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Billie Holiday - "Strange Fruit"

("Lady Day" and her dog Mister)

 

The sociologist, Arthur Franklin Raper, was commissioned in 1930 to produce a report on lynching. He discovered that "3,724 people were lynched in the United States from 1889 through to 1930. Over four-fifths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape. Practically all of the lynchers were native whites. The fact that a number of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned suggests the presence of sadistic tendencies among the lynchers. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers, only 49 were indicted and only 4 have been sentenced.”

In 1937 Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, created something indelible. Initially a poem he called “Bitter Fruit,” it de­picted Black men hanging from trees. Meeropol, a member of the American Communist Party, using the pseudonym Lewis Allan, published the poem in the New York Teacher and later, the Marxist journal, New Masses.

After seeing Billie Holiday perform at the club Café Society in New York City, Meeropol showed her the poem. Holiday liked it and after working on it with Sonny White, turned the poem into the song, "Strange Fruit". The record made it to No. 16 on the charts in July 1939. However, the song was denounced by Time Magazine as "a prime piece of musical propaganda" for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Here are two good links that helped me piece this together...

Today in History: The Legacy of “Strange Fruit”

How ‘Strange Fruit’ Killed Billie Holiday