My first book, the award-winning epic poem, Black Shadows and Through the White Looking Glass: Remembrance of Things Past and Present, deals with the theme(s) of “the captivity, exploitation and suffering of Black people in America.”  But not all of Black history is about suffering.  A big part of Black history is, despite the odds, triumph and transcendence.  Nevertheless, there is a theme of “racial injustice.”

The Equal Justice Initiative has a superb calendar documenting this racial injustice, lest we forget.  Every American should be subscribed to this calendar!  Today’s calendar is entitled, “White Mob Lynches Thomas Brown on Courthouse Lawn in Nicholasville, Kentucky,” on February 6, 1902.  In most of these lynchings, as in the murder of Thomas Brown, white mobs, without resistance from law enforcement, would seize Black men from jails, brutalize them in unspeakable ways, and then hang them, memorializing them as “strange fruit.”

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/feb/06

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’s a 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’s a strange and bitter crop

Black men, women, and children harvested crops across the South for nearly two and a half centuries under slavery, and then another 100 years under Jim Crow, laying the groundwork for the wealth of the nation.  Of course, most white folk did not and do not want to give Black folk credit for this, for the gift of their sweat and brawn, their ingenuity and brilliance, that they overcame, and did more than simply survived. The sadistic pathology of white supremacy though will not let Black people be!

As we head into a presidential political cycle, with a country as divided as it was during the period leading up to the Civil War, where some white people still do not want to let Black people be, where one political commentator describes the “politics of revenge,” that that’s what’s driving many white voters, that some white people want revenge. For what, I wonder? I know that when I hear “cancel culture” from a white person that it is connected to a bygone era, where white people were not held accountable for their crimes against Black humanity. Do some white people want to return to those days, where they could say and do anything, including killing Black people, without being held accountable? Those days are long over! 

Black fruit will not sit idly by and be turned into strange fruit! Perhaps RAHOWA is upon us!