“White Americans who have been shamed by the legacy of racism now are fearless in striking back in the attempt to browbeat and humiliate those who dare to call a racist act the result of racism.” The harder Christian nationalists try to write a revised American history that leaves out the injustice, the oppression, the abuse and the murder of slaves, women, African Americans and gays the more our pathetic legacy keeps shouting from the halls of government, “Hanging by a tree.” Systemic bigotry is still central to our politics the country is susceptible to such bigotry salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos. The representative from Tennessee needs a history lesson. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. …Īnd while he burns, good men, and, women too, shout, battling for his black and brittle bones.”Īnd as immortalized by Billie Holiday in “ Strange Fruit”:īlood on the leaves and blood at the root,īlack body swinging in the Southern breeze, …Ĭhrist’s awful sin is that he’s dark of hue, the sin for which no blamelessness atones. The South is crucifying Christ again by all the laws of ancient rote and rule.
In the words of Countee Cullen in Christ Recrucified: How often do the remedial lessons of Scripture need teaching? “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39).
Your son, Joe.”ĭoes Sherrell not know that in the age of lynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in common - white women?ĭoes he not have the foggiest notion that the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women? The breakdown of white male hegemony? My picture is to the left with a cross over it. In case his historical memory is flawed, here’s the inscription on a postcard depicting the charred remains of Jesse Washington, a lynched black farm worker in Waco, Texas: “This is the barbeque we had last night.
Sherrell’s suggestion conjures up a horrific time in American history: the lynching era.