Jenny D. pointed to a piece in the Guardian the other day about Billie Holiday and the song "Strange Fruit". The article is written by playwright Caryl Phillips who wrote a play of the same name which had nothing to do with racism or lynching. I thought it was odd that Phillips would be explaining the genesis of the song, when he admits he knew very little about it initially, but it's more of a pop culture curiosity piece than anything else. He does mention the songwriter, Abel Meeropol, but there is so much more to this amazing song than Phillips knows. Fortunately, David Margolick wrote a biography of the song, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society and An Early Cry for Civil Rights that is really outstanding and should be sought out by anyone interested in social history.

One really interesting tidbit about Meeropol is that he was one of the lawyers for the Rosenbergs and adopted their two children after their execution. He was a very open-minded and dedicated man who said in 1971 that the reason he wrote "Strange Fruit" was "...because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it."

Phillips says in his piece that Meeropol "was motivated to write the poem after seeing a photograph of two black teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been lynched in Marion, Indiana on August 7 1930." Margolick takes a more cautious stand, writing that no one knows for sure what specifically (if it was any specific event) inspired the songwriter. Phillips goes even further saying about Holiday that "Whenever she performed the song, she could see the two teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, hanging from the tree - which is, of course, why she closed her eyes whenever she sang it." As there is no proof of this - and ample evidence that she sang it many times with her eyes open - I can only assume the playwright was caught up in the impact of the song.

I always included "Strange Fruit" in my classes when I was teaching the Civil Rights Movement. We would watch a part of "Mississippi Burning", where activists Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman are killed, listen to Billie Holiday sing and then I would gather the class around a table so we could look at pictures in Without Sanctuary. My classes were all army - soldiers and dependents - and more mixed race than most college courses in any one place. I had students from several Latin American and Far East countries, from Indian Reservations and from African American schools that had never seen a white student in the classroom - even in the 21st century. There was a lot of tension when we "got down and dirty" about the Civil Rights movement; a lot of miscommunication and misconceptions. We worked through it though and hearing "Strange Fruit", watching the movie clips - seeing the pictures of white people cheering the death of a black man, made everyone site back and think.

Strange Fruit is an excellent book and the sort of title that I really enjoy. It shines the spotlight on one specific corner of American history and gives us reason to think about how powerful we can be if we dare - how the world can be forced to listen if we give it something to hear.

I was never taught hard history in school; only heroes and villains in the kind of way that seemed more like Saturday cartoons and westerns then anything real. I wanted to force my students to see how bad parts of American history truly are though, and then they would understand why we always have to fight to make the future better. Nobody argued after hearing this song and seeing these pictures - everybody always understood.

(Post title from David Margolick's book; the picture is from WIthout Sanctuary; four unidentified African American men, circa 1900.)