Strange Fruit: an Overview of Lynching in America, ” by Tameka Bradley Hobbs Reaction Paper

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This story section of the book was an overview of the lynching in America. For those who don’t know what lynching is, lynching is when a mob of people kill a human being, mainly hanging them by their necks with a noose hanging from a tree. The section starts off with a poem. The poem is describing the way the whites would hang African Americans from trees just because of the color of their skin. The poet describes the scene and scent as “…the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth the scent of magnolia sweet fresh then the sudden smell of burning flesh here is a fruit for the crows to pluck…” The poet describes the sight as a very gruesome one but in a tolerant and very non explicit manner. After the poem, the author speaks on the September 9, 2011 attack on the World Trade Center. Scholar Cornel West had his own thoughts to share about the situation at hand. West stated that the United States of America had been “Niggerized.” West meant that African Americans can relate to what had happened that day more than any other ethnic group. They knew how it felt to be the victim of random, useless, careless murderous acts. This can be backed up by the lynching’s that had happened during the 1880s all the way through the middle of the twentieth century. Hobbs does a great job in making the reader realize what took place at those dark times. In the section Hobbs writes about lynching in South America, where Florida led all southern states with the most lynchings. Lynching’s began as “type of vigilante justice”, then turned into a cruel way to torture blacks and the African American

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