Strange Fruit

It’s worth remembering that before “Strange Fruit,” there was Irving Berlin’s, “Supper Time.”

Berlin wrote it in 1933 for Ethel Waters to sing in “As Thousands Cheer.” It was a song about lynching, though it never used the word. Instead, it placed a Black mother in the doorway of an ordinary evening, trying to tell her children that their father would not be coming home for supper.

Six years later came “Strange Fruit,” and it went even further.

The song was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from The Bronx who wrote under the name Lewis Allan. But “Jewish schoolteacher” is only part of the picture. Meeropol was also a committed leftist and social activist. Years later, after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed, Meeropol and his wife adopted their two young sons and raised them as their own. His conscience did not end on the page.

Meeropol wrote the poem after seeing Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Ind. The image haunted him, and the poem eventually became, “Strange Fruit.” You can feel the photograph in the lyric. The song begins not with explanation, but with an image: “Black bodies swinging” in the Southern breeze.

It is worth remembering, too, that Meeropol was not the only Jewish voice responding to lynching at the time. Jewish writers in the Yiddish press were also publishing poems, essays, and protest pieces about anti-Black violence in America.

In other words, “Strange Fruit” did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of a larger moral conversation.

Still, a song is not only written. It has to find the right room, and then the right voice.

That room was Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York’s first integrated nightclub. Its owner, Barney Josephson, created it so Black and white artists could work together onstage, and Black and white audiences could sit together out front.

That alone was radical.

There are different versions of exactly how “Strange Fruit” reached Billie Holiday. In one version, Josephson heard the song and asked Meeropol to play it for her. In another, Robert Gordon, who was directing Holiday’s show at Café Society, heard it at Madison Square Garden and brought it to her. Either way, the song’s path to Holiday ran through Café Society.

Holiday understood the danger of singing it. This was not just another number. This was a Black woman standing in front of integrated audiences and singing about lynching in America. Many club owners did not want her to sing it. Some forbade it. Columbia, her label, wanted nothing to do with recording it. It was too dangerous for business.

So, Holiday went to Milt Gabler, the Jewish owner of Commodore Records. Gabler understood that the song had to be recorded. As the story goes, he said something to the effect of: I don’t care if it makes a dime — we have to put this out. Columbia gave Holiday a one-session release, and Gabler recorded it.

At Café Society, Josephson made sure “Strange Fruit” closed Holiday’s set. The waiters stopped serving. The room went dark except for a single spotlight on her face. There was no encore. Josephson wanted the audience to leave America’s first integrated nightclub with that song as the last sound, the last image, the last feeling they carried out into the night.

Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish-born co-founder of Atlantic Records and one of the most important record men of the 20th century, later called “Strange Fruit” “a declaration of war” and “the beginning of the civil rights movement.” Time named it the Song of the Century. It forced lynching into American popular music, into the nightclub, into the record store, and into the ears of people who might have preferred not to know.

And Holiday paid for that courage. Harry Anslinger, the racist head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, targeted her relentlessly. In 1947, she was arrested for narcotics possession and sent to prison. Afterward, she was denied the cabaret license she needed to perform in New York clubs. Even on her deathbed in 1959, federal agents came to her hospital room, arrested her for drug possession, handcuffed her to her hospital bed, and placed her under police guard. A judge later ordered the handcuffs removed, but she remained under federal watch. Doctors had begun treating her with methadone — a medically supervised drug used to ease opioid withdrawal — and she reportedly began to improve. But under pressure from the federal narcotics agents guarding her room, the treatment was stopped. She died soon after.

Meeropol wrote the song. Josephson created the setting in which it could be heard properly. Gabler made sure it was recorded when Columbia would not touch it. But Billie Holiday gave “Strange Fruit” its force, and she paid dearly for carrying it. The song became inseparable from her not simply because she sang it, but because she kept singing it when club owners, record companies, and eventually the government itself wanted her silent.

That is the extraordinary thing about this story: three white Jewish men helped make it possible for one of the most important songs about the Black experience in America to reach the woman who could tell the truth inside it. Once Holiday sang it, it became hers forever.