Lynching in the West

PART I



"Strange Fruit" was written by Abel Meerpool, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. He published it as a poem first in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine, under the pen name of Lewis Allan. Meerpool adopted Julius and Ethal Rosenberg's children, Michael and Robert, after their parents were executed for "espionage" in Sing Sing Prison on 19 June 1953. The Rosenbergs wrote a letter to their children shortly before they were executed.

"Strange Fruit," Abel Meerpool
Lyrics (as sung by Billie Holiday)

Southern trees bear a 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 is 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 is a strange and bitter crop.

Without Sancturay




"[M]ore Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity." -Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke, 2006)

Welcome to the past... As Ken Gonzales-Day's important new book Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 makes clear, in California and many western states the majority of lynching victims were Latino. This is a history still being told in ever varying shades of black, brown, and the white sheets and hoods that must be wrested from derelict political bodies in order to demand a literal and symbolic accounting of the corpus delicti.



PART II

Media Responses:
Counter/Memories, or the Aesthetic Agencies of Justice

The following articles proffer responses to Samuel Huntington's "thesis" in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004). Though the book's thesis is easily discountable, I'm interested in exploring how the book creates "affective communities" whose commerce of feeling make the "Latino-hating" we've studied possible by legitimating "fear" as a patriotic duty.

The Hispanic Challenge
By Samuel P. Huntington

Huntington's ... undocumented jeremiad against Latino immigration

Latinos, Cowboys, and Samuel P. Huntington: A Community Responds to ‘The Hispanic Challenge’















GHOSTING: How to Touch History

















GHOSTING