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The Strange Fruit Endures
Sometimes the news seems totally disjointed and anarchic, a torrent of disconnected events. Other times there is a gestalt to it that arrives with lightning bolt-like clarity.
Last week was one of the latter.
The centerpiece of that clarity was a trio of shotgun blasts, fired on a street in south Georgia, on a Sunday afternoon.
THE GALLANT SOUTH
On Sunday February 23, two white men armed with a shotgun and a .357 Magnum pistol got in a pickup truck and followed an unarmed 25-year-old black man named Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging down a suburban street in Brunswick, Georgia. They accosted him and shot him dead while a third white man, a friend of theirs, filmed the incident.
No charges were filed for two months, until public outcry and the emergence of that video forced it.
I spent my last two years of high school in that part of Georgia, near the Florida state line, and quite a bit of time in other parts of Georgia too. When you hear the phrase “the Deep South,” this is it. I can assure you that, in the late ’70s and early ’80s at least, the spirit of the Confederacy was alive and well there. I don’t imagine it has become a model of progressive race relations in the intervening years.
