excerpt from... Hellhounds

by Leon F. Litwack  

We have the Holocaust Museum to remember the victims of the butchery of Nazi Germany.  We have the black wall to honor the victims of our Vietnam debacle.  Now is the time for our belated effort to remember our victims of our inhumane lapses of morality, behavior so grotesque that it rivals the witch-burning episodes in an earlier century.  The violence meted out to blacks after emancipation and during reconstruction including mob executions designed to underscore the limits of black freedom, anticipated to a considerable degree the wave of murder and terrorism that would sweep across the south two decades later.  What was striking by new and different in the late 19th and early 20th century was the sadism and exhibitionism that characterized white violence.  The ordinary modes of execution and punishment no longer satisfied the emotional appetite of the crowd.  To kill the victim was not enough; the execution became public theater, a participatory ritual of torture and death, a voyeuristic spectacle prolonged as long as possible (once for seven hours) for the benefit of the crowd.  Newspapers on a number of occasions, announced in advance the time and place of a lynching, special "excursion" trains transported spectators to the scene, employers sometimes released their workers to attend, parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children for the event.  Even as these scenes recede into the past, they should continue to tax our sense of who we are and who we have been.  Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago.

Strangefruit.org is a grim reminder that a part of the American past we would prefer, for various reasons, to forget, we need very much to remember.  It is a part of our history, a part of our heritage.  The lynchings and terrorism carried out in the name of racial supremacy cannot be put to rest, if only because the issues they raise about the fragility of freedom and the pervasiveness of racism in American society are still very much with us.

(The entire Hellhounds essay can be found in the book, Without Sanctuary:  Lynching Photography in America, Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.)