The Hanging Tree

“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.” —Abel Meeropol, 1937

Between 1877 and 1950, 326 Blacks were lynched in Minter’s native Alabama. The 1981 Ku Klux Klan lynching of Michael Donald, the last recorded in the United States, also took place in Alabama.

Prewar Blacks grew up in what historian Leon F. Litwack identifies as "the most violent and repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States." Indeed, Jim Crow remains unfathomable yet too familiar-cautionary because of its closeness to ongoing ethnic repressions throughout the world. Its violences were iconographic, in the form of segregated facilities and minstrelsy; they were carnivalesque, in the form of rampant fraud and supercilious double-standards; they were disingenuous, in the form of paternalism; they were immobilizing, in the form of debt peonage, "vagrancy" laws, and proscriptions against movement and association; they were dehumanizing, in the form of disfranchisement and abhorrent social services; they were destabilizing, in the form of beatings and summary death. Jim Crow's terror was randomized, writes Litwack:

"The offenses that precipitated mob violence related less to sex crimes (as sensationalized in the press) than to physical assault and murder (the most common charge), theft, arson, violations of the racial code, economic competition, and disputes over crop settlements. Many of the transgressions by blacks would have been regarded as relatively trivial if committed by whites and were not grounds anywhere else for capital punishment: using disrespectful, insulting, slanderous, boastful, threatening, or "incendiary" language; insubordination, impertinence, impudence, or improper demeanor (a sarcastic grin, laughing at the wrong time, a prolonged silence); refusing to take off one's hat to a white person or to give the right-of-way (to step aside) when encountering a white on the sidewalk; resisting assault by whites; "being troublesome generally"; disorderly conduct, petty theft, or drunkenness; writing an improper ("insulting") letter to a white person; paying undue or improper attention to a white female; accusing a white man of writing love letters to a black woman, or living or keeping company with a white woman; turning or refusing to turn state's evidence, testifying or bringing suit against a white person, or being related to a person accused of a crime and already lynched; political activities, union organizing, conjuring, or discussing a lynching; gambling or operating a "house of ill fame"; a personal debt; refusing to accept an employment offer; "jumping" a labor contract; vagrancy; refusing to give up one's farm; conspicuously displaying one's wealth or property; and [in the eyes of whites] trying to act like a white man All too often, black southerners, innocent of any crime or offense, were victims of lynchings or burnings because they were black and in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Leon F. Litwack, "Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow" (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).