations of racial terror lynchings and in-depth profiles of people whose lives were forever altered by these acts of violence, the site demonstrates the enduring legacy of lynching and racial terror in America.

While Ms. Billie Holiday originally sang this song in 1939, its message still resonates today. As EJI director Bryan Stevenson told Billboard:

In this collaboration between Andra Day, EJI, and Google, we use music to express a painful and difficult truth about our nation's history of racial inequality. Inspired music has the power to expose and confront injustice differently than research, data and words alone. It can heal and uplift us; it's critical for human rights. Justice work needs a soundtrack that inspires the struggle. It's energizing that talented artists like Andra rise to the challenge."

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Andra Day Releases "Strange Fruit" Music Video

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Today, Grammy award nominated artist Andra Day is joining EJI to raise awareness for our work with the release of her recording of the iconic protest song, Strange Fruit. Earlier this summer, EJI launched Lynching in America, an interactive digital experience created in partnership with Google.

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On the painful past of American history, such as lynching.
" You might want to stay away from it, but when you can see that truth and deal with those painful realities of our history...it's the only way we can move forward and heal as a country."

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After seeing Billie Holiday's performance live in a theatre in New York, he said,
"She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere. This was exactly what I wanted the song to do and why I wrote it."

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In 1915, the following excerpt is from a reporters account of a scene at the Thomas Brooks lynching. His murder occurred in Fayette County, Tennessee.
"Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of a lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day's routine was delayed until boys and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man."

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Today the song “Strange Fruit” still represents the power of a protest song and a metaphor for the many who were murdered by lynching in America. It is also a symbol of the brutality of bigotry and cruelty at the hands of white supremist

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First recorded in 1939, the protest song Strange Fruit came to symbolise the brutality and racism of the practice of lynching in America's South. Now, more than seventy years later, such is the song's enduring power that rapper Kanye West sampled the track on his latest album Yeezus.

"The smell of the honeysuckle brings all of it back. That's the smell prevalent in the area we lived in. The honeysuckle was in bloom.

"Because words can't describe how we felt that night, how I felt. It was a combination of grief, shock, fear.

"You have a sorrow that grips you for what happened to Emmett."

Strange Fruit lyrics

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.

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.

Simeon Wright, now in his seventies, is recalling the August night in 1955 in Mississippi when his 14-year-old cousin Emmett Till was dragged out of the bed they were sharing at Simeon's house.

He was taken outside at gunpoint by two white men, bundled into a truck and driven away.

It was the last time Simeon saw his cousin alive. Three days later, Emmett's body was found in the Tallahatchie River.

He had been beaten, tortured and shot before being dumped in the river.

The "crime" he had committed was to whistle at a white woman in the store she ran with her husband Roy Bryant in Money, Mississippi.

That cheeky - but innocent - gesture cost him his life at the hands of a lynch mob.

The case became famous in America and helped usher in the civil rights movement.

It also brought to a close an era of "extrajudicial authority" - or mob rule - that had been tacitly accepted for more than a century when lynch mobs carried out their own form of citizens' justice.

Lynch mobs tried and executed more than 5,000 mostly black men, women and children for a variety of misdemeanours.

Taboo subject

Emmett Till's murder and the photos that were published of his bloated disfigured body in an open coffin divided America but brought the taboo subject of lynching into the public domain.

One of those who saw a photograph of Emmett is Sylvia Wong Lewis from New York.

She was eight or nine at the time and remembers innocently asking her father whether anything like that had ever happened in her family.

To her horror, her father replied, "Yes".

It was only years later, as an adult, that she discovered her great-uncle Warren had been accused of trying to assault a white woman.

He had been marched from jail in Ocean Springs, Mississippi by a group of 100 men to a persimmon tree a mile out of town where he was shot and strung up.

There was a reluctance within her family, she says, to discuss the lynching, making it hard for her to find out exactly what happened.

"They say the dog didn't bark when he went to her house," she reveals, inferring that they probably knew each other and that his killing was possible revenge for an affair between a black man and a white woman.

No grave

Newspaper reports from 1901 detail the "orderly and humane" lynching of a "negro brute" by the town's citizens.

These are the only remnants of his existence. There is no grave and there are no family photographs.

"Lynching was considered sport in some ways," says Robert Meeropol, "Postcards were taken of crowds of people picnicking under hanging bodies showing people who were proud of what they'd accomplished."

Meeropol is the adopted son of a Jewish schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, who saw one of these postcards in the 1930s and was prompted to write the song Strange Fruit - later to be made famous by Billie Holiday.

Abel, who wrote under the name Lewis Allan, was a civil rights activist who adopted Robert and his brother after their parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed by the American government for being Communist spies in what Meeropol believed to be a "state-sponsored" lynching.

He wrote Strange Fruit as an attack on those who perpetrated it.

It was never a popular song, and certainly not among black communities or outside of progressive cities like New York.

Its subject matter was simply too painful and controversial.

'Sad song'

"It's such a sad song," says Sylvia "It's a metaphor for my uncle and so many other uncles, grandfathers, brothers and fathers who were lynched throughout America".

Billie Holiday made the song famous, but in 1939 her record label refused to allow her to record it.

She was released from her contract especially to record it.

It was the first time a black artist had sung such controversial lyrics. Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun called the song "a declaration of war... the beginning of the civil rights movement".

It has endured and become a symbol of the racism, cruelty, pain and suffering endured by so many in the United States. Other major artists, including Nina Simone, John Martyn, Sting and Robert Wyatt, went on to record it.

Billie Holiday's version eventually sold more than a million copies. In 1999, Time magazine voted Strange Fruit the Song of the Century.

Bob Dylan cites the song as a personal inspiration. It has inspired books, an opera and continues to be recorded today.

This year India Arie included a version of the song on her album Songversation and Kanye West used a sample of Nina Simone's version of the song in his track Blood on the Leaves.

"That strange fruit is still out there, just in a different form," says Simeon Wright, who believes racism against young black men is still all too prevalent in American society.

He left Mississippi after Emmett's death and now lives in Chicago, where he joined the church and devoted much of his life to working with deprived black youths.

April Shipp is a quilt-maker from Detroit. She spent four years working on a large quilt called Strange Fruit.

It bears the names of over 5,000 lynched men, women and children, each one lovingly sewn in gold thread on black fabric.

She even included two nooses. "I cried every day I worked on it," April says, "I call it my 5,000 souls and I still cry when I touch it, but if no-one else remembers their names, I remember them. I stand for these people."

After being told about Sylvia's uncle, April offered to look for his name on her quilt, finding him a couple of hours later under the Mississippi section.

She took photos so that Sylvia could see his name.

After receiving the pictures, Sylvia replied "Thank you, thank you. There is something so comforting knowing he is remembered on a quilt, a bed-cover for the weary."

For Sylvia, April and Simeon, Strange Fruit remains a potent reminder of America's not-so-distant past.

Soul Music is on BBC Radio 4, 26 November, 11:30 GMT.

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First recorded in 1939, the protest song Strange Fruit came to symbolise the brutality and racism of the practice of lynching in America's South. Now, more than seventy years later, such is the song's enduring power that rapper Kanye West sampled the track on his latest album Yeezus.

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Is Lynching an Act of Religious Rituals?

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Is Lynching an Act of Religious Rituals?

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The BBC article makes the case that lynching African Americans is rooted in rituals of Southern evangelicalism.  It's somehow justified by being rooted and weighed down by Christian symbolism and its implication. At the core of the belief, the question is posed, does religion justify these acts of in-humanness and barbaric acts of cruelty?

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Photo by MPI/Getty Images

The cliché is that Americans have a short memory, but since Saturday, a number of us have been arguing over medieval religious wars and whether they have any lessons for today's violence in the Middle East.

For those still unaware, this debate comes after President Obama's comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where-after condemning Islamic radical group ISIS as a "death cult"-he offered a moderating thought. "Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ ... So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."

It's a straightforward point-"no faith has a particular monopoly on religious arrogance"-that's become a partisan flashpoint, as conservatives harangue the president for "equating" crusading Christians to Islamic radicals, accuse him of anti-Christian beliefs, and wonder why he would mention a centuries-old conflict, even if it has some analogies to the present day.

What we have missed in the argument over the Crusades, however, is Obama's mention of slavery and Jim Crow. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts his focus on religious justifications for American bondage, and it's worth doing the same for its post-bellum successor. And since we're thinking in terms of religious violence, our eyes should turn toward the most brutal spectacle of Jim Crow's reign, the lynching.

We can't deny that lynching-in all of its grotesque brutality-was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day.

For most of the century between the two Reconstructions, the bulk of the white South condoned and sanctioned terrorist violence against black Americans. In a new report, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states-Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia-between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is "at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported."

For his victims, "Judge Lynch"-journalist Ida B. Wells' name for the lynch mob-was capricious, merciless, and barbaric. C.J. Miller, falsely accused of killing two teenaged white sisters in western Kentucky, was "dragged through the streets to a crude platform of old barrel staves and other kindling," writes historian Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. His assailants hanged him from a telephone pole, and while "the first fall broke his neck ... the body was repeatedly raised and lowered while the crowd peppered it with small-arms fire." For two hours his corpse hung above the street, during which he was photographed and mutilated by onlookers. Finally, he was cut down and burned.

More savage was the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child, killed for protesting her husband's murder. "[B]efore a crowd that included women and children," writes Dray, "Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death."

These lynchings weren't just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, "celebratory acts of racial control and domination." They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy. "Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort," writes historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. "It would be inconceivable that they could inflict pain and torment on the bodies of black men without imagining that violence as a religious act, laden with Christian symbolism and significance."

The God of the white South demanded purity-embodied by the white woman. White southerners would build the barrier with segregation. But when it was breached, lynching was the way they would mend the fence and affirm their freedom from the moral contamination, represented by blacks and black men in particular. (Although, not limited to them. Leo Frank, lynched in 1915, was Jewish.) The perceived breach was frequently sexual, defined by the myth of the black rapist, a "demon" and "beast" who set out to defile the Christian purity of white womanhood. In his narrative of the lynching of Henry Smith-killed for the alleged rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance-writer P.L. James recounted how the energy of an entire city and country was turned toward the apprehension of the demon who had devastated a home and polluted an innocent life."

James wasn't alone. Many other defenders of lynching understood their acts as a Christian duty, consecrated as God's will against racial transgression. "After Smith's lynching," Wood notes, "another defender wrote, 'It was nothing but the vengeance of an outraged God, meted out to him, through the instrumentality of the people that caused the cremation.' " As UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Emeritus Donald G. Mathews writes in the Journal of Southern Religion, "Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness." The "sacred order" was white supremacy and the "holiness" was white virtue.

I should emphasize that blacks of the era understood lynching as rooted in the Christian practice of white southerners. "It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity," wrote NAACP leader Walter White in 1929, "No person who is familiar with the Bible-beating, acrobatic, fanatical preachers of hell-fire in the South, and who has seen the orgies of emotion created by them, can doubt for a moment that dangerous passions are released which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynching." And while some church leaders condemned the practice as contrary to the Gospel of Christ-"Religion and lynching; Christianity and crushing, burning and blessing, savagery and national sanity cannot go together in this country," declared one 1904 editorial-the overwhelming consent of the white South confirmed White's view.

The only Southern Christianity united in its opposition to lynching was that of black Americans, who tried to recontextualize the onslaught as a kind of crucifixion and its victims as martyrs, flipping the script and making blacks the true inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption. It's that last point which should highlight how none of this was intrinsic to Christianity: It was a question of power, and of the need of the powerful to sanctify their actions.

Still, we can't deny that lynching-in all of its grotesque brutality-was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day. It was also political: an act of terror and social control, and the province of private citizens, public officials, and powerful lawmakers. Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina defended lynching on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and President Woodrow Wilson applauded a film that celebrated Judge Lynch and his disciples.

Which is all to say that President Obama was right. The vastly different environments of pre-civil rights America and the modern-day Middle East belies the substantive similarities between the fairly recent religious violence of our white supremacist forebears and that of our contemporary enemies. And the present divide between moderate Muslims and their fanatical opponents has an analogue in our past divide between northern Christianity and its southern counterpart.

This isn't relativism as much as it's a clear-eyed view of our common vulnerability, of the truth that the seeds of violence and autocracy can sprout anywhere, and of the fact that our present position on the moral high ground isn't evidence of some intrinsic superiority.

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The Lynching of Blacks in the Jim Crow South Were Considered Acts of Christian Duty

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The cliché is that Americans have a short memory, but since Saturday, a number of us have been arguing over medieval religious wars and whether they have any lessons for today's violence in the Middle East.

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As a black man he advocated self-defense to resist the oppression of lynching. He explains his stance in the following writings from 1916.
"If we are to die, in God's name let us not perish like bales of hay. Lynching would stop in the South when the cowardly mob is faced with effective guns in the hands of the people determined to see their souls dearly."

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A woman who was lynched in 1911 along with her 15 year old son. Her crime? She was accused on killing a deputy-sheriff. The mob raped and dragged Nelson six miles to the river and hanged her from a bridge. The reason her child was included in the lynching is still a mystery.

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Shaw, a 42 year old man from Georgia was accused of attacking a white woman named Ola Franklin. He was dragged from his jail cell and hanged before his trial.

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In 1934, Neal a farmhand, was lynched for the raping and murder of a white female. The lynching mob was estimated to be several thousand white people. Neal was brutally tortured with 18 bullet holes in his body, fingers and toes cut off for souvenirs and finally parts of his body were burned.  When the local sheriff cut the body down, the townspeople rioted and began attacking other blacks in the town in protest.