April 19, 2009

• Racism’s Fruit

  In 2005, when the United States Senate apologized for its inaction on lynching, expressing contrition for condoning “this terrorism in America,” MSNBC published the chart below.

  

  msnbc.com news services
  Mon., June 13, 2005

  Click on any thumbnail below for a larger image.

  

  Original caption: 10/27/1942:  “The dead bodies of two fourteen-year-old lynching victims, Charles Lang and Ernest Green, lie on the ground with ropes still tied around their necks.”

  

  Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, all in their early twenties, did manual labor for a traveling circus.  They were in Duluth, MN on June 14, 1920, for a one-night performance.  Irene Tusken, 19, and James Sullivan, 18, went to the circus. The next day it was alleged that six black circus workers had threatened them at gunpoint and raped Irene Tusken. With little to no evidence, Clayton, Jackson, McGhie, and three other black workers were arrested by the Duluth Police.

  On the night of June 15, a mob of thousands formed. The police were ordered not to use force against them.  They stormed the jail and held a mock trial on the spot, declared the men guilty and took Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie one block, to the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. A few people tried to dissuade the mob, but the three men were beaten and then hanged on a light pole. The police then intervened and saved the three other men.

  (more at Minnesota Historical Society)

  
  William Brown, lynched in Omaha, NE, 1919
  Oxford African American Studies Center
  Photo Essay Jim Crow Justice

  

  Rubin Stacey, an African American man accused of “threatening and frightening a white woman,” was lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. White children and adults observe his corpse hanging from a tree in this photograph.  Other photos of his lynching exist, showing different gawkers, and one shows a large mob evidently crowding around to see, presumably during the killing itself.

  
  Tipton County, Tennessee Sheriff
  W.J. Vaughn flashes light on lynching victim
  Albert Gooden during early morning hours of
  August 17, 1937.

  “[About the same time as another lynching in Florida] “Tennesseeans were smugly telling themselves that it couldn’t happen in Tennessee.  On July 19 [1937], Sheriff Vaughan outraced a mob that had formed to lynch Albert Gooden, charged with murder, and got his man to Memphis for safekeeping.  The state was getting credit for a prevented lynching when the Sheriff went to bring Gooden back to the Marion jail.  The Sheriff, it seems, brought the prisoner direct to the waiting mob and delivered him without any protest.  Something had happened in the meantime.  The sheriff had been put on the spot and did his level best to recapture his popular standing with the lynch-minded.  There were but six members in the mob that on August 17 took Gooden away from the peace officer, rushed him to a railroad trestle near Covington, hanged him, and riddled his body with bullets.  There were no arrests, no indictments, and, consequently, no convictions.”
  Judge Lynch, His First Hundred Years by Frank Shay, pages 248-249

  
  Laura Nelson tried to stop a mob from lynching her son,
  and was hanged beside him from a bridge.
  May 25, 1911, Okemah, Oklahoma

  District Judge Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the lynching of Laura Nelson and her son. In his instructions to the jury, he said, “The people of the state have said by recently adopted constitutional provision that the race to which the unfortunate victims belonged should in large measure be divorced from participation in our political contests, because of their known racial inferiority and their dependent credulity, which very characteristic made them the mere tool of the designing and cunning. It is well known that I heartily concur in this constitutional provision of the people’s will. The more then does the duty devolve upon us of a superior race and of greater intelligence to protect this weaker race from unjustifiable and lawless attacks.”

  

  Postcard depicting the lynching of Lige Daniels, Center, Texas, USA, August 3, 1920. The back reads, “This was made in the court yard in Center, Texas. He is a 16 year old Black boy. He killed Earl’s grandma. She was Florence’s mother. Give this to Bud. From Aunt Myrtle.”
  National Great Blacks in Wax Museum

  Strange Fruit
  Abel Meeropol  (1939)
  Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
  Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
  Black body 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 magnolia sweet and fresh,
  And 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 a tree to drop,
  Here is a strange and bitter crop.

  Many lynching victims’ names have been forgotten or were never known to the public, or even to their killers.

  
  dated:  1889

  
  unnamed victim circa 1928
  Oxford African American Studies Center
  Photo Essay Jim Crow Justice

  
  unknown body burned and hanged
  Blog:  The Black History Audio Journal

  
  3 unidentified victims
  Habersham Co., GA, circa 1910

  

  The reverse of this souvenir postcard reads:
  “This is the Barbecue we had last night.  My picture is to the left with a cross over it your son, Joe.”

  Times have changed.  The numbers are way down, and there are now federal laws against such “hate crimes.”  But, at least in Texas, lynching has carried over into the twenty-first century, only the perpetrators are being prosecuted and memorials are being erected to the victims.

  

  The broken body of James Byrd Jr., 49, was discovered on Sunday morning by residents of an area just outside the East Texas town of Jasper, population 8,000. As he walked home from his parents’ house on Saturday night [June 7, 1998], Mr. Byrd was apparently picked up by the men sometime after midnight and taken to woods, where he was beaten, then chained to the truck and dragged for two miles.

  Guy James Gray, the Jasper County District Attorney, called the killing ”probably the most brutal I’ve ever seen” in 20 years as a prosecutor. Mr. Byrd’s torso was found at the edge of a paved road, his head and an arm in a ditch about a mile away, according to an affidavit.  [Other sources report that more than 50 pieces of the body were found.]

  The police charged Shawn A. Berry, 23, Lawrence R. Brewer, 31, and John W. King, 23, with murder. The District Attorney said Mr. Brewer and Mr. King had racist tattoos and were Ku Klux Klan supporters, leading investigators to believe the killing was racially motivated.

  racematters.org

  

  A year after Mr. Byrd’s lynching,
  a park was dedicated in his honor.

  
  Roadside memorial to Brandon McClelland,
  dragged to death behind another pickup truck
  outside another little Texas town,
  200 miles away, ten years later.

  The mortal remains of Brandon McClelland have been described as something worse than what happened to James Byrd.  Crime scene teams missed some of the pieces and they were later found by others, including members of the family.  Some say the crime never fit the classic description of a lynching. The police say two friends ran him over with a pickup truck after an argument during a night of drinking.

  But Mr. McClelland was black and the men accused of killing him are white, and his gruesome death has reignited ugly feelings between races that have plagued this small town for generations, going back to the days 100 years ago when it was the scene of brutal public lynchings.

  Sources:
  nytimes.com
  hiphopnews

  See also:

  
  The Brute Caricature
  The Jim Crow Museum
  Ferris State University

  A Partial List of Negroes Lynched in the United States Since 1859
  on Christine’s Genealogy Website

  

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