Published on Friday, February 06, 2015 by Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/06/fiery-cage-and-lynching-tree-brutalitys-never-far-away

The Fiery Cage and the Lynching Tree, Brutality’s Never Far Away

by  Bill Moyers

They burned him alive in an iron cage, and as he screamed and writhed in the agony of hell they made a sport of his death.
After listening to one newscast after another rightly condemn the barbaric killing of that Jordanian air force pilot at the bloody hands of ISIS, I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept roaming the past trying to retrieve a vaguely remembered photograph that I had seen long ago in the archives of a college library in Texas.
Suddenly, around two in the morning, the image materialized in my head. I made my way down the hall to my computer and typed in: “Waco, Texas. Lynching.”
Sure enough, there it was: the charred corpse of a young black man, tied to a blistered tree in the heart of the Texas Bible Belt. Next to the burned body, young white men can be seen smiling and grinning, seemingly jubilant at their front-row seats in a carnival of death. One of them sent a picture postcard home: “This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe.” http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/02/06/fiery-cage-and-lynching-tree-brutalitys-never-far-away