Raynor HCA 2013-01
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 1/10/2013
Photograph, 10” x 8” black and white, minor damage along right side. The photograph is affixed to a duplicate photo behind it. This haunting image shows the lynched bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two African-American men who were lynched on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. In addition, the original negative is present. Shipp and Smith had been arrested the night before, charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and raping his white girlfriend, Mary Ball. A large crowd broke into the jail with sledgehammers, beat the two men, and hanged them. When Abram Smith tried to free himself from the noose as his body was hauled up by the rope, he was lowered and then his arms broken to prevent him from trying to free himself again. Police officers in the crowd cooperated in the lynching. In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York, saw a copy of this photograph. Meeropol later said that the photograph "haunted me for days" and inspired the poem "Strange Fruit". It was published in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. This poem became the text for the song of the same name, performed and popularized by Billie Holiday. The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939.
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