BY OMARI MUSA
PITTSBURGH--This is the first stanza of the song made famous by Billie Holliday. She first sang it in 1939 at the Cafe Society in New York City. This "strange fruit" was the theme of "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," an exhibition of photographs and postcards at the Andy Warhol Museum from September through the Martin Luther King Holiday January 21.

The display is a collection of nearly 100 photographs and postcards from 1870 to 1960 put together by James Allen and John Spencer Littlefield. The museum said that 31,400 people visited the exhibit with more than 1,000 attending the last day. The total attendance was the largest ever for an exhibition at the Warhol museum.

The photos and cards show in gruesome detail the extent of the extralegal violence carried out against Blacks all over the United States during those years. The majority took place in the deep South and southern border states. A large percentage occurred between 1880 and 1920.

During those years thousands of Black men and women were tortured and mutilated, including sharecroppers, farmers, store owners, miners, railroaders, and other laborers. There is no way to know the exact number since disappearances of Blacks were common.

"The quality of the racial violence that gripped the South made it distinctive in this nation's history," wrote Leon Litwack, author of the introduction to the book Without Sanctuary, which contains all the photos in the exhibit. "In the 1890s," he continued, "lynchings claimed an average of 139 lives each year, 75 percent of them black.... Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,742 blacks met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs. As many, if not more, were victims of legal lynching, private white violence, and 'nigger hunts.'"

Often leaders or potential leaders of the Black community were lynched if for no other reason than to "teach them a lesson." Several photos show victims who defended themselves and their families from cops and racist mobs. William Brooks, a coal miner, was lynched on July 22, 1901, in Elkins, West Virginia, for killing a cop who tried to arrest him. A mob of 500 carried out this lynching. Another photo shows Laura Nelson and her son hanging from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma. Nelson's son was accused of killing a deputy who claimed they had stolen meat. Forty night riders participated in this lynching.

The exhibit also includes photos of Castengo Ficcarotta and Angelo Albano, Italian immigrant workers lynched after an outbreak of violence between striking workers and strikebreakers at a cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, in 1910. Another depiction is that of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory supervisor framed up and hung in 1915 on charges of killing a female worker. The significance of this lynching was that it marked the KKK as being not only anti-Black, but anti-Semitic as well. Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1985.  
 
Black land loss and the 'lynching trail'
Lynchings were a common weapon used by racists to drive Blacks off the land. A study published last December by the Associated Press documented 107 "land takings" in 13 southern states during the years portrayed in the exhibit. Some of the "takings" were against individual Blacks, while others targeted whole Black communities and towns. The AP investigation listed murders, house-burnings, theft, and officially sanctioned mob-ruled intimidation of Black farmers and landowners. "If you are looking for stolen Black land just follow the lynching trail," explained Raymond Winbush, director of Fisk University's Race Relations Institute.

This was the case with the 1916 lynching of Anthony Crawford in South Carolina. Crawford was a successful cotton farmer. He was arrested for cursing a white businessman in a dispute over the sale price of his cotton. After being released from jail he was cornered by a mob, knifed, beaten, and lynched. His family fought to keep the land but were eventually foreclosed on by the banks.

Violence meted out against Blacks after emancipation in 1865, including mob executions, was designed to undermine the gains of their new freedom. In the years immediately following the Civil War, the victorious northern capitalists vacillated in carrying out measures to crush the power and authority of the southern planter class. Facing uprisings against its control, the federal government was forced to end all post-Civil War governments and carry through what became Radical Reconstruction in 1867. The South was occupied by federal troops, while ex-slaves waged a struggle for a radical agrarian reform that would break up the old plantations of the former slaveowners and divide the land among freed slaves and other small rural producers. "Forty acres and a mule" became their slogan.

While the federal government refused to institute a far-reaching agrarian reform, Blacks did acquire some land. Elections were held in which Black men voted, ran for office, and took their places in new "reconstructed" governments. These state and local bodies began to pass laws in the interests of the ex-slaves and ruined small white farmers. Free public education and community services were set up. The Freedmen's Bureau was established to provide relief and assume custody of confiscated lands. Restrictions were placed on child labor. South Carolina and Mississippi adopted progressive income tax laws that fell on the rich. Civil rights laws barring racial discrimination were enacted and universal suffrage for males regardless of race was instituted.

But the Radical Reconstruction governments did not expropriate the land of the big plantation owners and distribute it to the ex-slaves or poor white farmers. This failure allowed the exploiting classes in the South, in alliance with their northern backers, to launch a campaign of legal and extralegal terror against Blacks.

By 1877 the Radical Reconstruction regimes were overthrown through a bloody counterrevolution.

Communist leader Farrell Dobbs wrote in Revolutionary Continuity that this "defeat was engineered by the dominant sectors of the industrial ruling class, who were incapable of carrying through a radical land reform in the old Confederacy and rightly feared the rise of a united working class in which Black and white artisans and industrial workers would come together in a powerful oppositional force, allied with free working farmers."

The reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, and other racist gangs was needed to roll back gains made by freed slaves, break the possibilities of an alliance of the toilers, and impose a brutal second-class status on Blacks. The capitalist rulers put in place the Jim Crow system of legalized segregation as the rural poor and working class were forcibly divided along racial lines.  
 
Public rituals of dehumanization
One of the most striking components of the exhibit "Without Sanctuary" is the fact that lynchings were not spontaneous. In fact, the racist rulers often publicized them in newspapers and circulars. The advertising and selling of tickets to view these barbaric acts was also common. Many photographs and postcards show crowds of smiling white men, women, and children attending the "Negro barbecue." The victims were burned at the stake, mutilated, and shot and stabbed repeatedly. Body parts were cut off for souvenirs. Litwack noted that "lynchings and sadistic torture became exclusive public rituals of the South."

He added, "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." And a lesson for every Black person who saw or heard about it.

"If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched, declared James Vardaman while he was governor of Mississippi (1904-1908). "It will be done to maintain white supremacy."

The ruling class sought to portray Blacks as subhuman brutes alongside the faithful Sambo retainer. Part of the racist ideology was that the "Black beast" lusted after white women. This was depicted in the movie "Birth of a Nation" in 1915. The film was a important piece of white supremacist ideology. It made Blacks the oppressors and whites the victims. The KKK was glorified as the savior of civilization and "white womanhood." However, Litwack points out that "of the nearly 3,000 blacks known to have been lynched between 1889 and 1918, only 19 percent were accused of rape."

But neither Jim Crow laws nor lynching completely cowed Blacks. By the late 1930s, as African Americans fled the South in search of jobs "up north," and with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), they gained more confidence to fight back. The independence struggles in Africa and Asia coming out of World War II gathered strength and bolstered this confidence. The March on Washington Movement to end discrimination in the armed forces and defense industries in the 1940s began dealing blows to legalized segregation. The mobilizations and battles of Blacks in the 1950s and '60s from one end of the South to the other battered down Jim Crow. Legal segregation was overthrown and lynchings became seen as an outrage by the overwhelming majority of working people and others in the United States.

Although the use of lynchings against those displayed in "Without Sanctuary" has been pushed back, violence against the oppressed in this country--including executions on the streets--is still meted out by the courts, cops, and employers. The question today is what strategy do we need to eliminate the lynching system, that is, capitalism, and open the way for the development of the full potential of Blacks and working people in general. Today the objective conditions exist for alliances between workers and farmers. Black workers are part of the working-class vanguard that will transform the unions into fighting instruments of struggle, lead the battles of Blacks against racial oppression, and build a proletarian party capable of leading workers in revolutionary struggle to take power out of the hands of the capitalists. For the first time the road will be opened to fight to transform social relations and build a society that is free of racism and is based on human needs and not profits.

"Without Sanctuary" will next be shown in Atlanta beginning May 1, 2002. The venue will be the Martin Luther King National Historic Site on Auburn Avenue. We encourage everyone to see it.  
 
 
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