Upsoaring wings: Swinging in the southern breeze

When I heard the story on NPR yesterday about how James Byrd, Jr., was brutally murdered 20 years ago in Jasper, Tex., I immediately recognized an episode of Law & Order.

Byrd was walking home from work in the early hours of 7 June 1998, when he was picked up by three white men—all white nationalists, as it turns out, and looking for trouble—with the offer of a ride home. Instead, they took him to a remote place, beat him with a baseball bat, urinated on him, and chained him to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him for more than three miles on an asphalt road. He died somewhere on that ride when he struck a culvert, severing his head and an arm.

His murderers dumped his body on the grounds of an African-American church, where they were discovered later that Sunday morning. They were all arrested fairly soon after. One cooperated with authorities and is serving a life sentence (eligible for parole in 2038); one was executed in 2011 (proud to the last moment of what they’d done); and one was executed yesterday. One of the many tattoos on his body was of a black man hanging from a tree.

I’m not naming them, because those names do not deserve to be repeated.

In the October 1998 L&O episode, titled “DWB” (Driving While Black), the three murderers pull their victim out of his car, take him to a remote place, beat him with a baseball bat and drag him to death behind their Pontiac. The twist is that they’re all white cops. And as I listened yesterday to NPR’s Wade Goodwyn—who covered the story from the original crime—recount the history of Byrd’s death, I considered how prescient L&O was with making cops the killers.

Since 1998, cops have been killing black men and boys without any serious consequences at a pretty good clip. We outside the African American community are probably just becoming more aware of it because it’s being spread on social media. Goodwyn’s report yesterday included the fact that, while the killers of James Byrd, Jr., were convicted, the community of Jasper has spent a good deal of the intervening 20 years in denying that there’s any kind of race issue.

Consider Jasper a microcosm for America these days.

So for our National Poetry Month entry today, I’m giving you a poem written in 1937 by the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Abel Meeropol, AKA Lewis Allan. He called it “Bitter Fruit”, but he set it to music and we know it better as “Strange Fruit”. And the version I’m giving you is sung by Billie Holiday.

It seems appropriate somehow.