Institutional Attacks or Vigilante Justice?

      Hollyway discusses "black death" in depth. While she discusses how they deal with death, during her chapter 2, she goes into detail about how "black folk" die. She states "we died ... as victims of lynching, from executions, murders, police violence..." In response to these horrific deaths they faced, they used their forms of art to bring attention to these issues. Similar to the photographers in Guimond and Allinger's pieces, they used literature, music, etc. to talk about the "black death." Most notably, Billie Holiday sung about lynching in her song "Strange Fruit." This song shocked people, as they were unaware what it was about until she got into her lyrics. This became a fight song for the African Americans to fight the heinous crimes against them. They were finally able to bring attention to lynching in the eyes of the white Americans who were ignorant to their issues.

      Fast forward 63 years from Billie Holiday's recording of Strange Fruit, which Hollyway used to illustrate the push back from the African American community, to the release of Toby Keith's Beer For My Horses. While Billie Holiday's lyrics discussed the horrors of lynching, Toby Keith sings a lighthearted song at the "old days." His lyrics could be linked to the lynching which Holiday sings of. He sings "take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree, found up all of them bad boys, hang them high in the street for all the people to see." The scene he paints with his lyrics sounds incredibly familiar to Strange Fruit's, "black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." Looking specifically at the last line provided from Toby Keith's song "hang them high in the street for all the people to see," relates even further to Holloway's how blacks died. Hollyway discuses the piece "This Is Her First Lynching" where a young girl is being held up to get a better view of a lynching, or so "all the people can see." Through both Holiday and Keith's piece, we see lynching from different perspectives but all relate back to the heinous ways in which blacks died, as described by Holloway, witnessed by Holiday, and written about by Keith.