This video segment explores how the song Strange Fruit became one of the best known and most enduring songs of protest. In 1939, the legendary blues singer Billie Holiday performed the song as a daring criticism of the commonplace practice of the lynching of African-Americans. Civil rights groups such as the NAACP had made countless appeals, but it was Holiday’s haunting rendition that made it impossible for white Americans and lawmakers to ignore the widespread crime.
Download and ShareIn 1939, a song performed by the legendary jazz sstinger Billie Holiday left an indelible stamp on a movement that had begun decades earlier in an attempt to eradicate brutality against African Americans.
Beginning in 1912, organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lobbied Congress in an effort to pass an anti-lynching bill. The bill was spurred by the horrific acts of the Jim Crow era, when white supremacy groups like the Ku Klux Klan assaulted and murdered thousands of African Americans.
More than 200 bills were introduced, with activists like Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois speaking out forcefully in support of them. Three bills passed the House of Representatives, but senators from the South blocked all of them. The anti-lynching movement, which had evolved into a well-organized campaign by the late 1930s, became an issue that galvanized people of color and their white allies. At the same time, many African Americans, refusing to live under segregation and the continued threat of violence, began moving to the North in search of political and economic opportunities.
In the first half of the 20th century, African Americans moved from the South to the North in a wave known as the Great Migration, settling in places like Chicago, Detroit and New York City. The New York City neighborhood of Harlem became a haven for artists like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Billie Holiday. The resulting Harlem Renaissance movement produced some of the most influential American thinkers and artists in the nation’s history. This movement led to extraordinary collaborations between artists and intellectuals, and its effect on American culture was both powerful and lasting.
The power of the movement manifested itself in Billie Holiday’s performance of Strange Fruit at the integrated Café Society nightclub in Greenwich Village, New York. The song, a chilling account of an African-American man being lynched in the South, united the talents of Billie Holiday and the song's composer, Abel Meeropol. Its performance connected the political left, pop culture and civil-rights advocates at a crucial time, and made Strange Fruit a unifying anthem for those opposed to the brutality inflicted on the African-American community throughout the United States. Recording this song of protest is often believed to be Holiday’s most important professional accomplishment.
Farah Jasmine Griffin: By the time Billy Holliday records strange fruit it enters into the public discourse, in both literature and painting, about lynching. The anti-lynching movement had been going on for some time before the recording of Strange Fruit. There were anti-lynching campaigns throughout the United States. Strange fruit became not just a song of protest but a kind of elegiac song - a song of mourning - and it was a song that also sparked a kind of activism for black communities
E.M. Woody Beck: There had been legislation introduced into congress on many occasions to make lynching a federal offence, and each and every time it was filibustered or ruled-over by southern legislators.
Narrator: During a 1940 effort to promote passage of a federal anti-lynching bill, the lyrics of strange fruit are sent to every member of congress. Neither this tactic, nor years of intensive lobbying by the NAACP ever succeeds. Federal anti-lynching legislation is never written into the law.
Farah Jasmine Griffin: Strange fruit became a song that’s been claimed by African Americans as part of an artistic tradition that’s both beautiful, yet one born in protest. That was probably Billie Holliday’s greatest contribution. She didn’t write the song but she certainly was a great communicator of that message.
Abbey Lincoln: I don’t remember exactly when I heard strange fruit, but it caused a sensation in the neighborhood because they were lynching people in the south and she dared to sing about it.
Loading Standards
Background Essay
Print Background Essay