Ever Present Threat of Violence

Campaign of Terror: Lynching in America

1. What is lynching? Execution of a person by mob action without due process of law, especially hanging.

   • “After the Civil War, lynching became a domestic terrorist tactic that White people used to exert power over newly-freed Black men and women. Although many Americans think of it as a Southern phenomenon, lynchings took place in the North, too. Lynching was not legal — it was carried out by a mob rather than a formal judge and jury. However, because lynchings went unchallenged in courts, they became a de facto form of legalized mob violence,” (History.com)

   • In Roll of Thunder, the threat of lynching is present throughout the novel and is a key part of the climax in the last chapter.

   • Listen to one of these recordings of “Strange Fruit” while reading the 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 a 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

   • This first recording is by Billie Holiday from the 1930’s, (that’s exactly when Roll of Thunder takes place). This next is a live video of her singing is it from the 1950’s: “Strange Fruit” Last is f Nina Simone from the 1960s. Billie Holiday sang this song at most of her night club performances in the late 1930s -1950s. She was forbidden to sing it by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger but she kept singing it anyway. He eventual planned a drug sting knowing she was a drug user and had her arrested. Upon release from prison, she continued to sing it. Eventually, her heart, lung and liver problems drove her to seek medical help at a hospital. There at the hospital Anslinger had her chained to her hospital bed and by some accounts forbade the doctors from treating her. She died. Read a brief story of her death and how singing this song in defiance of the White authorities coupled with her drug and alcohol abuse, killed her, here.

     The song is a a protest song written by Abel Meeropol, a communist Jewish teacher, about Black Americans begin hung (lynched).

2. Read this article about the opening of a new memorial to victims of lynching in America. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html

3. A noose (rope tied in the special slip knot used to hang people) is used as a threat, as a form of intimidation still today. Here’s an article about incidents of nooses being secretly placed at national museums, schools, including at the Smithsonian recently. https://www.wbur.org/npr/531034568/noose-found-at-national-museum-of-african-american-history