Strange fruit . . .

The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, a large gathering of lynchers. August 7, 1930, Marion, Indiana.

THE TEA PARTY AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT have a scary mindset about Obama, and it brings to mind the halcyon days of yore. According to THE LYNCHING CALENDAR,

From 1865 to 1965 more than 6,000 African-Americans died in racial violence in the United States. This inventory includes the names of 2,400 of the African-Americans who were lynched in the United States from 1865 to 1965.

The inventory is necessarily incomplete. Records are scant. Newspaper reports are scattered. The Tuskegee Institute Lynching Inventory began in 1882 -- just before the great surge of lynchings that occurred around the turn of the century -- a surge that accompanied the American conquest of the Philippines, defeating the colored fighters of the Philippine War of Independence, called by Anglo-American historians “The Philippine Insurrection.”