In the late 1930s, Abel Meeropol, son of Russian Jewish immigrants and a high school English teacher in the Bronx neighborhood where he was born, wrote a poem entitled Strange Fruit. This video discusses how the poem would later be performed by the legendary Billie Holiday as a song of protest, bringing national attention to the crime of lynching.
Download and ShareIn 1939, a song performed by the legendary jazz singer 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.
Henry Foner: Abel wrote Strange Fruit as a poem. It was originally published in the Teacher’s Union publication, and later became the song.
Bernie Kassoy: It was some time in the late 30s.
Honey Kassoy: That’s right, we heard Strange -
Bernie Kassoy: -or the middle thirties -
Honey Kassoy: - no
Bernie Kassoy: - because I was…I’m sorry
Honey Kassoy: It was written in the late thirties. Whenever those first performances were at the Teachers Union, this was the kind of thing that when you heard you couldn’t applaud at first, it was just so, so gripping.
Henry Foner: I describe Abel a pioneer. The fact that he could write the song that really became the anthem on lynching, and that it should come from the pen of a Jewish writer, I think is very significant and is symbolic of that period.
Michael Meeropol: My father was most proud of strange Fruit, of all the things he did. He was most proud of that.
Robby Meeropol: He was a very gentle man, and a very humorous person, who was really not comfortable in public. He was ill at ease, but he felt things very deeply, and very passionately,
Man 3: And he saw a photograph of a lynching, and it then inspired him to write the poem. Maybe it was all up here [points at head] but he said a picture inspired it.
Narrator: Café society’s publicist hears Strange Fruit performed at one of the theater arts theater cabarets. He subsequently arranges a meeting at Café Society between Barney Josephson, Able Meeropol and Billie Holliday. Meeropol plays the song for Holiday, and with encouragement from Josephson, she agrees to perform it. It is February 1939.
Jeff Melnick: One of the amazing things for me about Meeropol writing Strange Fruit and getting it to Billy Holliday – and then having it last the way it has, this song of racial protest – is not that a Jewish person got a Jewish-written song to a black performer, because that had been going on for decades at that point, but that the terms of that meeting were so different that they had ever been before.
Don Byron: There’s this sense of the Jewish American being the middleman between the public, which has limited tolerance for blacks as a people, but kind of likes some of the cultural products of it, and the people and the culture and the music of black America, which kind of makes Strange Fruit really different. It’s really different because what this Jewish American musician is being a middleman for is something quite militant.
Jeff Melnick: The truly new thing about Strange Fruit is that it was really about popular front politics, about finding ways to give voice to racial protest, to social opposition to the dominant order, which none of the songwriters had previously touched on.
Don Byron: It’s the first step away from entertainment and towards expressing something a little more harder-edged, more true to the negative side of being black and living in America
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