Upon hearing about the racial turmoil in Jena, La., and the hanging nooses inflaming that turmoil, thoughts naturally turn to the people, places and events of the American Civil Rights movement.

Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, and Medgar Evers. The Selma marches, the Montgomery bus boycott and the Little Rock Nine.

John Mellencamp employs all those images, and many more, in a video for his new song, “Jena,” that admonishes the town to “tear your nooses down.”

On his Web site, Mellencamp writes that he wrote the song “not to antagonize, but, rather, to catalyze thought.”

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No song about race in America has done a better job of inspiring profound thoughts and emotions than one written by New York City schoolteacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan.

“Strange Fruit” was published in 1937, but it was made popular by Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording, which remains one of the most affecting performances of her, or anyone else’s career.

But it was the grim lyrics that inspired Holiday’s passion for the song. With imagery contrasting “the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” of hanging victims with a “pastoral scene of the gallant South,” the song evokes the nauseating ugliness of lynching.

Nearly 70 years later it is still powerful partly because it doesn’t get bogged down with the details of any particular occurrence. It tells a big truth that sheds light on many smaller ones.

Unfortunately, Mellencamp’s “Jena” is not enlightening.

“An all-white jury hides the executioner’s face,” is the song’s opening line. Never mind that none of the so-called Jena 6 were ever facing a capital charge. Or that all the jurors were white for the simple reason that none of the black citizens in that particular jury pool elected to come to court that day.

As for Jena’s nooses, school officials there did tear them down and punish the students who put them up. Even more importantly, the cruel beating that led to the Jena 6 being arrested happened three months after and was not, until after the fact, connected to the noose incident.

“To put the incident in Jena in the same league as those who were murdered in the 1960s cheapens their sacrifice and insults their memory,” Jena Mayor Murphy R. McMillin told the Associated Press on Monday.

Murphy is right, of course, but many would disagree. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others have succeeded in using the credulous media to fabricate a legend about Jena that will no doubt poison talk about race for years.

And while Jackson and Sharpton persist in trying to relive the 1960s, the people they claim to represent are facing real problems.

Poverty, bad schools, non-existent families and the violence bred by the absurd war to maintain drug prohibition are happening right now. Lynching is not.

Mellencamp no doubt has good intentions. But in art, as in politics, only the result matters. The result of Mellencamp’s song and video could be that many people who don’t know any better are led to believe that the United States has made little progress on race relations and civil rights in the last few generations.

“Strange Fruit” is a big part of that progress. It took courage for Holiday to perform it when she did, and it inspired courage in others, artistically and otherwise. It would not be so if the song was anything other than the truth.

The poet John Keats wrote, “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” If he’s right, then creative artists ought to maintain their integrity in the search for both.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.