Even Strange Fruit Bears Seeds:
The remarkable history of lynching In America.
Philando Castile. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Tamar Rice. Mike Brown.
Trayvon Martin.
If these names are familiar to you, in that they recall the taste of bile in the back of your throat, the feel of fists clenched to bare-knuckle whiteness, or the not-so silent white hot rage that comes from having watched yet another killer of an unarmed person of color go free.
If the names attached to these hashtags remind you someone you know and love: a child, a parent, a sibling, a lover, yourself.
If you, like myself, have lost track of the names because they have become too many to count, and the weight feels too much to bear.
Then it is incumbent that you understand these seeds did not fall far from the tree upon which their ancestors were hung.
It is with this in mind the Equal Justice Initiative has launched the interactive website: Lynching In America; Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. According to their website, the Equal Justice Initiative is “committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.”
This by any measure, no mean feat. According to Jon Campbell, a Producer working with Google on the project, Lynching in America got its start with a grant from google.org for EJI (the money will go towards building a memorial museum; the website is a force multiplier). “They’ve spent the last 5 years researching and confirming details around racial terror lynchings and are in the process of placing memorial plaques at as many locations as possible” says Campbell of EJI. “The museum will be a central place for all of it.”
Inspired by a speech from Bryan Stephenson, Founder and Executive Director of EJI, Campbell’s team produced all of the content, the audio stories, the photos, the film, the promos, educational videos, and all of visual storytelling. “The original intention was to take EJI’s research and make it accessible” says Campbell. “We were going to just make films of 3 families but once we started interviewing them for research, we knew we had to let their voices tell their own stories. We built lesson plans for high schools, released podcasts, a book, worked with 3 more families.”
The results are nothing short of breathtaking, and should be mandatory education for every American citizen. There are stories to listen to. Videos to watch. There is an utterly terrifying interactive map detailing the history of Racial Terror Lynchings, state by state, county by county. Google technology lets you track the Great Migration, where more than six million African Americans fled the South; refugees of terror in their own country. There is an incredibly detailed recounting of the history of lynching in America; the embarrassment of a national tragedy, laid out from secession to the lingering trauma in irrefutable black and white.
There is an unpacking of the myth that the 13th Amendment brought an end to slavery, and an explanation of how the modern criminal justice system incarcerates more people of color today than were slaves in the 1800s.
Most importantly, there is what you personally can do to help challenge racial injustice.
“The original intention was to take EJI’s research, which was a presented as a PDF written by a group of lawyers, and make it accessible” says Campbell. “We were going to just make films of 3 families but once we started interviewing them for research, we knew we had to let their voices tell their own stories. Then once EJI saw what we wanted to do, they opened up more stories for us to follow and we kept growing. We built lesson plans for high schools, released podcasts, a book, worked with 3 more families, Honestly, it’s a little surreal that it’s out there in the world now.”
It’s even more surreal the lengths this country has gone (and continues to go) to hide its shameful past. Still, strange fruit bears strange seeds. The effects of racial terror perpetrated by Americans on fellow Americans, reverberate with us to this day. May we each to our part to embrace these truths, no matter how ugly, that we may plant the seeds for a better tomorrow.
