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Freedom's
Journal
Reports a Lynching
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, June 20, 1827
Horrid Occurrence.--Some time during
the last week one of those outrageous transactions--and we
really think, disgraceful to the character of civilized man,
took place near the north east boundary line of Perry, adjoining
Bibb and Autanga counties. The circumstances we are informed by
a gentleman from that county, are--That a Mr. McNeily having
lost some clothing or some other property, of no great value,
the slave of a neighboring planter was charged with the theft.
McNeily, in company with his brother, found the Negro driving
his master's wagon, they seized him, and either did or were
about to chastise him, when the Negro stabbed McNeily, so that
he died in an hour afterwards; the Negro was taken before a
justice of the peace, who, after serious deliberation, waived
his authority--perhaps through fear, as the crowd of persons
from the above counties had collected to the number of seventy
or eighty, near Mr. People's (the justice) house.
He acted as President of the mob, and put the
vote, when it was decided he should be immediately executed by
being burnt to death--then the sable culprit was led to a tree
and tied to it, and a large quantity of pine knots collected and
placed around him, and the fatal torch was applied to the pile,
even against the remonstrances of several gentlemen who were
present; and the miserable being was in short time consumed to
ashes.
An inquest was held over the remains and the
Sheriff of Perry county, with a company of about twenty men,
repaired to the neighborhood where this barbarous act took
place, to secure those concerned, but with what success we have
not heard, but we hope he will succeed in bringing the
perpetrators of so highhanded a measure to account to their
country for their conduct in this affair. This is the second
Negro who has been thus put to death, without Judge or Jury in
that country.
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Strange Fruit Anniversary of a Lynching
August 7, 1930
Eighty
years ago, two young African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram
Smith, were lynched in the town center of Marion, Indiana. . . .
Local photographer
Lawrence Beitler took what would become the most iconic photograph
of lynching in America. The photograph shows two bodies hanging from
a tree surrounded by a crowd of ordinary citizens, including women
and children. Thousands of copies were made and sold. The photograph
helped inspire the poem and song "Strange Fruit" written by Abel
Meeropol—and performed around the world by Billie Holiday.
But
there was a third person, 16-year-old
James Cameron, who narrowly survived the lynching
"After
15 or 20 minutes of having their pictures taken and everything, they
came back to get me. . . And I looked over to the faces of the
people as they were beating me along the way to the tree. I was
pleading for some kind of mercy, looking for a kind face. But I
could find none. . . . And that's when I prayed to God. I said,
'Lord have mercy, forgive me my sins.' I was ready to die."
NPR
NPR Transcript
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Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America
Edited by
James Allen
These
images make the past present. They refute the
notion that photographs of charged historical
subjects lose their power, softening and
becoming increasingly aesthetic with time. These
images are not going softly into any artistic
realm. Instead they send shock waves through the
brain, implicating ever larger chunks of
American society and in many ways reaching up to
the present. They give one a deeper and far
sadder understanding of what it has meant to be
white and to be black in America. And what it
still means.—New
York Times, January
13, 2000 |
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Bill Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008)
Strange Fruit Lynching Report
/
Anniversary of a Lynching
Willie
McGhee Lynching /
My Grandfather's Execution
Dr. Robert Lee Interview
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African American dentist in Ghana
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
18 January 2012
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