In last dozen years, Northwestern University journalism students and their professors
have been instrumental in proving the innocence of many prisoners in Illinois,
several of whom had been sentenced to death. Their investigative
journalism ultimately sparked the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois in 2011.
Lynching prompted the classic Billie Holiday song,"Strange Fruit,"
which she recorded independently in 1939 -- getting around the objections of Columbia, her record
label: "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit
hanging from the poplar trees." It ultimately became her biggest selling record. Time magazine denounced the song as a "piece of musical propaganda." The song's lyrics were inspired by this photograph of a 1930 lynching in Indiana.
Re Legacy: No schools are named after newspaper editors because they ignored or apologized
for racist lynchings. But Ida
B. Wells has a high school named after her (school home page here) in San Francisco (just across the park from the famous "painted ladies" Victorian houses.)
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