Strange Fruit: Images of Lynching in Poetry

Strange Fruit, a collection of poems by various poets, dramatizes the conflict of African American lynching during the early to mid-twentieth century. The collection focuses on different aspects lynching: why lynching occurs; how the African American community feels regarding this inhuman act; how lynching affects white Americans; and finally, in what ways the black community should respond. Margaret Reid suggests in Black Protest Poetry that these poems are "the only weapon" available to the poets and become, in essence, a means of protest (8). While the poems may be considered a form of protest, ultimately, each poet, through poetry, attempts to address the inconsistencies between the American ideal and its reality.

One of the greatest inconsistencies in American society has been the treatment of African Americans. Following the Civil War, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were passed to abolish slavery and bestow citizenship on the former slaves. Nonetheless, despite these laws, whites in the former Confederate states undermined these amendments through various means: the Thirteenth Amendment was undermined through debt peonage or sharecropping and vagrancy laws; the Fourteenth, by de jure and de facto segregation. In addition, white Southerners also began to indiscriminately murder blacks, leading Congress to pass the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870 in order to protect the African American community from this type of violence. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court declares this act unconstitutional in 1875 in US v. Cruishank, after which violence against blacks, particularly lynchings, increase.

Lynching, according to James Cutler, is "the practice whereby mobs capture individuals suspected of crime, or take them from the officers of the law, and execute them without any process at law, or break open jails and hang convicted criminals, with impunity" (1). For African Americans, this becomes an all too common occurrence, especially in the South. Philip Dray confirms this opinion in At the Hands of Persons Unknown, in which he asserts that whites made a concerted effort to undermine advances made by African Americans since the Civil War and Reconstruction. For southern whites, lynching provides a way to weaken both the social and political power of those they believed to be a threat to their own way of life. "Most sensationally, lynching came to be associated with what was seen as the ultimate symbol of black autonomy, sexual access by black men to white women" (60). Yet there were those in the African-American community who recognized that lynchings were not really to protect white women from black men, but an excuse to prevent blacks from advancing economically, socially, and politically. In essence, white Southerners utilized this form of terrorism to force blacks to "remain in their place."