Billie holiday risked her career to sing strange fruit and expose the horrors of racism.
Billie Holiday, one of the most influential jazz singers of the 1930s and 1940s, had a voice that could move audiences to tears. Her music, shaped by the hardships she endured throughout her life was filled with raw emotion. Born in 1915, she experienced a difficult childhood filled with instability and trauma. Despite her struggles, music became her refuge, allowing her to express herself in ways that words alone could not.
In the late 1930s, Billie Holiday came across a poem that would change the course of her career and place her at the center of a political storm. The poem “Strange Fruit” was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and activist who was deeply disturbed by the widespread lynching of Black people in the United States. The haunting lyrics painted a brutal picture of racial violence, describing Black bodies hanging from trees in the South. The imagery was so powerful that it was impossible to ignore.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a 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
When Holiday decided to turn the poem into a song, she knew she was taking a risk. Strange Fruit was unlike any other jazz song of the time. She first performed it in 1939 at Cafe Society, an integrated nightclub in New York City. The audience sat in stunned silence as she sang, the room filled with an overwhelming sense of sorrow and anger.
Her decision to perform Strange Fruit did not go unnoticed by the U.S. government. Harry Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was an outspoken racist who despised jazz music and saw Black artists as a threat to American society. He viewed Holiday as an easy target, not only because she was a successful Black woman challenging the status quo but also because of her struggles with drug addiction.
Anslinger warned her to stop singing Strange Fruit, but Holiday refused. She believed in the power of the song and its ability to shed light on the horrors of racism in America. Her defiance enraged the government, and Anslinger launched a relentless campaign against her. He used her addiction as a pretext to have her arrested and imprisoned on drug charges. She was sentenced to a year in a federal rehabilitation center, and upon her release, she was denied a cabaret license, preventing her from performing in many nightclubs.
Strange Fruit remains one of the most powerful protest songs in history.
