By Garry Blanson
Of the number of Negroes and Colored people who were lynched in Monroe, Louisiana, “on the grounds of The Ouachita Parish Courthouse”
Please Note — This is Part One of a Two-Part Series.
In April of 1939, Billie Holiday came out with a “strange song,” which was appropriately titled “Strange Fruit!” Additionally, the thing that’s even “more strange” than the title is that the fruit which was “hanging and swanging” on all of the trees, strangely enough, wasn’t even fruit at all! You see, Billie Holiday was actually referring to “the bodies of Negro people who were being lynched to death in America by white American citizens!”
Also, it was said that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI began targeting Billie Holiday, “all because she would not stop singing her song, ‘Strange Fruit!'”
Well, while there’s not a complete list of the “colored people and Negroes who were lynched on the grounds of the Ouachita Parish Courthouse,” Lora Peppers, a local historian and librarian who works at the Main Branch of the Ouachita Parish Public Library, has posted a partial listing in her online series of Ouachita Parish Tidbits. Anyone interested in viewing her list can simply Google “Ouachita Parish Tidbits, Lynchings in Ouachita Parish.”
Incidentally, sometimes when the “white people” had finished lynching the Negroes and Colored People on the grounds of the Ouachita Parish Courthouse, the proud white citizens “would dump” the bodies into the Ouachita River, facing the Ouachita Parish Courthouse.
Needless to say, if we were to drag the part of the Ouachita Parish River facing the Ouachita Parish Courthouse, there is no doubt that we would find the “human remains” of 50 to 100 Negroes and Colored People “who were lynched in Monroe, Louisiana, on the grounds of the Ouachita Parish Courthouse!”
