Eli Jones
Contributing Writer
The lyrics to the song “Strange Fruit” make a point of contrasting the beauty of natural scenery and the grotesque violence that results after a lynching. This juxtaposition is stark, describing the sweet smell of magnolia flowers blending into the smell of burning flesh. The song is grotesque, disturbing, and haunting, which is exactly why it is such an effective tribute to the crime against humanity that is lynching. Unless an accurate image of such a horrifically violent act is conjured in someone’s head, the concept loses all meaning.
This was exactly what that the Black Law Students Association felt last week as the President of the United States compared his possible impeachment to a lynching on his Twitter account.[1] As students who study the law—and by extension American society and culture over the years—such a comparison was both immensely striking and distressing. We knew such a comparison was neither accurate to the nature of lynching itself, nor sensitive to the atrocities endured. When discussing the matter in our office, our Firm Relations Chair, Nicole Banton ’21, pointed out that some people don’t really know what a lynching looks like.
To address this issue, we decided to create a pop-up exhibit, held in a classroom every morning for three hours a day, three days straight. The finished exhibit, Lynching: An Exhibit on Racial Terror, featured photographs and information on eight separate incidents of lynching, as well as physical artifacts and an electronic interactive map that showed the location of every recorded racial lynching in the United States. The main drive of the exhibit was to provide an educational forum to learn about the widespread practice of lynching in American history and foster a culture that holds individuals accountable for misrepresentations.
The exhibit aimed to be shocking and, we dare say, upsetting. As a society, we can decry comparisons to lynching or talk at length about how awful racism is, but it’s not often that we actually face the blunt reality of what these regimes look like. When you see photographs of women and children laughing at a burning body as if they are watching a sporting event or when you see a souvenir postcard of a lynching jokingly call the man people burned alive “the barbecue we had yesterday,” there is a new level of horror that people feel towards something from which they initially may have felt a great deal of distance.
The legacy of racism and dehumanization of Black people is not something to be invoked lightly, which is why BLSA worked to address the need for this exhibit. I use the word need intentionally, because regardless of what political stripe we fall into, this history is important. Not only important, but vital. As aspiring lawyers, if we cannot look at the full reality of our past, we will never fully be able to adequately address the challenges of today and tomorrow.
This observation is without a doubt the biggest takeaway we wanted people to have from the exhibit. Although President Trump’s tweet was the impetus of this exhibit, this was not about politics or impeachment. This was about Bennie Simmons, Laura and L.D. Nelson, Jesse Washington, John Henry James, Emmett Till, and the thousands more who fell victim to the murderous rage of the lynch mob. Thousands of Black bodies were denied their due process and convicted in the court of public opinion for offending the false notion of white supremacy.
Our country bears the burden of this legacy. Just as every person lays claim to the wonderful and powerful strides towards freedom and justice this nation makes, we each have an obligation to lay claim to the weight of the shameful portions of America’s past that lay on our shared identity. If there is one thing BLSA wants people to remember from our exhibit on lynching, it is to accept the need to reconcile the two.
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ejj9yj@virginia.edu
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1186611272231636992?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet