Interesting Black and White pictures ripped from the net

[S Landreth]

^ Nice pic but I wish some would provide a little back story to the less obvious pics.

For example:

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were African American men who were lynched on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, after being taken from jail and beaten by a mob. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. A third African American suspect, 16-year-old James Cameron, had also been arrested and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob; he was helped by the intervention of an unknown woman and returned to jail. He was later convicted and sentenced as an accessory before the fact. After dedicating his life to civil rights activism, in 1991 he was pardoned by the state of Indiana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynchi...nd_Abram_Smith

The night of the lynching, studio photographer Lawrence Beitler took a photograph of the crowd by the bodies of the men hanging from a tree. He sold thousands of copies over the next 10 days, and it has become an iconic image of a lynching.

In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York and the adoptive father of the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, saw a copy of Beitler's 1930 photograph. Meeropol later said that the photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired his poem "Bitter Fruit". It was published in the New York Teacher in 1937 and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. Meeropol set his poem to music, renaming it "Strange Fruit". He performed it at a labor meeting in Madison Square Garden. In 1939 it was performed, recorded and popularized by American singer Billie Holiday.[5] The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939, and has since been recorded by numerous artists, continuing into the 21st century.

Because it’s a black and white thread,…

Abel Meeropol

from The Blues thread here at TD (a Billie Holiday cover),…….

Little about the lyrics/poem in the last video,......

The lyrics are under copyright but have been republished in full in an academic journal, with permission. In the poem, Meeropol expressed his horror at lynching's. He had seen Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem under the title "Bitter Fruit" in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though Meeropol had often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set "Strange Fruit" to music himself and the piece gained a certain success as a protest song in and around New York. Meeropol, his wife, and black vocalist Laura Duncan performed it at Madison Square Garden.

Southern trees bear a 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 big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning 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 leafs to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

The picture that moved Meeropol to write the poem: https://teakdoor.com/Gallery/albums/u...ange_Fruit.jpg

I didn’t post the picture (but the link is there) because I thought it was a bit disturbing.