 “Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the roots. 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.’’
– Billie Holiday
In many ways, we are a nation of short memories. We live on the 24 hour news cycle, careening from non-event to newsworthy non-event, barely able to process the historical import of things that happened one year ago, let alone in generations past, and mostly at a loss to put the past into historic context so that it’s useful to us today (many Americans are only now seeing the parallels between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam). And because we have been stripped of an in-depth knowledge of history, along with a broad civic education, from our public school system in favor of multiple choice tests, we are raising a generation of young people whose memory is even more shallow than our own.
It is in that context that nooses, with all of their gory, historic significance, are back in vogue.
The students at Jena High School in that backward hamlet of LaSalle Parish, La., doubtless had a cursory understanding of the abject violence that nooses represent in American history – that they signal “n----rs steer clear;’’ that they demarcate the places where black citizens, black students, dare not set foot.
Most likely, though, that's where their understanding ends. Likewise, the sudden outbreak of “noose incidents’’ across the country, including on college campuses in Maryland and New York, seems to signal a disturbing trivialization of the noose’s wicked step-parent: lynching.
Such killings outside the legal system were a leftover from America’s frontier days, when armies and police forces had scant control over the vast ranges of territory into which the United States was expanding. After the Civil War, they became a brutal means of intimidating and controlling former slaves – but also of subduing immigrants (Italians, Jews and Mexicans were the next most likely targets of lynching after Blacks) who might challenge the status quo.
As the twentieth century became the 21st, lynchings went from a scattered national phenomenon to one that became most closely associated with the American South, though murders continued to take place in the northern states.
Some 4,733 people were lynched between 1882 and 1959, punctuated by the terror campaigns of the Ku Klux Klan and the disturbing number of killings that took place under the color of law.
For African-Americans, the noose represents the act of taking a man bodily from his home, under the control of a mob, stripping, beating, and torturing him until his skin becomes strips of bloody sinew, and the breaking of his neck at the end of a hastily tied noose, and sometimes setting his body on fire, often after crudely castrating him.
That imagery of naked brutality – of blood and gore – is important to recall, because it was the remaining corpse, left hanging in the tree, sometimes for days, that was intended to send a message of sheer terror to other blacks, telling them they had no rights that white men were bound to respect.
Is that the message that these white collegians and high school brats are trying to send?
Lynching also represented the slow annihilation of the souls of white folk, who became so degraded that they could take their children to watch a killing and call it a picnic. Are the pranksters willing to take on that bloody legacy, and to bend under history’s judgment? (And what about black comedian Kat Williams, who recently wore a noose as “bling’’ at the BET Hip-Hop Awards ... Are nooses the new N-word?)
For this country’s sake, let's hope most of these fools are acting out of flippant ignorance, rather than culpable knowledge.
Joy-Ann "Joy" Reid is a political commentator and writer, and is the co-host and producer of the "Wake Up South Florida" morning show on NewsTalk 1080 AM, WTPS in Miami, heard weekdays from 6-10 a.m. You can reach her at
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or 305-644-0800.
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