veiled4allah: strange fruit

Billmon looks back on America's shameful history of lynching (note: entry contains graphic pictures of lynching). He notes:

However, it shouldn't be necessary -- but apparently is -- to point out that the destruction and, yes, savage mutilation of other human beings isn't a uniquely Iraqi, or Arab or Islamic spectator sport. And we don't need to visit the killing fields of Bosnia or El Salvador to find the proof. It's tucked away in the attic of our own national memory. And it isn't all that dusty, either... ...Now to my eyes, at least, the participants in this particular public atrocity don't appear to be either Arab or Muslim. Interestingly enough, they're not even white Southerners. This 1919 snapshot was snapped in Duluth, Minnesota -- peaceful, tolerant, Scandinavian Minnesota. And somebody liked the picture so much they turned into a postcard...

..."Having a lovely time. Wish you were here."

This is fitting, in a way, since murdering people with dark skins -- plus the occasional Jew or labor organizer -- remained a popular form of American light entertainment deep into the 20th century:

At its height at the turn of the century, two to three people, mostly southern blacks, were lynched every week. Railroads ran special excursion trains to lynching sites, and thousands gathered to watch the beating, hanging, and burning of human beings. Spectators brought cameras and vendors printed photographs on the spot, minting a small fortune by turning the prints into souvenir postcards.

Some of those photographs are now part of a new exhibit at the New York Historical Society, and what they show is the shameless, festive carnival of lynching: Women with parasols, children lifted onto shoulders for the view, and large groups of men, all expectant and exultant.

You can find more memorabilia from that not-so-distant era at the online version of the same exhibit, Without Sanctuary. But be warned: Some of the photos are every bit as graphic as anything you'll find on Yahoo News from today's massacre in Fallujah.

All told, an estimated 2,500 Americans, most of them African-Americans, were lynched over the 55-year period between the end of Reconstruction and the Great Depression. In her 1992 book, A History of Lynching in the United States, historian Jana Evans Braziel did the math: "the scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob."...

To learn more about the history of lynching see The New "Lynching" by Lilith Devlin (contains a number of graphic photos) and Strange fruit (also contains a graphic picture) and A historical note by David Neiwert.

David, Billmon, and I all called our entries "Strange Fruit". Why? This Billie Holiday song:

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.