Since Black American jazz singer Billie Holiday sang of “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” in her 1939 anti-lynching ballad, the popular representation of American trees has been haunted by the nation’s history of enlisting nature in terror. “I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see negroes hanging from its branches,” French dramatist Jean Genet pondered in the introduction to the 1970 printing of Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson—an epistolary biography that recounts Jackson’s life and politics as a Black American activist and prisoner in California’s San Quentin State Prison prior to his attempted prison escape and subsequent murder. In Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, a fugitive slave woman named Sethe has whipping lashes on her back that have healed into the shape of a chokecherry tree. “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing, I will never run from another thing on this earth,” Sethe asserts. And decades later, Percival Everett’s 2021 The Trees, a work of crime fiction set in a small town in Mississippi, follows a series of murders that share an uncanny link to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old lynching victim whose brutal murder in the very same state continues to rupture the very metaphysics of time and space, life, and death.

With the release of Racist Trees (2022), documentarians Sara Newens and Mina T. Son join in this artistic and intellectual tradition of arboreal inquiry in their film’s exploration of Crossley Tract, a historically Black community in Palm Springs where residents organized for the removal of tamarisks trees that have separated their under-resourced and state-neglected neighborhood from the luxury views of the Tahquitz Golf Course.

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