In 2002, students at Lowndes High School in Valdosta found strange fruit hanging from a tree at the front entrance of their school. Several Barbie dolls had been painted black and hung from the schoolyard tree. Students also discovered the letters “KKK” scrawled in a restroom. The FBI labeled the act as a hate crime and referred the case to the U.S. Department of Justice. This may be a new millennium, but strange fruit is not foreign to the limbs of Georgia’s trees. The lynching of Black people in the South became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain White supremacy in the nineteenth century.

History of Lynching
Lynching is most commonly applied to racist violence in the south after the Civil War. It is the illegal execution of a person by a mob. The most common form of lynching is hanging. Lynching can also refer to the execution and torture of a person by shooting, burning alive, beating, dragging, mutilating, or some other atrocious method. The term lynching almost certainly derived from the name Charles Lynch, or William Lynch; both were officials who administered rough justice and extralegal proceeding to punish loyalist during the American Revolution.

In 1863, emancipation freed the slaves, but the adoption of Black Codes still restricted the freedoms of African- Americans. Black Codes were adopted state by state, including Georgia and were a prelude to Jim Crow laws. The Klan sought to control the social and political status of the freedmen. Lynching was on the rise after the Civil War
with the increase of negrophobia and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865. Negrophobia is a term used to refer to the prejudicial and discriminatory fear of African American freedmen, or former slaves. Negrophobia was the driving force behind the adoption of Black Codes. Many white people believed that Blacks could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.

Lynching was a form of terrorism used by the KKK to control the political and social status of African Americans. Lynching commonly refers to the execution of a Black person. However, the Klan’s focus was not limited to African Americans. Scalawags and Carpetbaggers also became the target of intimidation tactics and lynching during reconstruction. Reconstruction was the period after the American Civil War when the states of the breakaway Confederacy were reintegrated into the United States of America. The term carpetbagger was an epithet used to refer to Northern (Yankee) businessmen and politicians after the Civil War who moved to the South during Reconstruction and supported the Republican Party. The term scalawag was used to describe white Southerners who supported the Republican Party. Scalawags were considered the political allies of the former slaves and carpetbaggers. Scalawags were
denounced as corrupt by the Democrats. Some of these whites were lynched for being sympathetic to blacks. Some people were lynched for being Jewish, or Asian.

Lynching Records

No record covers the complete history of lynching in America, but there are at least three major sources of lynching statistics starting in 1882. In that year, the Chicago Tribune first began to take systematic account of lynchings. In 1892, Tuskegee Institute began to make a systematic collection and tabulation of lynching statistics. Beginning in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People kept an independent record of lynchings.

These statistics were based primarily on newspaper reports. Many lynchings escaped publicity because they took place in rural districts away from city newspapers. Undoubtedly, there are inaccuracies in the available lynching statistics. The NAACP lynching statistics tend to be higher than other figures. The reason for discrepancy is due to the various conceptions of what constituted a lynching.

Although a substantial number of white people were victims of this crime, the vast majority of those lynched, were Black people. Actually, the pattern of almost exclusive
lynching of Blacks was during the Reconstruction period. Lynchings occurred throughout the United States. However, 90% of lynchings in the United States took place in the Southern and border states. Mississippi had the highest incidence of lynchings in the South as well as the highest for the nation, with Georgia taking second place, respectively.

Rebirth of the Klan on top of Stone Mountain
In November 1915, William Joseph Simmons, a suspended preacher from the Methodist church became concerned with rebuilding the Klan, which he had seen depicted in the film, The Birth of a Nation. He obtained a copy of the former Klan’s “Precept,” and used it to write his own prospectus for a new KKK. He invited a group calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan to the revival meeting on top of Stone Mountain. This group of men had just recently lynched Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia. Leo Frank was a Jewish man, accused of the murder of Mary Phagan.

William Simmons led this group of robed and hooded men who met at Stone Mountain and created a new edition of the KKK. The Ku Klux Klan had been dormant since it was suppressed by the federal government during Reconstruction. They burned a cross on top of the mountain and recited an oath administered by Nathan Bedford Forrest II, the grandson of the original Imperial Grand Wizard, ex-Gen. Nathan B. Forrest and was witnessed by the owner of Stone Mountain, Samuel Venable. Venable granted the Klan perpetual access and right to hold celebrations as they desired at Stone Mountain. The Klan, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, were able to influence the ideology of the carving, and they strongly supported an explicitly Confederate and white supremacist memorial. It was purchased by the State of Georgia in the 1950s.

Strange Photos
Early one morning in the 1960s, two young boys going to a favorite fishing hole came upon a county prison farm trustee’s dead weight hanging by the neck in a thorny bramble of Georgia hardwoods. They reported it to the local authorities. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s chief looked at the scene, declared, “suicide,” snapped a photo, and closed the investigation.

Photos of lynching were quite popular and were often turned into postcards. Inscribed on one postcard with brown ink: “This is the Barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son Joe.” In correspondence related to lynching, eating references are often found such as “coon cooking,” “main fare,” and “barbecue.”

Lynchings were witnessed by thousands and treated like festivals. Pieces of body clothing, body parts, and rope were saved as relics. A photograph in the collection of James Allen’s Without Sanctuary exhibit includes a lock of a victim’s hair. Atlanta resident James Allen, a collector of African American folk art, started collecting lynching photography years ago when he found a lynching photo postcard at the bottom of an antique desk he purchased in Macon, Georgia. A few years later he came across another photograph and realized that lynching photography was a turn of the century convention. He began painstakingly collecting photographs, acquiring them through gun shows, Civil War memorabilia shows, racist collectors, auctions and on the internet. The exhibit was first housed at Emory University and has since toured the country. The exhibit can also be view on the website, www.withoutsanctuary.org.

In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher saw a lynching photograph. Meeropol recalled how the photograph“haunted me for days.” It inspired him to write the poem, Strange Fruit. Meeropol, using the pseudonym, Lewis Allan, published the poem.

After seeing Billie Holiday perform at a club, Meeropol showed her the poem. Holiday liked it and after working on it with Sonny White turned the poem into the song, Strange Fruit.

A Lynching Reenactment
Many lynchings were often gone unpunished, but in the past decade, investigations have been reopened into some of the most heinous crimes against African Americans. In the summer of 2005, Georgia civil rights activists, and members of the community in Monroe, Georgia reenacted a 59 year old lynching to push for indictments in the murder of four African Americans; two men and two women, one who was seven-months pregnant at the time. The lynching took place in Monroe in broad daylight by a white mob at the Moore's Ford Bridge over the Apalachee River.

Two African American couples were trapped on a bridge by the Ku Klux Klan. They were dragged out of the car one by one. The arms of the women were broken because they fought back and saw the uncovered faces of the KKK. They lined up the four African Americans, beat them severely, and shot them several times. They stood over them and laughed and grinned about how great everyone performed their roles. Though President Truman ordered an investigation, no one was ever prosecuted. Recently, a witness to the lynching was interviewed on videotape by an FBI agent before he passed away. The interview will serve as evidence to the case.