One could say it all started with the killing of George Floyd on the streets of Philadelphia (or was it Newark, NJ, or Minneapolis?) or somewhere else far from the historically racist southland of the United States. Or was it the killing of Emmit Till, a 14 year old Black boy lynched in 1955 Mississippi for allegedly offending a white woman in her store. I still remember the look on my mother's face and how all the grownups talked about what happened to Emmitt Till. Whenever I heard his name, there was grief and sadness in the room. I wondered if my parents knew his family; they didn't. What they knew were the sensibilities of Black folk around the wanton killings of Blacks, seemingly wherever they could be captured.
The lynching of Emmitt Till was a first for me. I already knew "Strange Fruit" but barely understood what the song represented. I was coming to know the meaning of the word, and feeling the trauma and grief all around me. This came on the heels of the forced "desegregation" of public schools in the South in 1954 (Brown vs. Topeka), and, immediately following, the gerrymandering of school districts in the previously integrated schools in the North, where I lived, in a suburb of New York City. We could almost feel the draft as whites fled to nearby towns and exclusive neighborhoods where Blacks were not permitted to live.
The killing of George Floyd was also a first. For me, it was the first time I witnessed an actual murder; a person being mauled to death on a curb side of a city street with cell phones and security cameras buzzing. Sure, I have seen many televised shootings and stabbings in movies and on television, but this was not fiction. This was real. Anyone watching, in my opinion, knew he was dead when his body was flopped on the stretcher when police personnel arrived in an ambulance to take him away.
My immediate reaction: "…Another f*****' lynching…!". "Strange Fruit." Instantaneously, it seemed as if "…the whole world knew...." People knew that a Black man had been crushed to death, but this time with cameras rolling, and onlookers begging the police to stop killing him; to know, as they knew, that he was going to die if they didn't get that officer's knee off of his neck. Meanwhile, other police officers stood casually around the scene, creating a barrier to intrusions by onlookers who seemed to want this outrage to stop. But the police were cavalier and unyielding. It seemed as though he had to die before they would get off of him. This, for me, is where the current cacophony began. Was it because so many people saw the horror of this flesh-to-flesh massacre? Or was it because everyone knew that everyone else knew? We may never know the answers to those questions. But the drum beat continues. "Black Lives Matter"; "I'm not a racist"; "I'm an anti-racist!"; you're not the antiracist you think you are!"
Learned colleagues struggle to unpack what is happening. Mid-stream, some wonder, where are all the Black protesters? How come we are not hearing Black voices? Simultaneously, some professional's listservs have been nearly shut-down because of the volume and vitriol of "anti-racist" postings, attacks, counter-attacks and defenses.
Cacophany: harsh discordance of sound; dissonance: a cacophony of hoots, cackles, and wails; a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds: the cacophony produced by city traffic at midday.
Arguably, this definition of cacophony does not capture the essence of what is flooding the air ways in our culture in this moment. Racism has become recognized as pandemic in our society. Alongside COVID-19, these twin pandemics have devastated many in the Black communities of the United States. Whites, other People of Color, have also been heavily impacted; African-Americans disproportionately so.
#Say their names
There are many t-shirts and posters covered with names of Black men and women shot to death by police. Breonna Taylor; Arbry; …many more. Try to say their names. I can't do it. Two or three names into the list, and my tears block me. Is that part of why Black voices are relatively silent in this maelstrom?
Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arberry, Malice Green, Abner Louima.
Learned scholars, psychologists and other psychotherapists among them, band together to do the work! Progressive groups create horse races of professional activism, and squeeze out the more moderate voices of other colleagues, in ways reminiscent of the killing of George Floyd. White fragility abounds and the argumentativeness and push back becomes a marginalizing force. In the midst of twin pandemics of racism and COVID-19, we have those who argue for thoughtful, albeit slower, approaches to the work.
It was April, 1968. As a young college senior, I was driving to campus and tried to park my car, when fires broke out. Turning around and racing around the corner, tried to park again, and again fires broke out. My car was functional but the radio didn't work. I ran into a dorm and found out that Martin Luther King had been shot to death. I was stunned. Afraid to stay in my apartment closer to downtown, I found a way to drive around the National Guard, patrolling to enforce the curfews imposed to quell the riots, to my best friend's house and stayed with him and his mother on the edge of Howard University's campus. There were lots of protests, riotous frenzy, as whole neighborhoods burned to the ground around us. We stormed campus buildings, locked the administrators out. We wanted change.
We are older and more thoughtful now. We need to band together to educate all who are in our circles, leaving the shrill voices of protesters and the young to sing the songs and march the streets in protest. Until we get a grip on what is still happening, we may see more lynching on curb sides or by police guns in the backs of fleeing young Black men and boys. And we will have yet another explosion of riotous outrage.
We are called upon to dig deeper beneath the poundings of cacophonous voices, and to share in ways that can temper the perpetuation of these periodically emerging outbreaks and enhance the efforts to understand and teach what we know,
Strange Fruit was written in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, to protest the lynching of Black Americans which had peaked at that time. Meeropol was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and sympathetic to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for spying on the United States for Russia in 1953; Meeropol and his wife adopted the Rosenberg's orphaned sons. The song was recorded by African American blues singer, Billie Holiday. Haunting, it has been called a declaration of war and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the United States. Billie Holiday reportedly recorded the song with such pathos in memory of her father, who died at age 39 from a lung disorder after he had been refused admission to a hospital because he was Black. Pandemic racism gave rise to wanton health disparities then, and does so now.
"Daddy, why did you and all of your 12 brothers and sisters leave the south and move north?"
"... 'cause they were shooting-up Black folks down there…."
Lyrics
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
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' 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 the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Lewis Allan
Strange Fruit lyrics © Edward B Marks Music Company, Marks Edward B. Music Corp.