Audience Description Post

The ‘millenial’ demographic and future generations are going to continue to be the most diverse generations in american history, an article by Pew Research that defines Millenials as people born after 1980 claims that “43% of Millennial adults are non-white"(D’Vera and Caumont). Generations have been steadily becoming more and more educated while being hit harder by the recession than other age groups. ("Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.", 2010) As well as being “Less Religiously Active than Older Americans”.

2.      Come up with one specific, representative detail about your imagined reader that helps you understand who they are concretely. i.e. background, education, culture, etc.

However diverse and educated and not religiously active American Millennials are they are still American’s and with that comes a whole multitude of dynamic beliefs and opinions. Each and every last one of them believes that America is the place where, regardless of the political and social climate, they can practice those beliefs and shout those opinions freely. This is what all Americans share, millennial are just coming into they’re own and starting to add to the national voice. This brings forth the question in their mind about what change they would like to see in the world and how to implicate that. Millennials are ready to strike.

3.      List the principles relevant to your issue that you and this person probably share.

Everyone likes Thanksgiving, generally speaking.

We can all agree Native American’s got a raw deal

Mashed potatoes and gravy are good any time of year

4.      List the principles relevant to your issue that you and this person probably do not share.

Tradition is over rated

It’s a necessary change

5.      Do any of the principles in 4 represent insurmountable obstacles to them accepting your argument?

Probably for some people. I really should add to the list. 

6.      Where will you and this reader find common ground?

I’d like to argue that American holidays have been somewhat taken over by capitalism. That tradition really can be proven to be somewhat a myth, especially the myth that Thanksgiving is founded upon. 

7.      Are there any issues on which you are not willing to concede ground to your listener or where you will feel the need to explicitly reject their principles?

Yeah tradition is over rated, specifically this one. I’ve got a few things I need to research before I can fully explicate that argument but I think there’s going to be sufficient historical and hopefully ironic information out there supporting that.

8.      Where in your paper will you explicitly acknowledge and respond to possible objections that this audience might have?

This is going to be like that paper “The Rhetoric of the Streets’ with the amount of acknowledging and responding I’m about to throw down

Cohn, D’Vera, and Andrea Caumont. “10 Demographic Trends That Are Shaping the U.S. and the World.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2016, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/03/31/10-demographic-trends-that-are-shaping-the-u-s-and-the-world/. 

Ryan, Camille L, and Kurt Bauman. “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2015.” Census.gov, US Census Bureau, Mar. 2016, www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf.

Smith, Samantha. “The Whys and Hows of Generations Research.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Pew Research Center, Mar. 2015, www.people-press.org/2015/09/03/the-whys-and-hows-of-generations-research/.

“Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Pew Research, 24 Feb. 2010, assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/10/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf. p. 39

Wormald, Benjamin. “Millennial Generation Less Religiously Active than Older Americans.” Pew Research Center's Religion &Amp; Public Life Project, Pew Research Center, 17 Feb. 2010, www.pewforum.org/2010/02/17/millennial-generation-less-religiously-active-than-older-americans/.

Working with Theoretical Sources

Soviet Samizdat and Nonconformist Art Movement - Colin Potter

Johnston, Hank. “Talking the Walk: Speech Acts and Resistance in Authoritarian Regimes.” Repression and Mobilization, edited by Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol McClurg Mueller, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 108-137.

The argument that is posited by this essay is that not all protests and forms of collective action adhere to the conventional structure and concept of protest usually used to describe protest movements. In particular, Hank argues that in authoritarian regimes where the punishment for conventional protest is very severe, simply engaging in oppositional speech and expression qualifies as a form of protest. Hank explores how the samizdat in the USSR provided a way to disseminate culture that was inherently oppositional and how safe spaces were created to promote this kind of speech. Hank states that "oppositional speech acts are a less demanding and less risky form of collective action" (117). This argument relates directly to how I need to analyze the Soviet nonconformist movement. Because the action people took during the movement weren't conventional forms of protests such as marches, sit-ins, petition signing, and letter-writing to name a few, it is important to establish first that this movement is still a form of protest. This source does that, and it contextualize the important features of this kind of protest, from why it occurs, to what it accomplishes beyond the superficial level that many historians focus on. It is something I will need to establish early on and does a good job at providing a framework from which to investigate this movement.






Cochlear Implant Protest - Daniel Tannen
Key Term: Audism

Eckert, Rowley. “Audism: A Theory and Practice of Audiocentric Privelege.” Humanity & Society, vol. 37, no. 2, 2013, pp. 101-130.

The protest against the Listening and Spoken Language Symposium that was sponsored by the Alexander Graham Bell Association was based on the idea of oppression and discrimination. However, many individuals (those unfamiliar with the deaf community) may not immediately associate the use of cochlear implant technology with oppression. The article by Eckert and Rowley establishes a framework for thinking about oppression of deaf individuals by exploring a key theory: audism. In 1977, Tom Humphries defined the term as “The notion that one is superior based on one’s ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who hears” (Eckert 105). The authors seek to use this word and associated theory to, “improve social scientific and public understanding of audism as a social problem in postmodern times” (Eckert 120).

In the protest performed by Audism Free America in Los Angeles in 2013, the audience must understand the emotional and logical opposition the deaf community holds against proponents of cochlear implant technology. Eckert and Rowley specifically take note of a type of audism called the auditory industrial complex (AIC) that aggressively targets Deaf children for medical treatment often through surgery techniques (Eckert 107). Deaf individuals do not perceive the inability to hear as a disability and have therefore become outraged about the push for the implementation of medical procedures that seek to “fix” them. The ideas presented in the article are essential to understand the societal background that gave rise to the protest movements for deaf civil rights.



KKK Homosexuality - Lance Reidenbach

This article is from a larger collection.
Gibson, James. "Homosexuals and the Ku Klux Klan: A Contextual Analysis of ..." Jstor. The Western Political Quarterly, Sept. 1987. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.

I believe the focus is to show that anyone should be allowed to protest even the Ku Klux Klan. As a people, the KKK hate virtually anything not American or white. Their “hate” protests incite anger in everyone across the world. The article mentions an exact protest from 1984 in which the KKK protested homosexuality. They were being escorted around town but hundreds of officers. It shows how the city and law enforcement support knowing the KKK’s rights to do so. I chose this article because my subject is how the KKK had an effect on the civil rights movement. The KKK is relevant to my paper because it shows the ideas and thoughts in a KKK member’s head. There is history here and maybe a primary source.

For my paper the framework of it all will help bring in the reality of Civil rights to both sides. (KKK VS Others) Also find what counts as rights and not just anarchy.

“On Saturday, June 9, 1984, 55 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down Wertheimer Street in the Montrose Area of Houston in protest of homosexuality. The Klansmen were escorted and protected by 800 members of the Houston Police Depart”(427). This also reveals yet another source to protest, being homosexuals not just hating on black. “Unpopular political minorities have often met intense resistance from the majority when they have sought to assert the rights of citizens of democratic policies”(427). Makes me think further pointing out inequality and the KKK making sure these smaller groups are put to rest before they get sense that they can work together. “…items, actual civil liberties disputes provide an illuminating context for studying applied political tolerance” (427).The protests on both sides start to blur the edges of legal or not legal.

Précis

In Steven Schwarze's 2006 Environmental Melodramain the  Quarterly Journal of Speech

published online in Nov of that year, he outlines set of guidelines in which melodrama is a necessary and valuable tool of rhetoric. Schwarze cites emotional appeals within environmentalism as a means to logically explain the effectiveness of melodrama. The authors final takeaway is that in the rhetorical conversation no one form of rhetoric is superior to another. Examining the use of certain code it would seem Schwarze is speaking to an scholarly audience which is familiar with rhetoric, probably his peers. He establishes this relationship with them by not appealing to ethos.

Topic Exploration: Free Nips

1. What was the protest? If it was part of a larger movement, where are you drawing the boundaries (geographical, chronological, legislative, etc.) around your project? 

Free the Nipple, or free nips if you’re one of the cool kids, is a campaign that gained a lot of publicity for a movement of equality. Actually several movements for equality in regards to double standard laws and social norms against women. The Free the Nipple campaign spawned or perhaps was inspiration (it’s a smidge unclear) for a film directed by Lina Esco about a group of women who protested to change New York laws about which gender could be topless in public legally. At the moment there seem to be several factions of movements or protests all addressing the issue of inequality of women’s states of undress versus mens. 

For this project i’ll focus on this particular campaign and protest since it has gained a huge following, they have their own hashtag. So from 1992 to now I suppose is the timeframe I have to work with. I probably won’t really have geographical boundaries however I will limit myself to things that are more relevant to this movement. I’ll look into legislation and sociological side effects. I should probably watch the movie.

2. Why do you believe that this identity is tied to this protest in a significant way? For whom is this tie significant? 

Women, the female identity, are tied to this movement because they have nipples and are the ones facing the discrimination in a much more severe way than men. Almost no one cares if man is topless except that it may be unusual in certain settings. If a woman is topless even in places where it may be legal, such as New York, she may still be arrested. The laws surrounding female toplessness are sadly the first step. The taboo on female bodies extends through society and results in larger problems for women to face for the rest of their lives.

3. How did the group you’re looking at participate in the protest?

Mostly they took off their shirts in public. Also there was an appeals case People v Santorelli.

4. When you think about this project, what are you worried or concerned about? Do
your worries have anything to do specifically with whether you can tie your identity to the protest clearly? Are there questions that you think it will be hard to answer? Do you have methodological concerns? What part of this project do you think will be the most difficult for you? 

I’m worried about finding scholarly sources more than anything, there seem to be plenty of journals and articles. Though I don’t really know how to look for those so i’ll have to employ some of those library skills we learned the other week. This is like five questions Stephanie I don’t want to answer all of them. I think it’s a bit intimidating as it is. I’m a one step at a time kinda gal.

Finally: if you are working on a topic that is similar to someone else’s, how will your projects be distinct from one another. (This will obviously require talking to/emailing with the other person/people about their projects.) 

Nobody else cares about boobs so my project will be different because literally I’m the only one talking about boobs.

Website Criteria

Website that meets criteria:

http://sain.scaa.sk.ca/items/index.php/eskimo-woman-with-dog-inside-igloo;rad

This website meets the criteria because it is relevant to the topic of igloos and is reliable because it is published by the University of Saskatchewan. The image included a reference code and is published by a credible source. 

Website that does not meet criteria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igloo

Wikipedia does not meet these three criteria because it is open to public editing and is not relevant because not all sources are credible even though sources are given. It is not current; not all the content within the website is based on scholarly consensus. It is not like a group of credible sources or writers or professors got together and approved every Wikipedia post.

Reliable??: not really! For a long time we’ve known Wikipedia can't always be trusted. A lot of opinions are expressed through the site so it can't be seen as reliable.

Connotative

Definition:

Griffin uses connotative to reference words. More specifically a connotative word has a 
definition in a book somewhere but can be used associatively with feelings (positive or 
negative), or predisposed ideas (cultural or social) and images. Connotation is concerned 
with the association that our minds make about the word rather than taking the 
definition literally. Usually words can be synonyms and have different connotations. Such as 
cheap versus economical. 

Example:

"In a study literally called: ‘The Effect of Background Music in Shark Documentaries on Viewers' Perceptions of Sharks’ researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego showed over 2,000 participants 60-second video clips of sharks swimming - one silent, one set to uplifting music and one set to ominous music. “This is the first study to demonstrate empirically that the connotative attributes of background music accompanying shark footage affect viewers’ attitudes toward sharks,” said lead author Andrew P. Nosal." (Hooton)

From the text:

The one time Griffin uses the word connotative he is talking about the connotation in the word movement used to describe social change. "As students of rhetoric our concern is obviously with those efforts which at- tempt to effectuate change, not through the forces of wealth or arms, but through the force of persuasion. In the term historical movement, then, movement is the significant word; and in particular, that part of the connotative baggage of the word which implies change conveys the quality 
of dynamism. For as the historical movement, looked upon as a sustained process of social inference, is dynamic, and has its beginning, its progression, and its termi- nation, so the rhetorical component of the movement is dynamic, and has its inception, its development, and its con- summation."

Works cited:

Christopher Hooton. "Ominous music linked to negative perception of sharks, study finds"  independent.co.uk, 8 Aug. 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/ominous-music-linked-to-negative-perception-of-sharks-study-finds-a7178776.html

Communications

Definition:

an exchange of information, news, or expression. In regards to DeLuca and Peeples communications 
is a reference to mass communications, the media, new and old.

Example from text:

Both Derrida and Peters offer dissemination as the primordial form of communication, the first turn before dialogue. Their point, an insight highlighted in an age of mass communication, is that communication/transmission/reception/meaning/understanding/communion may never happen, “that a letter can always not arrive at its destination, and therefore it never arrives. And this is really how it is, it is not a misfortune, that’s life, living life”

Context:

DeLuca and Peeples mention communication several times in "From Public Sphere to Public Screen" each is a comment on the discussion of the effectiveness of mass and new media in delivering information and as a tool to use in the public sphere. "Communication as characterized by dissemination is the endless proliferation and scattering of emissions without the guarantee of productive exchanges. Peters cites the parables of Jesus as the paradigmatic example of dissemination in order to suggest that dissemination offers a model of communication that is more democratic, open, public, equitable, receiver-oriented, and in tune with humanity’s multiple communication practices" 

Rhetorical vs. Historical Context

1) Historical context:

• 1860s Woman's Rights Convention (p. 488)
• Gay Liberation Movement 1977-1990 (p. 488)
• Knights of Labor 1879-1913 (p. 488)
• American Federation of Labor and the depression of the 1890s (p. 488)
• SCLC 1957 (p. 488)
• NAACP 1909 (p. 488)
• National Urban League 1910 (p. 488)
• CORE 1942 (p. 488)
• SNCC 1960 (p. 488)
• Youth International Party 1960s (p. 489)
• Carmichael's speeches 1966-1967 (p. 489)
• MLK's speech/march on Washington, D.C. 1963 (p. 490)
• Freedom Summer 1964 (p. 490)
• "The Ballot or the Bullet" 1964 (p. 490)
• Democratic party convenes 1964 (p. 490) 
• Selma to Montgomery March 1965 (p. 490)
• Watts Riot Aug. 11-16 (p. 491)
• James Meredith Pilgrimage 1966 (p. 491)

2) Rhetorical context:

• Evolutionary struggle, which is within the movements and helps evolve it 
• 1860s Woman's Rights Convention (p. 488)
• Gay Liberation Movement 1977-1990 (p. 488)
• Knights of Labor 1879-1913 (p. 488)
• American Federation of Labor and the depression of the 1890s (p. 488)

• Established organization
• SCLC 1957 (p. 488)
• NAACP 1909 (p. 488)
• National Urban League 1910 (p. 488)
• CORE 1942 (p. 488)
• SNCC 1960 (p. 488)
• Organizations and leaders
• MLK vs. Malcolm X (p. 490)
• Floyd McKissick of CORE (p. 491)
• Roy Wilkins of NAACP (p. 491)
• James Meredith, civil rights legend who was shot (p. 491)
• Stokely Carmichael, ideal charismatic leader of the black power struggle (p. 492)

Strange Fruit

Elizabeth Kennedy

Steph Brown

ENG306

09/10/2016

Stranger Fruit

Strange Fruit, sent a message throughout history since Billie Holiday first performed it in 1939 at Café Society in New York City, with a solitary beam of light on her face, to a small, dead quiet crowd at the end of her set and well after the dinner service (Margolick, 1998). The song was published as a poem in the New York Times, originally titled “Bitter Fruit”, two years before it ever hit the stage. The poem and music was written by Abel Meeropol, a teacher and activist. Mr. Meeropol was spurned by the rage he felt when he saw a now famous photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith, the ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’. America at the time was either collectively ignoring the inhumanity of lynching, and the implications it would have for the prevailing white supremacy, or actively engaging in the act as though it were a spectacle, an ordinary amusement. Billie Holiday did what Mr. Meeropol never could. She gave Strange Fruit a voice, indeed Thom and Abe got a voice and subsequently became a part of a much larger group of people who needed justice. The dead who by the power of song refused to be forgotten and the living who would demand equality. 

Ms. Holliday amplified a message to America, now and then, that injustice and violence against African Americans won’t be silenced, and should not be perpetuated or ignored. The lyrics, “Southern trees bear strange fruit,” specifically call out the south, even though the particular image that inspired Mr. Meeropol was taken in the decidedly mid-western state of Indiana. He mentions the south twice more calling to mind specific idealized country imagery when he mentions the magnolia, the official state flower of both Mississippi and Louisiana, and in the line, “Pastoral scene of the gallant south,”. Mr. Meeropol may be speaking to America, the image that inspired him was from Indiana, but the message is clearly meant for the south, where racism and violence have a synonymous history.

This song brought the crime of lynching to audiences regardless of their political involvement and put injustice at the forefront of the American conversation. Lynching has been used as a tool for punishment without due process for as long as America has been a free nation. A punishment that would range from hanging and shooting the victims to burning them at the stake or torture and mutilation. This communal act of violence was an effective and unfortunate method of terrorism against African Americans. In a 1971 interview Mr. Meeropol went on record to say, “I wrote 'Strange Fruit' because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetuate it.” (Margolick, 1998) Billie Holliday took that stage and began to sing Strange Fruit, who’s lyrics so artfully expressed the idea to America that, African Americans are not dispensable, they see what is happening, you should to see it too. We should all want it to stop.

Mr. Meeropol’s juxtaposition of traditional southern imagery, combined with a harsh critique of the southern lifestyle, against the backdrop of graphic and poetic violence is a tongue in cheek appeal to logos, lacking in strong ethos, and still a powerful use of pathos. So Mr. Meeropol starts us off, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root.”, implying that the bodies, the people dead and hanging are a different kind of fruit, that the blood of that fruit, the blood of African American’s has been spilling in the south for a long time and helped the south grow into what it is today. In the second verse he repeatedly uses graphic language depicting the state of the dead bodies while invoking images of a quaint beauty. Abel is being sardonic in his use of irony, effectively cutting through the ethos that the south demands. The third verse returns us to the metaphor of fruit, and the poem depicts what happens to the fruit, the dead bodies after time passes. Meeropol’s final statement in the verse is a huge appeal to pathos, that he starts building overtime he speaks about the bodies. He starts with the fruit, a normally inconsequential, even sweet object, and by the end the reader is stuck with the cold facts of lynching, the explicit details about the decomposition of the bodies, and the decomposition of race relations with every fruit that drops. Without leading the reader to any conclusion, simply opening their eyes and saying you can’t look away anymore, the bodies will continue to fall, and now you know exactly what they look like. 

Meeropol was just a regular dude. He was Jewish, and secretly a communist (Blaire, 2012) so his identity is really just the American identity. Ms. Holliday, as an African American lends her identity to the song. She brings an ethos that Meeropol, a white American, just couldn’t have contributed. The way she uses her voice, performs the song in itself is the ethos of the piece. When she stood on that stage at the end of her set, knowing that the audience wouldn’t leave before the last song, closing her eyes while she sings, and the singular light on her face in an otherwise entirely dark night club put her in a position of power over the audience. She’s ignoring them in favor of soaking in the emotion of the song, she doesn’t need to see them. Holliday needs them to see her as she is affected by the words, to see her not being vulnerable, not being afraid to sing this song under threat of violence (Margolick, 1998) the sheer audacity of her choice to sing the song at all is testament enough to her ethos. It’s a very sad and graphic song and Holliday doesn’t shy away from that, she croons along to the words lending to the pathos, calling attention to the logos with sad snarky expression, and acting as the commanding messenger. Plus Billie Holiday has a baller voice. 

The protest song, and art as a means of protest in general, can be hard to correlate to change in terms of numbers or literal legislation. The impact however, especially in the case of Strange Fruit, is obvious in hindsight. The song has been called by many “the first great protest song” (Margolick, 1998), has sold more than a million copies (Sanburn, 2011), is named the song of the century by Time Magazine (Sanburn, 2011), was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978 (Astaire, 2016) , and has been covered, sampled and employed by several artists across all media landscapes. Nina Simone covered this song at the height of the civil rights movement (Linskey, 2011), a nod to the anthem as effectual and necessary to remember in all times of racial strife. Strange Fruit and it’s inception is a great analogy for what the song is intending it’s audience to hear. This is our problem, this is our song, this is our history, and we can stop it from being our future.

Works Cited

Margolick, David, and Hilton Als. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. N.p.: Harper Perennial, n.d. Print.

Sanburn, Josh. "ALL-TIME 100 Songs." Time. Time Inc., 21 Oct. 2011. Web. 14 Sept. 2016. references an originally printed Time article

Lynskey, Dorian. "Strange Fruit: The First Great Protest Song." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 2011. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.

Margolick, David. "Strange Fruit." Vanity Fair, 1998. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.

Blaire, Elizabeth “The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit'" NPR. NPR, n.d. 2012 Web. 29 Sept. 2016.

By Jessica Wohl and Judann Pollack - 15 Minutes Ago. "African-Americans: Representations in Advertising." Advertising Age AdAge Encyclopedia RSS. N.p., 2003. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.

Astaire, By Fred. "GRAMMY Hall Of Fame." The GRAMMYs. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.

Moore, Edwin. "Strange Fruit Is Still a Song for Today | Edwin Moore." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 2010. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.

"State Symbols." State Symbols. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.

"Magnolia." State Symbols USA. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.

Gibson, Robert A. "The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United ..." Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

"History of Lynchings." NAACP. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

"Lynching Statistics." For 1882-1968. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Citizen Discussion 9/28

Q: Where on the line are you?

A: 6 + 3.1415926535897932384626...

Q: How did you decide?

A: The book itself instills the experiences of racism into the readers point of view (in most passages). Each story is someone's experience. Someone's life. To be treated based on the amount of melanin in one's integumentary system to a degree that forces Rankine to implement such crude, hurtful, and vulnerable diction. 

The images direct the blame. The rhetorical atmosphere establishes a claim. The audience holds all the pressure to connect the dots how living that life is not okay. It's not right.

Q: Evidence:

A. Page 43 - "What did you say?"

     page 91 - image of lynching

     Page 159 - It wasn't a match. It was a lesson.

"THE WHOLE EXISTENCE OF THE BOOK", Lisa

"The Battle in Seattle" analysis

1. The authors believe violence is a crucial way to be visible on the public screen. Since everyone with access to the public screen(s) are always distracted, those individuals habituate to the distractions where everything is almost tuned out. Violence would act as a spectacle to sensitize everyone and put focus on the protest.

2. Specific evidence for how violence is crucial to be on the public screen would be with the WB/WIMF protests. There wasn't coverage about the event when there wasn't any violence (195). In another instance, Doha, Qatar was chosen as the site for WTO meetings in order to decrease the likelihood of violence about the meetings. "Consequently, there was absolutely no TV evening news coverage" (195).  For the Seattle protests, the coverage escalated when the violence broke out in comparison to more modest coverage about the protest in the beginning.

3.  The evidence suggested above seems legitimate because the amount of violence positively correlates with the amount of coverage that protest event receives. Showing the escalation of coverage vs violence contributes the most to this conclusion because it shows how violence puts the protest out there and makes it a focus that most screens want to broadcast.

4. Violence is necessary to disseminate the arguments of the protest for people to see it and understand what is actually happening. It's also noted in the section is that it's not just the violence that is being broadcasted, but the protestor's opinion and why they are actually protesting. This would make the violence not be in vain.

5. The group mostly agrees with the claims and conclusions.

Strange Fruit

Elizabeth Kennedy

Steph Brown

ENG306

09/10/2016

Stranger Fruit

Strange Fruit, sent a message throughout history since Billie Holiday first performed it in 1939 at Café Society in New York City, with a solitary beam of light on her face, to a small, dead quiet crowd at the end of her set and well after the dinner service. The song was published in the New York Times, originally titled “Bitter Fruit”, two years before it ever hit the stage. The poem was spurned by the rage Abel Metropol, a teacher and activist, felt when he saw a now famous photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith, the ‘strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees’. America at the time was either collectively ignoring the inhumanity of lynching, and the implications it would have for the prevailing white supremacy, or actively engaging in the act as though it were a spectacle, an ordinary amusement. Billie Holiday did what Mr. Metropol never could. She gave Strange Fruit a voice, indeed Tom and Abe got a voice and subsequently became a part of a much larger group of people who needed justice. The dead who by the power of song refused to be forgotten and the living who would demand equality.

Lynching has been used as a tool for punishment without due process for as long as America has been a free nation. A punishment that would range from hanging and shooting the victims to burning them at the stake or torture and mutilation. The history and statistics of lynchings leave a little accuracy to be wanted, but most experts agree that while it was not exclusive to the African American community, it was an effective and unfortunate method of terrorism against them. Before 1882 there are no reliable recorded statistics of lynchings in the United States and not for another ten years after did Tuskegee Institute begin to make a systematic collection and tabulation of lynching statistics and 1912 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began their independent record of lynchings in the United States. It’s hard to imagine a community that would attempt to excuse and justify such horrific acts of violence, but many lynchings were recorded with a ‘cause’, rape was the third greatest cause of lynchings behind homicides and 'all other causes'. 

From 1930 to 1939 there were 202 lynchings in the United States. As far as anyone knows Billie Holiday never personally witnessed a lynching, she was from Baltimore, Maryland which wasn’t as saturated with lynchings as states further South. Ms. Holiday shared nothing more with the victims than racial identity and humanity, much in the same way that Mr. Metropol shared nothing more with Tom and Abe then fellow humanity. The metaphor in the song implies a beauty lost in the most grotesque way. 

Works Cited

Margolick, David, and Hilton Als. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. N.p.: Harper Perennial, n.d. Print.

Sanburn, Josh. "ALL-TIME 100 Songs." Time. Time Inc., 21 Oct. 2011. Web. 14 Sept. 2016. references an originally printed Time article

Gibson, Robert A. "The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United ..." Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

"History of Lynchings." NAACP. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

"Lynching Statistics." For 1882-1968. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2016.

Stay-At-Home

Homeboy Mandela got some South African's together and they all agreed not to work one day. Take that Apartheid.

After some deliberation they decided the best day to do this would be Monday June 26th, 1950, talking about that three day weekend.

The African National Congress wanted to protest the Suppression of Communism Act, which had much less to do with communism and more to do with undermining the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups. They told the South African people it would be a Day of Mourning for all the lives lost to the movement.

Stranger Fruit

Make no mistake Billie Holiday is a legend. This song however was written by Abel Metropol, a poet, political activist, and high school teacher. Abel was inspired by a photograph he saw of a lynching. That photograph haunted him.

The poem was published in a book in 1937 under the title, "Bitter Fruit". This song was recorded and released in 1939. Ms. Holiday here is singing the song under some serious threats and pressure not to.

Lynchings had reached a peak in American history in the 20's but still persevered even into the 1960's. This was a time where a black American could be killed for nothing. No trial was necessary, just ignorance and fear. We live in a time where black Americans are still dying. They just aren't in the trees anymore.

Nipple

Who: Feminists mostly or entirely. Anyone who likes letting it fly free.

What/When: This movement is about gender equality. Arguably the campaign began around 2014 with the release of Lina Esco's film of the same name.

Why: Conveniently there is a website for the campaign and the why is simply equality, empowerment, and freedom for everyone.