"Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday. It condemned American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans that had occurred chiefly in the South but also in the North for decades before this was written. Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978.[2] It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
"Strange Fruit" began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx, about the lynching of two black men. He published under the pen name Lewis Allan (the names of his two children who died in infancy).[3]
Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit" to express his horror at lynchings after seeing Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana.
Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about recording the song. Columbia, fearing a backlash by record retailers in the South, as well as negative reaction from affiliates of Columbia's co-owned radio network, CBS, refused to record the song. However, Columbia did allow Holiday a one-session release from her contract in order to record it in 1939 for Commodore, Milt Gabler's alternative jazz label Photo of the Two Hanged Men - Warning! Graphic Material Strange FruitSouthern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies 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 magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
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.
Billie Holiday singing Strange FruitWikipedia -
Tuskegee remains the single complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882, and is the source for all other compiled statistics. As of 1959, which was the last time that their annual Lynch Report was published, a total of 4,733 persons had died as a result of lynching since 1882. To quote the report,
"Except for 1955, when three lynchings were reported in Mississippi, none has been recorded at Tuskegee since 1951. In 1945, 1947, and 1951, only one case per year was reported. The most recent case reported by the institute as a lynching was that of Emmett Till, 14, a Negro who was beaten, shot to death, and thrown into a river at Greenwood, Mississippi on August 28, 1955... For a period of 65 years ending in 1947, at least one lynching was reported each year. The most for any year was 231 in 1892. From 1882 to 1901, lynchings averaged more than 150 a year. Since 1924, lynchings have been in a marked decline, never more than 30 cases, which occurred in 1926...."[42]
The following graph gives the number of lynchings and racially motivated murders in each decade from 1865 to 1965. Data for 1865-1869 and 1960-1965 are partial decades. [43]
The same source gives the following statistics for the period from 1882 to 1951. Eighty-eight percent of victims were black and 10% were white. Fifty-nine percent of the lynchings occurred in the Southern states of Kentucky (neutral in the Civil War), North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Lynching was not uncommon in the West and Midwest but was virtually nonexistent in the northeast, except for isolated instances.
The most common reasons given by mobs for the lynchings were murder and rape. As documented by Ida B. Wells, such charges were often pretexts for lynching blacks who violated Jim Crow etiquette or engaged in economic competition with whites. Other common reasons given included arson, theft, assault, and robbery; sexual transgressions (miscegenation, adultery, cohabitation); "race prejudice," "race hatred," "racial disturbance;" informing on others; "threats against whites;" and violations of the color line ("attending white girl," "proposals to white woman").
Tuskegee's method of categorizing most lynching victims as either black or white in publications and data summaries meant that the mistreatment of some minority and immigrant groups was obscured. In the West, for instance, Mexican, Native Americans, and Chinese were more frequent targets of lynchings than African Americans, but their deaths were included among those of whites. Similarly, although Italian immigrants were the focus of violence in Louisiana when they started arriving in greater numbers, their deaths were not identified separately.
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