After our discussion regarding Strange Fruit in class, I spent a little time searching for songs with hidden meaning. Strange Fruit for me doesn’t have a hidden a meaning, it’s simply a choice to hear, or not hear, the message. I wanted to see what messages were out there that I might have missed before. […]
Read more "Hidden So Deep, It’s Not Even There"This entire week, throughout the Class, Race, and Gender readings and our class discussion, I have had a song stuck in my head: “The Hanging Tree” melody from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. I first heard this song when I went to see the film and the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, sings a verse or […]
Read more "The Music Holds a Message"This week in class, race, and gender we discussed the history of lynching in America. We discussed at length the systematic oppressive violence of the Jim Crow south against African Americans as well as other cases against different races throughout the country in the 19th and 20th centuries. Then we addressed a truly uncomfortable question: […]
Read more "The Legacy of Lynching"“Some may ask, why bring up ‘the past’ and these atrocities now?…we should bring these events up so we can face our collective past in order to see how it might affect the present and future.” –The Mary Turner Project Lynching is a difficult, painful topic from U.S. history that does not often find its […]
Read more "Addressing the Legacy of Lynching: The Mary Turner Project"Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees – “Strange Fruit” [1] The first time I heard “Strange Fruit”, a song popularized by legendary jazz songstress Billie Holiday, I was transfixed. Lulled by the […]
Read more "Strange Resistance"Without a doubt, lynching in the United States is one of the dirtiest stains, if not the single dirtiest, in our nation’s history. Perhaps it even outdoes years of disenfranchisement, internment camps, and the institution of slavery itself. The culture of lynch mobs that was prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was […]
Read more "Vigilante Injustice"Lynching is a subject in American History that is often thought of in a certain way – a phenomenon of the past, entrenched in the Civil Rights movement of the South. Although this is partially correct, both academics and the public need to expand the way we think of this difficult subject and realize that […]
Read more "Rethinking Lynching in American History"