Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal
My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.
Tracy Fessenden: Decades after Billie Holiday’s death, ‘Strange Fruit’ is still a searing testament to injustice – and of faithful solidarity with suffering
Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York.
Desne A. Crossley: Transfer of Courage | 1968 & 1950
He was about to bear down hard on my thighs to force me open. With a loaded exhale of breath, I growled in his face like a mad animal and gouged his eyes with my prized fingernails, lacquered blood red. I dug them in along the hollows of his eyes, my hands like two steel vices, and held on.
Abby Zimet: Ida Wells’ Crusade To Arouse the Conscience of America
Anti-lynching agitator, muckraking journalist, fierce suffragist and orator Ida B. Wells, used the media to fight against lynching, “that last relic of barbarism and slavery,” as “color-line murder” based on “the old threadbare lie that Negro men assault white women.”
Claude McKay: The Lynching
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue
Abby Zimet: America’s Right Wing Is Some Stoked To Erase Our Historical Sins
Biden: “Great nations don’t hide from their history. They acknowledge their past, both the triumphs and the tragedies.”
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: A Dirge for Our Murdered Sons
Oh, America, how many tears do you want
before you stop killing our sons?
George Yancy: Ahmaud Arbery and the Ghosts of Lynchings Past
As a black man living in Georgia, I am all too aware of the state’s history of lynching.
Equal Justice Initiative: What was the Red Summer of 1919?
African American veterans returned home from World War I eager to continue the fight for freedom at home. Many black soldiers returned from the war with a newfound determination to … Continue reading
Video: “Strange Fruit” sung by Billie Holiday
. Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, … Continue reading
