This day in History: August 7

Aug 07, 2022 News

Compiled by Zena Henry

Billie Holidays “strange fruit” draws inspiration from lynching poem

Kaieteur News – Before taking its place on the “Songs of the Century” list, the unsettling lyrics of Billie Holiday’s 1939 single “Strange Fruit” was used to protest the lynching of Black Americans in the USA. Composed by Lewis Allan, the lyrics were drawn from a poem by Abel Meeropol published in 1937.

American singer Billie Holiday

The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees as such lynching had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century, and the great majority of victims were black. The song itself has been called “a declaration” and “the beginning of the civil rights movement”.

Meeropol, born to Russian-Jewish parents, had set his lyrics to music with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan and performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden. Holiday’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978 and the “Songs of the Century” list of the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts among other achievements.

It was a photo of two Black Americans, J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith lynched in Marion, Indiana, which Meeropol said, “haunted him for days” and inspired the piece which was originally named “bitter fruit”. The young African American men were murdered in a spectacle lynching by a mob of thousands on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. The mob used sledgehammers to break into the jail cells before beating and hanging them from a tree in the county courthouse square. They had been arrested that night as suspects in a robbery, murder and rape case along with a 16-year-old boy, James Cameron, who barely had his life spared when the very photographer who took the photo that inspired Meeropol, and an unknown female pleaded his innocence. Cameron later stated that Shipp and Smith had committed the murder but that he had run away before that event. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) had tried to evacuate the suspects from town to avoid the mob violence but were not successful. The NAACP and the State’s Attorney General pressed to indict leaders of the lynch mob, but as was typical in lynchings, no one was ever charged for their deaths, nor for the attack on Cameron.

Separate US Embassy attacks in Eastern Africa put attention on Bin Laden, al-Qaeda

The 1998 United States Embassy bombings were attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998. More than 200 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

The aftermath of the attack on the Nairobi-based US Embassy

The attacks, which were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, brought Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their terrorist organisation, al-Qaeda, to the attention of the U.S. public for the first time, and resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placing bin Laden on its 10 most-wanted fugitives list. The FBI also connected the attack to Azerbaijan, as 60 calls were placed via satellite phone by bin Laden to associates in the country’s capital Baku. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah were credited with being the masterminds behind the bombings. The bombings are widely believed to have been revenge for U.S. involvement in the extradition, and alleged torture, of four members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) who had been arrested in Albania in the two months prior to the attacks for a series of murders in Egypt.

T&T denies conspiring with US to capture, extradite Roger Khan

On August 7, 2006, Trinidad and Tobago officials had cause to deny involvement in a conspiring with the United States to get convicted drug felon Saheed “Roger” Khan, into the northern territory.

Roger Khan

T&T based Attorney Odai Ramischand had accused the Trinidad government and the US of acting illegally. In an interview in the twin state, Ramischand said, “…they abducted Khan and unlawfully took him to the US.” He said that he knew Khan and knew that he would not willingly agree to be sent to the US. As such, Ramischand said he was filing a court application declaring the involvement of the T&T government. He said too that petitions were also being made to international human rights bodies to highlight the method of apprehension which he said violates international law. T&T’s former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Rangee Dolsingh and other stakeholders had denied that the T&T acted illegally. It was said that Khan was not landed by immigration authorities and that he was probably put on detention under the watch of US Marshal and local authorities before continuing on his journey. The T&T official had said that certain courtesies were extended to the Marshals under the “Mutual Assistance Treaty” between the US and T&T.

America deploys 15,000 troops in Gulf War

The Gulf War was an armed campaign waged by a United States-led coalition of 35 countries against Iraq in response to the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait.

The Iraqi military invaded the neighbouring State of Kuwait on 2 August, 1990 and fully occupied the country within two days.

Scenes from the Gulf War

Different speculations have been made regarding the true intents behind the invasion, including Iraq’s inability to pay Kuwait the more than US$14 billion that it had borrowed to finance its military efforts during the Iran–Iraq War, and Kuwait’s surge in petroleum production levels which kept revenues down for Iraq.

much of the 1980s, Kuwait’s oil production was above its mandatory OPEC quota, which kept international oil prices down. Iraq interpreted Kuwait’s refusal to decrease its oil production as an act of aggression towards the Iraqi economy. The invasion of Kuwait was met with international condemnation, and economic sanctions against Iraq were immediately imposed by the United Nations Security Council in response. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. president George H. W. Bush deployed troops and equipment into Saudi Arabia, and urged other countries to send their own forces to the scene. On August 7, 1990, 15,000 U.S. troops, 32 destroyers and 100 helicopters and fighter planes arrived in Saudi Arabia.