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Listen: Billie Holiday + “Strange Fruit”

There are many important dates in America’s long struggle for racial equal rights. Eighteen-sixty-three was the year of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved people, and the year 1954 brought the Supreme Court case that integrated the schools. Ten years later (1964) brought the Civil Rights Act and the next year (1965) brought the Voting Rights Act. There is also another year that’s important—a year that’s often overlooked, according to Angela Davis, a professor of History at U-C Santa Cruz who points out that, “Two major moments in the cultural history of the United States occurred in 1939.”

That year is pivotal not because there were any great laws passed. Instead, it stands out from other years because of its important symbolic moments. On April 9, 1939, the great African American contralto Marian Anderson—who was denied the use of the District of Columbia’s Constitution Hall because she was Black—stood up against racial discrimination and sang a triumphant concert in front of 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial.

That same year, another African American woman—someone just as well-known as Marian Anderson—also stood up for justice with a song. The singer was Billie Holiday. In her short life (she was only 44 when she died from drug addiction), Billie Holiday performed with a type of genius that is still imitated by singers today. She was best known for sad songs about heartache and pain from losing your love. One thing people don’t say about Billie Holiday was that she was a protest singer. There certainly were African American performers who sang about the hard times Black people suffered in the 1930s. There was plenty to sing about—not being allowed to vote, not being allowed to go to the same bathroom or restaurant as white people, unfair trials that locked Black people away in prison for no reason. These are not the kind of songs Billie Holiday was known to sing. In 1939, though, she made an exception, recording a song called “Strange Fruit” that brought out into the light one of America’s dirtiest secrets—the issue that experts have called the “window to the soul of white supremacy and African American life in the South”—lynching. According to Dr. Farrah Jasmine Griffin, author of the book If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, “In the late 19th and early 20th century, there began this horrific practice of lynching. Starting around the 1890s following Reconstruction,” she says, the lynching of Black people becomes a horrible practice in the United States. By the time Billie Holiday was singing, it had been going on for decades.

There were many activists both Black and white who tried to stop lynching. As Angela Davis says, “There were actually political movements against lynching by 1939—major political movements. The NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] took up the cause of lynching. One of its local leaders, Harry T. Moore in Central Florida—where a Black man was more likely to get lynched than anywhere else in the South—had his house blown up with dynamite. He and his wife were killed on Christmas Eve, 1951, because he had tried to stop lynching in the state. People like Mr. Moore were trying to get Congress or their state legislatures to pass laws saying it was illegal to kill a Black man just because you didn’t like him. These activists started pushing right after World War I. But, Dr. Davis says, “Anti-lynching legislation was proposed and unfortunately was not passed in the 20s.”

Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” talks about lynching. It was inspired by a terrible, gruesome picture taken in 1930s of two Black men hanged from tree branches by their necks, surrounded by white men in fancy clothes. The song was originally written as a poem by a school teacher in New York City named Louis Allen. It’s a short poem that goes:

Southern trees bear a Strange Fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze

Strange Fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South

The bulgin’ eyes and the twisted mouth.

Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burnin’ 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 tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Mr. Allen wrote the poem in 1937, and a short time later he set it to music. According to Dr. Griffin, “He brought it to a young singer named Billie Holiday who had just started singing down at Café Society, which was the only integrated night club in New York City at the time.” Billie had been singing up until then in the segregated Black neighborhood called Harlem, but Dr. Griffin says the move to Café Society, “Was her big break and she was becoming a star.”

The song was instantly popular with the people in the audience, who were mostly people who supported the idea of giving rights to African Americans, but Billie—who knew what a terrible problem lynching was—decided she wanted to bring the song to a larger audience.  

It’s difficult today to imagine what life was like during the years when lynching was popular in the South. Black men lived in constant terror that someone might accuse them of a crime, and that a white mob would grab them, take them against their will to a tree, and lynch them. Lynching wasn’t just a way for white people to keep Black people in line. It was also, in some places, treated like a sport. According to a memorabilia collector named James Allen, who spoke in a BBC television documentary, often at a lynching, photographers would take pictures and then sell them door to door. Allen has a collection of these post cards, which show Black men hanging from trees with white people standing around and smiling. “Some of these images were printed in the tens of thousands,” Allen said. They “sold for a dime or a dollar a piece. They were sold in drugs stores and pharmacies.”

This is the kind of horrific behavior that Billie Holiday hoped to stop with her new song. So she felt that it wasn’t enough just to sing it for liberals in New York. Dr. Griffin says, “She wants to record it. She has a recording contract with Columbia Records. It’s a great commercial contract. They refuse to record it and so then she goes and she insists, and she finds another label to record it, and she becomes associated with the song for the rest of her life.” 

It is significant, Angela Davis says, that “the same year that Billie Holiday sang ‘Strange Fruit’ to a progressive nightclub audience in Greenwich village, Marian Anderson sang at what has become one of the most memorable concerts in in US History.” Marian Anderson’s achievement has lived on in Civil Rights history. Billie Holiday’s is largely forgotten today, but they both are equally important, according to Dwandalyn Reece, curator of music and performing arts for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The two “play off of each other as far as I am concerned, and there is no one event that is more important than the other.” 

When Billie Holiday got up to sing this song, Dr. Davis says, “It had an enormous impact. This was really first time that, at least in popular music, such a powerful anti-racist stance had been assumed.” It is difficult today to express the risk Billie Holiday took to record the song. Black people lost their jobs all the time for standing up for the rights of their community. Teachers were fired, unions would bar Black activists from working on construction and plumbing jobs, and Black singers and actors could be barred from performing or dropped by their record labels. The decision to record “Strange Fruit,” Dr. Griffin says, was “very brave and courageous of a young artist who really put her career at stake by not only singing but recording this song, and she would do so again and again and again. I can’t think of another song until the 1960s that has the kind of political and emotional impact that “Strange Fruit” had and continues to have,” she says.

Billie Holiday stood up for what she believed in and moved America one step closer to achieving racial equality.