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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (83349)	7/2/2000 5:00:09 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

On a somewhat related note: A Song That Reverberates in the American Soul nytimes.com Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. . . . For people like Steven Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, who plays "Strange Fruit" to his law students each year at Emory, Harvard and Yale, it still is. For Mr. Bright, who litigates capital cases throughout the South, the death penalty is, in its arbitrariness and terror and disproportionate impact on poor, uneducated blacks, "the first cousin of lynching." And "Strange Fruit" is not just some historic curiosity. "It just hits like a sledgehammer," he said of the song. Leon Litwack, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of African-American life after the Civil War at the University of California at Berkeley, also plays it in his classes. "The song unnerves us because it depicts unspeakable atrocities meted out by people very much like ourselves, and justified in the name of Christianity and a belief system that defines one group of human beings as less human than another," he said. "I should say defines, because it's really not past tense. The whole notion that being black by itself incurs risks in our society -- that's not a matter of the past." Of course, the Supreme Court's view of the relevance of the obvious bias against the poor and minorities here is similar to their view of claims of innocence, once it gets to the appeals stage. Mustn't interfer with the workings of the well-oiled machine. Cheere, Dan.