Talk:Strange Fruit

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[edit] Lynching

"he practice of lynching and burning African Americans that was prevalent in the South at the time when it was written."

Would anyone be terribly offended if this was reworded to avoid "prevalent". I don't think anyone can disagree that this practice was far from common, let alone prevalent.


FOLLOW UP to "prevalent" comment posted by unknown user :

I wondered about this, so I checked up on it and made an estimate of how frequently lynchings occurred in a given area. I wasn't sure what to expect, but having done so, I DO think the practice was common / prevalent.

See : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/00/Lynchings-graph.png

from the article : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

The song was first published in 1937; lynchings occurred approximately 50 times a year in the 20 year period leading up to that. Other things such as beatings and forcible seizure of firearms also occurred that aren't listed as lynchings, but doubtless contributed to the fear of lynching.

An estimate of how often someone was lynched with a given radius : Figuring the South is roughly 500,000 Sq miles (USA is 3.7 million sq mi; the South is around 1/6th of that, just based on eyeballing a map, and remembering that Alaska is actually double the size of Texas), 50 lynchings/year means 1 lynching/10,000 sq miles/year, solving for radius gives about 60 miles, roughly. Just in case my estimate was conservative, lets figure every 100 miles.

Meaning that ROUGHLY ON AVERAGE every year, if you were living in the South at this time, someone within a 100 mile radius of you would be lynched. Each year.

It seems that this would be a VERY real and constant fear for African-Americans in the South during this time; news of recent lynchings would almost definitely travel over a 100 mile radius, so every year you could expect to hear about someone from a nearby community being lynched. I think it qualifies as "prevalent". If anyone thinks that doesn't qualify as "prevalent" then I guess they could change it, but I don't intend to. Beakdan 15:24, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

No Original Research 80.254.147.52 13:26, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
I changed the wording. Lynchings were more frequent in earlier decades before the song was written. --Parkwells 18:44, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lyrics

If this song dates to the '30s, the lyrics are still under copyright, and we can't post them in the article. — BrianSmithson 09:33, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Moreover, the writer died in '86, which is much less than the required 70 years ago. I'm removing. ABoerma 19:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

However, a subset of the lyrics could be used in context of discussing imagery and inspiration of the song; that should qualify as Fair Use. I'd wait for comments from folks more experienced with copyright law than I am before doing something like that, though. Beakdan 15:24, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Photo

Note that the PBS documentry on the song and its author attributes his inspiration to a photo of the lynching of Rubin Stacey (SP?) near Ft. Lauderdale in 1935. The photo can be found here: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USACstrangefruit.htm

I think the photo should be deleted or reduced in size. We don't have to see it to believe the author of the poem might have been disturbed by such an image.--Parkwells 18:16, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inspiration

It doesn't make sense to include Oscar Wilde's poem about a man on a gallows - yes, it deals with a hanging, but wasn't inspired by the song or Holiday's singing, which it preceded by decades. I'm removing the reference. --Parkwells 18:15, 7 November 2007 (UTC)