The beginning of the end of ‘Strange Fruit’
“Southern trees bearing strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”
— Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol, 1939
African American journalist Ida B. Wells died in 1931, nearly four decades after she began her crusade to hold America accountable for the scourge of lynching and a decade before Emmett Till, arguably the 20th-century’s most famous lynching victim was born.
Since the early 1890s, Wells chronicled the extrajudicial killings of blacks that took place primarily, but not exclusively, in the American South. Lynchings were literally as American as apple pie in those days. Many were staged at very patriotic community picnics where the victims were hung, drowned, tortured or barbecued for the entertainment of white mobs ostensibly gathered to administer “justice.”
As an investigative journalist, Wells didn’t have to work hard gathering evidence of the atrocities taking place almost daily across America. The communities where lynchings happened with sickening regularity understood they had nothing to fear taking the lives of black people.
Pictures of lynchings were taken and distributed as souvenirs. Far from hiding their guilt, the perpetrators usually dressed in their Sunday best and posed for pictures in front of black neighbors they slaughtered for offenses — real or imagined — attributed to them.
White newspapers reported the lynchings when they could on the front page. Some even editorialized that, though barbaric, lynchings were reasonable expressions of the public will when it came to certain “black outrages.” Ironically, lynch mobs mocked the criminal justice systems at the state and local levels as incompetent, so it seemed “reasonable” for white men with blood in their eyes and vengeance in their hearts to turn to vigilante justice.
Armed with the statistics and stories gathered by Ida B. Wells of lynchings across the South in the last decade of the 19th century, Rep. George Henry White, a Republican from North Carolina and the only black member of Congress at the time, proposed anti-lynching legislation in 1900.
Suddenly, the lynchers and their representatives in Congress howled about “states’ rights” and worried that elevating lynching to a federal crime would insult fairminded, state and local criminal justice systems that were perfectly capable of adjudicating black citizens accused of crimes deserving of death.
Rep. White’s legislation was shelved though it would be revived and defeated many times in many iterations over the next 119 years.
Even after Emmett Till, a spirited Chicago-born 14-year-old, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered for allegedly “reckless eye-balling” and whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi general store in 1955, anti-lynching legislation couldn’t get traction in the U.S. Congress.
Despite the open casket at his funeral that displayed his bloated, tortured body fished from the Tallahatchie River three days after he was murdered, anti-lynching legislation was still considered federal overreach into the affairs of the state. Let the state prosecute its own people, Congress said.
Even after Emmett’s unrepentant and boastful killers were found not guilty by an all-white, all-male jury, federal prosecution of lynchings was considered even more potentially outrageous to Southerners than the underlying crime itself. States’ rights trumped civil rights and even human rights in the worldview of Southern obstructionists in Congress who used the filibuster to continually kill it.
Even as both the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts navigated treacherous legislative waters from Congress to President Lyndon Johnson’s desk, anti-lynching legislation remained symbolically toxic. It couldn’t get past those for whom federal prosecution of lynching was a violation of state sovereignty in general and Southern sovereignty in particular.
Even the relatively conservative estimate of 4,742 lynchings in America between 1882 and 1968 failed to make anti-lynching legislation palatable for the states’ rights brigade. They knew that 99.9% of those involved in lynchings weren’t indicted or failed to be convicted if they were tried in court. Still, the principle mattered more than the injustice itself.
In 2018, the only three blacks in the Senate — Kamala Harris, DCalif., Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Cory Booker, D-N.J. — crossed party lines to co-sponsor the “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act.” For the first time in American history, a lynching bill passed the U.S. Senate unanimously last year.
This week, “The Emmett Till Antilynching Act” introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, passed the House on a 410-to-4 vote with 16 members sitting it out.
The “no” votes were cast by a revanchist Who’s Who of states’ rights dead-enders: Republicans Ted Yoho, of Florida, Louie Gohmert, of Texas, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. They were joined by Republican-turned-independent Justin Amash, of Michigan. They objected to the assault on states’ rights the legislation represents.
Their foot-dragging didn’t matter, fortunately. For the first time in our tortured history, an anti-lynching bill, though purely symbolic, is now poised to emerge from Congress. After nearly 200 attempts in 120 years, two nearly identical bills have been approved in the House and Senate with both adding lynching to the United States Criminal Code of prosecutable hate crimes. Once the versions are reconciled, a final bill will be sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.
Emmett Till has been dead for 65 years, Ida B. Wells for 89 and Rep. George Henry White, the man who introduced the first anti-lynching bill in Congress, for 102 years. What would they make of this moment? The cliche about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice often takes a beating, but one can easily imagine Wells exclaiming her joy over this one. Once lynching is recognized as a hate crime by federal law, her spirit will rest easier.