“I can’t breathe,” Eric Garner moaned moments before dying on a Staten Island street on July 17 of this summer. As one of millions who watched the video clip of officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Mr. Garner to death while the unarmed man lay on the pavement, I can say it was a disturbing image that won’t soon, if ever, be forgotten. Watching Garner, an unarmed Black man, slain for supposedly selling loose cigarettes, was beyond senseless. Another deadly moment when the division between race and class was clearly defined, it’s becoming harder every day to separate the lynching culture of pre-Civil Rights America from our postmodern police state.


Afterward, seating speechless in front of the computer screen, it was difficult to digest that I had literally witnessed a lynching, with officer Pantaleo’s arm as the noose that many Black men and women have tried to avoid our entire lives. “That could’ve been me,” we whisper, touching our own necks and grimacing—no matter how much folks want to claim things have changed; no matter how many White folks accuse us of exaggerating about racism as they point out our Black president.


Having grown up in the always-claiming-liberal New York City, I remember the tragic deaths of Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and others. The only difference in the Eric Garner situation was, like something out of the prophetic film The Running Man, we got to watch the murder from the comfort of our own homes.
As Professor Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of the upcoming Octavia’s Blood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice says, “Lynchings weren’t done in secret that was done undercover in the night, they were public spectacles. They did these murders without ever having to fear any retribution or justice, and that’s exactly what happened in this case. I wondered if the police officers cut off toes for souvenirs the way they the lynchers did, because that’s the level of brutality we’re at and have been for hundreds of years.”


Moments after hearing the decision on Tuesday night, I closed my eyes and somewhere in the back of my mind heard the haunting voice of Billie Holiday’s pained rendition of “Strange Fruit”—a song that’s become has been a protest anthem of injustice and death for over seven decades. The first time the legendary singer performed “Strange Fruit” at the then-recently opened Café Society in New York City in 1939, two years after it was written by Bronx poet and schoolteacher Abe Meeropol (who used the pseudonym Lewis Allan), the integrated audience was stunned silent by its power.


“There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished,” Holiday noted in her autobiography. “Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping.” In Holiday’s short but prolific career, the brutal “Strange Fruit” became one of her signature tunes. As essayist Gerald Early noted in Ken Burn’s Jazz documentary, “this was a whole new sensibility” in the progression of the music. In shows, with the venue dark and a single spotlight on her face, Holiday sang the harsh lyrics, painting a harrowing portrait as she mournfully wailed about the “bulging eyes and twisted mouth” of a corpse hanging from a tree where there was “blood on the leaves and blood at the root.”

So used to seeing Negro acts “cooning,” brainlessly performing and smiling while knowing their place in the Jim Crow era, Holiday saddened a few, outraged others, and made herself more than a few enemies that contributed to her eventual downfall.

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