How Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” Fought for Civil Rights

Billie Holiday, aged 23 at the time, introduced her closing tune of the night to Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, 1939. “Strange Fruit”. The title rang with terror, that terror only being proved further by the pianist’s opening chords- the motion from each chord sent chills down the audience’s spines as Lady Day stared blankly into the back of Cafe Society.

“Southern trees,”

“Bear a strange fruit.”

Before it was addressed directly, the room was given the exactly vivid visual that Billie was describing. Those 5 words sunk into the silence of the room, and every person, regardless of pigment, could visualize the horrifying images of “fruit” Billie referenced in her raspy, reflective voice. The image was pungent, Billie’s heart-wrenching voice only intensifying the true fright the image itself held.

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” was a courageous act of activism by Billie, bringing light to the haunting image of lynchings that targeted African Americans in the South at the time. Holiday would go on to dedicate her career not only to making music, but to highlight the substantial troubles as an African American in the South at the time, and to emphasize the discrimination Black Americans faced for their skin color.

Though most famously sung by Billie Holiday, the song originally sprouted from a poem that Abel Meeropol wrote in the New York Teacher. Abel Meeropol was a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx that bravely published the poem “Bitter Fruit” to bring light to the racism that ran rampant across America- in specific, the lynchings that occurred in the South, though not limited to that area. The poem captured the overwhelming horror that the lynchings of Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith reeked of, the direct inspiration coming from a photograph depicting the two Black men hanging from trees. With Meeropol’s wife and singer Laura Duncan, the poem was put to music and performed as an activist song, reaching many New York venues including Madison Square Garden.

Barney Josephson, the owner of Cafe Society, heard this song and introduced it to Billie Holiday. The song reminded her of her father, so each time as a tradition to close the night, Holiday would sing the tune and ask for there to be some set rules:

The waiters would stop all service in advance.

The room would be dark, the only light highlighting Billie’s horrified face.

There would be no encore.

This song was so ambitious and eye opening that her attempts of activism were threatened and shut down multiple times. One of the people who tried to silence Lady Day’s word was Harry Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, in a racist claim that Black people overstepped their bounds due to drug use and marijuana, labeling Billie’s and other Black musicians’ art as “the Devil’s Music”.

Billie, being adamant about what she had to say, refused this demand of silence and went against Harry Anslinger’s word, performing her song as much as she could. Harry Anslinger made it his duty to silence her- he had his men deal her heroin, knowing Holiday was a drug user, and eventually locked her up for one and a half years on accounts for narcotic possession and use.

Law enforcements of all kinds attempted to stop Billie from spreading her song, and even on Billie’s deathbed in 1959, she was still under arrest in the hospital. Billie suffered from heart and lung failure, many years of drug and alcohol abuse catching up to her.

Billie Holiday died on July 17, 1959. She left behind no kids, though a strong, powerful legacy that brought decades of change to come. She is remembered as one of the most famous jazz vocalists to this day.

“Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,”

“For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck.”

“For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,”

Here is a strange and bitter crop.