Lynching in the American Midwest 1930.

 

The lynching of Thomas Shipp & Abraham Smith

America seems to be full of abandoned and neglected areas like Gary in Indiana. Gary is the birthplace of Michael Jackson and his family. They call it the rust belt which stretches from New York to Chicago. These are areas that were reliant on certain industries such as steel and which suffer economic decline and urban decay because of deindustrialization. Gary's racial population is mainly black and it's 30 miles from Chicago.

The city of Marion, in Indiana, is 147 miles from Gary or a 2-hours, 45 minutes’ car drive. I believe the racial population of Marion is mainly white. It's the birthplace of the actor James Dean, but it's also notable for another incident.

In August 1930, two young black men, Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith, were lynched by a group of thousands. They were taken from their jail cells, beaten, and hanged from a tree in the county courthouse square. They had been arrested as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case. No one was ever charged over their deaths which was typical in lynching’s. Police officers in the crowd are known to have cooperated in the lynching. The crowd was estimated at 5,000 including women and children.

We usually associate lynching’s with the southern states of the U.S. but Indiana is in the American Midwest. As Billie Holiday sings in "Strange Fruit": "Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood on the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees..."

The song is said to have been inspired by a poem written as a protest against lynching’s and in particular a photograph taken by Lawrence Beitler of the lynching of Shipp and Smith.

The American singer Paul Robeson tried to get the U.S. President Harry S Truman to take action to stop the lynching’s of black people, but Truman declined to do so, because he felt it would alienate southern voters.