Black History

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March 3, 2010 • Joe Guidry III  
Filed under Opinion

Black History

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
 Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
 Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
here is a strange and bitter crop.
 By: Billie Holliday

The scent of corpses and rotten flesh still linger in our history as well as the broken tree limbs still on the ground. The pain of losing a loved one still paints the picture of our beautiful America, know as the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”. I mention brave because from 1607 to 1865, many African Americans were lynched, tortured, and starved. Many of the men and women’s bodies were left to shrivel up and rot. They swayed and swayed in the wind until their very last possible moment of life remained. From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings had occurred in the United States. 3,446 of those people lynched were all black.  The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched. However, blacks were not the only ones to be lynched. Whites accounted for 27.3 percent of lynchings, most of the time they were lynched for helping or aiding blacks. Willie Lynch was the author and creator of the word lynch, and he said, “Gentlemen, you know what your problems are: I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, I am here to introduce you to a method of solving them. In my bag here, I have a fool proof method for controlling your Black slaves. I guarantee everyone of you that if installed correctly it will control the slaves for at least 300 hundred years . My method is simple. Any member of your family or your overseer can use it.” His method was lynching. Lynching in his mind brought fear into the eyes of children and parents. By lynching parents in front of their children, this assured himself that slave masters wouldn’t have any problems for years to come. However, its 2010 and we’ve taken a half step up and gotten a black president. From lynching’s, to now having a black president.

Know your history…Black history

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