Transcript: Strange Fruit: A Song Born of Protest

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.