There was a little child, once – often confused – who would stare in horror at this post’s infamous image of a real, down-home lynching and ask nobody in particular as quietly as possible, “So…is that Hitler?”¹

He just wasn’t super smart is all. Couldn’t place Hitler in an historic, temporal, or spatial context. No biggie. But then imagine that youngster’s terrific additional horror, years later (three weeks ago, in fact), when he learned that the event took place not in some dark, gothic deep-South, but in Marion fuxking Indiana, a scant hour’s drive from Purdue University. Yikes. Done imaginging that? Well, now for a bonus round of shitting in your pants, realize that this lynching occurred in fuxking 1930. Not that long ago! Certainly not long ehough to be dismissed with that oh-well-we-all-did-crazy-things-back-in-the-day-aw-shucksery that will sometimes explain why we used to beat kids and women and then drink, drink, drink and drive, drive, drive. Yeehaw.

New pants? You can read more about this grossness by picking up a copy of IU professor James H. Madison’s A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America. In it, Madison references the connection between that event in northern Indiana and the song “Strange Fruit” made famous by Billie Holiday. Please see Madison’s book for more about the connection (or discussions of this important song at PBS or BBC or LOC’s National Recording Registry or AllMusic.com or David Margolic’s book). Just know that this post’s live version (attached to that courthouse square in Marion) is particularly gripping and dark and overwhelmed by the hopelessness of Holiday’s knowing that such things had happened at all, let alone would – oh, most certainly – continue in one form or another.

MAPPING IT

It’s in Indiana. The North.

HEARING IT