The Rise and Fall of Chongryun—From Chōsenjin to Zainichi and beyond

Extract

Horrified by the sight of the lynching of African Americans, Abel Meeropol wrote a poem called Strange Fruit that is perhaps better known in the form of the 1939 rendition by Billie Holiday. African Americans continued to suffer lynching for many decades after the American Civil War—mostly in the South, but also in many other states all around the country. Being black meant risking being turned into a strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, giving off the smell of burnt flesh as it swung in the southern breeze. Being black meant close proximity to death—by accidentally stumbling into a white person, by not adhering to prescribed etiquette, by not addressing a white person properly, or simply by making eye contact with a white woman. In a word, lynching could and did take place at the whim of certain white people. Hardly any explanation, let alone justification, was required. In some states, a lynching would be announced in advance in the local newspaper so that white people could gather and enjoy a picnic while watching it. Men and women, old and young, and boys and girls participated, eager and curious witnesses to the spectacle of black bodies being beaten, severed, carved, sliced, burned, and mutilated. Today, half a century after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, great numbers of black Americans die at the hands of police or while in police custody, reminding us that to erase a belief and the system that it is founded upon takes more than the declaration of a new law.