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This article talks about the evolution from poem to song, and how it took over Billie Holiday's life. A self made singer, Holiday took "Strange Fruit" to the top, and would never leave her side. This reflects on how her raw emotion and vulnerability with the lyrics would take a toll, and it would become her life.

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t is a clear, fresh New York night in March 1939. You're on a date and you've decided to investigate a new club in a former speakeasy on West 4th Street: Cafe Society, which calls itself "The Wrong Place for the Right People". Even if you don't get the gag on the way in - the doormen wear tattered clothes - then the penny drops when you enter the L-shaped, 200-capacity basement and see the satirical murals spoofing Manhattan's high-society swells. Unusually for a New York nightclub, black patrons are not just welcomed but privileged with the best seats in the house.

You've heard the buzz about the resident singer, a 23-year-old black woman called Billie Holiday who made her name up in Harlem with Count Basie's band. She has golden-brown, almost Polynesian skin, a ripe figure and a single gardenia in her hair. She has a way of owning the room, but she's not flashy. Her voice is plump and pleasure-seeking, prodding and caressing a song until it yields more delights than its author had intended, bringing a spark of vivacity and a measure of cool to even the hokier material.

And then it happens. The house lights go down, leaving Holiday illuminated by the hard, white beam of a single spotlight.

She begins her final number.

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit." This, you think, isn't your usual lovey-dovey stuff. "Blood on the leaves and blood at the root." What is this? "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze." Lynching? It's a song about lynching? The chatter from the tables dries up. Every eye in the room is on the singer, every ear on the song. After the last word - a long, abruptly severed cry of "crop" - the whole room snaps to black. When the house lights go up, she's gone.

Do you applaud, awed by the courage and intensity of the performance, stunned by the grisly poetry of the lyrics, sensing history moving through the room? Or do you shift awkwardly in your seat, shudder at the strange vibrations in the air, and think to yourself: call this entertainment?

This is the question that will throb at the heart of the vexed relationship between politics and pop for decades to come, and this is the first time it has demanded to be asked.

Written by a Jewish communist called Abel Meeropol, Strange Fruit was not by any means the first protest song, but it was the first to shoulder an explicit political message into the arena of entertainment. Unlike the robust workers' anthems of the union movement, it did not stir the blood; it chilled it. "That is about the ugliest song I have ever heard," Nina Simone would later marvel. "Ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country." For all these reasons, it was something entirely new. Up to this point, protest songs functioned as propaganda, but Strange Fruit proved they could be art.

It is a song so good that dozens of singers have since tried to put their stamp on it, and Holiday's performance is so strong that none of them have come close to outclassing her - in 1999, Time magazine named her first studio version the "song of the century".

Although lynching was already on the decline by the time of Strange Fruit - the grotesque photograph of a double hanging which moved Meeropol to pick up his pen had been taken in Indiana in 1930 - it remained the most vivid symbol of American racism, a stand-in for all the more subtle forms of discrimination affecting the black population. Perhaps only the visceral horror that lynching inspired gave Meeropol the necessary conviction to write a song with no precedent, one that required a new songwriting vocabulary.

Meeropol, who taught at a high school in the Bronx and churned out reams of topical songs, poems and plays under the gentle alias Lewis Allan, published a poem under the title Bitter Fruit in the union-run New York Teacher magazine in 1937. The later name change was inspired. "Bitter" is too baldly judgmental. "Strange", however, evokes a haunting sense of something out of joint. It puts the listener in the shoes of a curious observer spying the hanging shapes from afar and moving closer towards a sickening realisation.

Meeropol worked out a tune and Strange Fruit quickly became a fixture at leftwing gatherings during 1938, sung by his wife and various friends. It even made it to Madison Square Garden, via black singer Laura Duncan. In the crowd was one Robert Gordon, who had recently taken on a job at Cafe Society, directing the headlining show by Billie Holiday. The club was the brainchild of New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson: a pithy antidote to the snooty, often racist elitism of other New York nightspots. Opening the night before New Year's Eve 1938, it owed much of its instant success to Holiday.

In her 23 years, Holiday had already seen plenty, although her notoriously unreliable autobiography Lady Sings the Blues obscures as much as it reveals. Born in Philadelphia, she spent some time running errands in a Baltimore whorehouse, "just about the only place where black and white folks could meet in any natural way", where she first discovered jazz. After she accused a neighbour of attempting to rape her, the 10-year-old Holiday, an incorrigible truant, was sent to a Catholic reform school until her mother secured her release. Moving with her mother to New York, she worked in another brothel, this time doing more than errands, and was jailed for solicitation. Upon her release she began singing in Harlem jazz clubs, where she caught the eye of producer John Hammond, who made her one of the swing era's hottest stars.

Meeropol played Josephson his song and asked if he could bring it to Holiday. The singer later insisted she fell in love with it right away. Meeropol remembered it differently, believing that she performed it only as a favour to Josephson and Gordon: "To be perfectly frank, I don't think she felt comfortable with the song."

Arthur Herzog, one of Holiday's regular songwriters, claimed that arranger Danny Mendelsohn rewrote Meeropol's tune, which he uncharitably dubbed "something or other alleged to be music", which might have made the difference to Holiday.

The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith in Indiana in 1930 inspired Abel Meeropol to write Strange Fruit. Photograph: AP

Either way, Holiday road-tested the song at a party in Harlem and received what would become a familiar response: shocked silence followed by a roar of approval. Meeropol was there the night she debuted it at Cafe Society. "She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere," he marvelled. "This was exactly what I wanted the song to do and why I wrote it."

Josephson, a natural showman, knew there was no point slipping Strange Fruit into the body of the set and pretending it was just another song. He drew up some rules: first, Holiday would close all three of her nightly sets with it; second, the waiters would halt all service beforehand; third, the whole room would be in darkness but for a sharp, bright spotlight on Holiday's face; fourth, there would be no encore. "People had to remember Strange Fruit, get their insides burned by it," he explained.

It was not, by any stretch, a song for every occasion. It infected the air in the room, cut conversation stone dead, left drinks untouched, cigarettes unlit. Customers either clapped till their hands were sore, or walked out in disgust. Back then, before her life took a darker turn, Holiday was able to leave the song, and its politics, at the door on the way out. When Frankie Newton would hold forth on Marcus Garvey's black nationalism or Stalin's five-year plan, she would snap, "I don't want to fill my head with any of that shit." Holiday's biographer John Chilton suggests that this was not because she wasn't interested but because she felt embarrassed by her lack of education. All that she knew and felt about being black in America, she poured into the song.

Holiday's regular label, Columbia, blanched at the prospect of recording it, so she turned to Commodore Records, a small, leftwing operation based at Milt Gabler's record shop on West 52nd Street. On 20 April 1939, Holiday entered Brunswick's World Broadcasting Studios with Frankie Newton's eight-piece Cafe Society Band and recorded Strange Fruit in one four-hour session. Worried that the song was too short, Gabler asked pianist Sonny White to improvise a suitably stealthy introduction.

On the single, Holiday doesn't open her mouth until 70 seconds in. Like Josephson with his spotlight, the musicians use that time to set the scene, drawing the listener in as if to a ghost story. Newton's muted trumpet line hovers in the air like marsh gas; White's minor piano chords walk the listener towards the fateful spot; then, at last, there's Holiday. Others might have overplayed the irony or punched home the moral judgment too forcefully, but she sings it as though her responsibility is simply to document the song's eerie tableau; to bear witness. Her voice moves softly through the dark, closing in on the swinging bodies like a camera lens coming into focus. In doing so, she perfects the song, narrowing the sarcasm of "gallant South" to a fine point and cooling the temperature of the most overheated image: "the stench of burning flesh". She is charismatic but not ostentatious, curling the words just so. Her gifts to the song are vulnerability, understatement and immediacy: the listener is right there, at the base of the tree. Look, she is saying. Just look.

Released three months later, it became not just a hit but a cause celebre. Campaigners for an anti-lynching law posted copies to congressmen. The New York Post's Samuel Grafton called it "a fantastically perfect work of art, one which reversed the usual relationship between a black entertainer and her white audience: 'I have been entertaining you,' she seems to say, 'now you just listen to me.' If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise."

Holiday quit Cafe Society in August 1939, but she took Strange Fruit with her and carried it like an unexploded bomb. In Washington DC, a local newspaper wondered whether it might actually provoke a new wave of lynchings. At New York's Birdland, the promoter confiscated customers' cigarettes, lest their firefly glow distract from the spotlight's intensity. When some promoters ordered her not to sing it, Holiday added a clause to her contract guaranteeing her the option. Not that she always exercised that right. "I only do it for people who might understand and appreciate it," she told radio DJ Daddy-O Daylie. "This is not a 'June-Moon-Croon-Tune'."

Yet Holiday could no more detach herself from it than if the lyrics had been tattooed on her skin. Strange Fruit would haunt Holiday for the rest of her life. Some fans, including her former producer John Hammond, blamed it for robbing her of her lightness. Others pointed out that her burgeoning heroin habit did that job.

So did the persistent racism which poisoned her life just as it poisoned the life of every black American. In 1944, a naval officer called her a nigger and, her eyes hot with tears, she smashed a beer bottle against a table and lunged at him with the serrated glass. A little while later, a friend spotted her wandering down 52nd Street and called out, "How are you doing, Lady Day?" Her reply was viciously blunt: "Well, you know, I'm still a nigger." No wonder she clutched the song tightly to her breast, as a shield and a weapon, too.

Holiday discovered heroin in the early 40s, an addiction that eventually earned her a year-long prison term in 1947. Ten days after her release, she performed a comeback show at New York's Carnegie Hall.

According to Lady Sings the Blues, she accidentally pierced her scalp with a hatpin and sang with blood trickling down her face.

There could be only one contender for the closing number. "By the time I started on Strange Fruit," she wrote, "between the sweat and blood, I was a mess." Time called the performance "throat-tightening".

During the 50s, she performed it less often and, when she did, it could be agonising to watch. Her relationship with it became almost masochistic. The worse her mood, the more likely she was to add it to the set, yet it pained her every time, especially when it prompted walkouts by racist audience members.

By the latter half of the decade, her body was wasted, her voice weathered down to a hoarse rasp, and Strange Fruit was the only song that seemed to dignify her suffering, wrapping her own decline in a wider American tragedy. Writing about her final years in his definitive book Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song, David Margolick says: "she had grown oddly, sadly suited to capture the full grotesqueness of the song. Now, she not only sang of bulging eyes and twisted mouths. She embodied them." It was as if the song, having lived inside her for so long, had finally warped its host.
Extracted from 33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey, published by Faber & Faber Ltd on 3 March at £17.99. To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

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Strange Fruit: the first great protest song

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t is a clear, fresh New York night in March 1939. You're on a date and you've decided to investigate a new club in a former speakeasy on West 4th Street: Cafe Society, which calls itself "The Wrong Place for the Right People".

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This article talks about how Holiday became a star. This relates to how "Strange Fruit" would impact her life, and the history behind the beloved artist.

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Talking about how the song was discovered, Milt Gabler felt the song was too short, therefore creating the long seventy second introduction, one that would introduce the raw intensity and emotion.

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In 1978 Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[4] 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.

Meeropol had seen Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He published the poem under the title "Bitter Fruit" in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine. Though he had often asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set "Strange Fruit" to music himself and the piece gained a certain success as a protest song in and around New York.

Barney Josephson, the founder of Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub, heard the song and introduced it to Billie Holiday. Other reports say that Robert Gordon, who was directing Billie Holiday's show at Cafe Society, heard the song at Madison Square Garden and introduced it to her. Holiday first performed the song at Cafe Society in 1939. She said that singing it made her fearful of retaliation but, because its imagery reminded her of her father, she continued to sing the piece making it a regular part of her live performances. Because of the poignancy of the song, Josephson drew up some rules: Holiday would close with it; the waiters would stop all service in advance; the room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on Holiday's face; and there would be no encore. During the musical introduction, Holiday would stand with her eyes closed, as if she were evoking a prayer.

Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about the song, but the company feared reaction by record retailers in the South, as well as negative reaction from affiliates of its co-owned radio network, CBS. Even John Hammond, Holiday's producer, refused. So she turned to friend Milt Gabler, whose Commodore label produced alternative jazz. Holiday sang "Strange Fruit" for him a cappella, and moved him to tears. Columbia allowed Holiday a one-session release from her contract in order to record it and Frankie Newton's eight-piece Cafe Society Band was used for the session.

Because he was worried that the song was too short, Gabler asked pianist Sonny White to improvise an introduction so that Holiday only starts singing after 70 seconds. Gabler worked out a special arrangement with Vocalion Records to record and distribute the song.

The song was highly regarded and the 1939 record sold a million copies, in time becoming Holiday's biggest-selling record.

In her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday suggested that she, together with Meeropol, her accompanist Sonny White, and arranger Danny Mendelsohn, set the poem to music. The writers David Margolick and Hilton Als dismissed that claim in their work, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song writing that hers was "an account that may set a record for most misinformation per column inch". When challenged, Holiday-whose autobiography had been ghostwritten by William Dufty-claimed, "I ain't never read that book."

Numerous other singers have performed the work. In October 1939, Samuel Grafton of The New York Post described "Strange Fruit": "If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its 'Marseillaise'."

1999, Time magazine called it the song of the century.
2002, the Library of Congress honored the song as one of 50 recordings chosen that year to be added to the National Recording Registry.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution listed the song as Number One on "100 Songs of the South".
Bob Dylan cited "Strange Fruit" as an influence in the 2005 documentary No Direction Home.
Serbian rock musician, journalist and writer Dejan Cukić wrote about "Strange Fruit" as among 45 songs that changed the history of popular music in his book 45 obrtaja: Priče o Pesmama.
In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the "Top 20 Political Songs".
-Wikipedia
LYRICS ::

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

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Holiday approached her recording label, Columbia, about the song, but the company feared reaction by record retailers in the South, as well as negative reaction from affiliates of its co-owned radio network, CBS. Even John Hammond, Holiday's producer, refused. So she turned to friend Milt Gabler, whose Commodore label produced alternative jazz.

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Time Magazine named "Strange Fruit" the song of the century in 1999, explaining why it is so powerful and impactful to society today.

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Our critics pick the most extraordinary English-language popular recordings since the beginning of TIME magazine in 1923. Here are 100 (unranked) songs of enduring beauty, power and inventiveness

"Strange Fruit" is a tragic song famously performed by Billie Holiday, one of America's most tragic singers. The devastating image of "strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" is the mournful heart of this antiracism song. Named song of the century by TIME in 1999, the lyrics were written by Abel Meeropol, an English teacher from the Bronx who in 1937 ran across a photograph of a lynching that both disturbed and inspired him. The resulting poem became the basis of the song two years later. Holiday's live version of "Strange Fruit," with only a piano backing her, is even more raw and heartfelt than the recording. You can feel her anguish, you can feel her sadness, you can feel her anger. It's a song that is complicated in a unique way - such beautiful humanity in such a shameful topic.

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Our critics pick the most extraordinary English-language popular recordings since the beginning of TIME magazine in 1923. Here are 100 (unranked) songs of enduring beauty, power and inventiveness "Strange Fruit" is a tragic song famously performed by Billie Holiday, one of America's most tragic singers.

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This article talks about the history of lynching in America, and how they were used as forms of dehumanization and terror against African Americans. Showing graphic images of lynchings and protests, this article goes beyond to explain why white people in America were horrible people in the 20th Century.

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Historians broadly agree that lynchings were a method of social and racial control meant to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into an inferior racial caste position. They became widely practiced in the US south from roughly 1877, the end of post-civil war reconstruction, through 1950.

A typical lynching would involve criminal accusations, often dubious, against a black American, an arrest, and the assembly of a "lynch mob" intent on subverting the normal constitutional judicial process.

Victims would be seized and subjected to every imaginable manner of physical torment, with the torture usually ending with being hung from a tree and set on fire. More often than not, victims would be dismembered and mob members would take pieces of their flesh and bone as souvenirs.

In a great many cases, the mobs were aided and abetted by law enforcement (indeed, they often were the same people). Officers would routinely leave a black inmate's jail cell unguarded after rumors of a lynching began to circulate to allow for a mob to kill them before any trial or legal defense could take place.

What would trigger a lynching?

One chief among the trespasses (occasionally real, but usually imagined) was any claim of sexual contact between black men and white women. The trope of the hypersexual and lascivious black male, especially vis-a-vis the inviolable chastity of white women, was and remains one of the most durable tropes of white supremacy.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), nearly 25% of lynching victims were accused of sexual assault. Nearly 30% were accused of murder.

"The mob wanted the lynching to carry a significance that transcended the specific act of punishment," wrote the historian Howard Smead in Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker. The mob "turned the act into a symbolic rite in which the black victim became the representative of his race and, as such, was being disciplined for more than a single crime ... The deadly act was [a] warning [to] the black population not to challenge the supremacy of the white race."

How many took place in America?

Because of the nature of lynchings - summary executions that occurred outside the constraints of court documentation - there was no formal, centralized tracking of the phenomenon. Most historians believe this has left the true number of lynchings dramatically underreported.

For decades, the most comprehensive total belonged to the archives at the Tuskegee Institute, which tabulated 4,743 people who died at the hands of US lynch mobs between 1881 and 1968. According to the Tuskegee numbers, 3,446 (nearly three-quarters) of those lynched were black Americans.

The EJI, which relied on the Tuskegee numbers in building its own count, integrated other sources, such as newspaper archives and other historical records, to arrive at a total of 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, and another 300 in other states.

Unlike the Tuskegee data, EJI's numbers attempt to exclude incidents it considered acts of "mob violence" that followed a legitimate criminal trial process or that "were committed against non-minorities without the threat of terror".

Left to right: The lynching of George Meadows, 1889. A crowd surrounds two African American lynching victims. A group of African Americans marching near the Capitol building in Washington DC, to protest against the lynching of four African Americans in Georgia. Composite: Library of Congress

Where did most lynchings take place?

Unsurprisingly, lynching was most concentrated in the former Confederate states, and especially in those with large black populations.

According to EJI's data, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings.

Who attended lynchings?

Among the most unsettling realities of lynching is the degree to which white Americans embraced it, not as an uncomfortable necessity or a way of maintaining order, but as a joyous moment of wholesome celebration.

"Whole families came together, mothers and fathers, bringing even their youngest children. It was the show of the countryside - a very popular show," read a 1930 editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer. "Men joked loudly at the sight of the bleeding body ... girls giggled as the flies fed on the blood that dripped from the Negro's nose."

Adding to the macabre nature of the scene, lynching victims were typically dismembered into pieces of human trophy for mob members.

In his autobiography, WEB Du Bois writes of the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia. He reports that the knuckles of the victim were on display at a local store on Mitchell Street in Atlanta and that a piece of the man's heart and liver was presented to the state's governor.

In the 1931 Maryville, Missouri, lynching of Raymond Gunn, the crowd estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 was at least a quarter women, and included hundreds of children. One woman "held her little girl up so she could get a better view of the naked Negro blazing on the roof", wrote Arthur Raper in The Tragedy of Lynching.

After the fire was out, hundreds poked about in his ashes for souvenirs. "The charred remains of the victim were divided piece by piece," wrote Raper.

What was the political context at the time?

Lynchings were only the latest fashion in racial terrorism against black Americans when they came to the fore in the late 19th century. White planters had long used malevolent and highly visible violence against the enslaved to try to suppress even the vaguest rumors of insurrection.

In 1811, after a failed insurrection outside New Orleans, for example, whites decorated the road to the plantation where the plot failed with the decapitated heads of blacks, many of whom planters later admitted had nothing to do with the revolt.

It wasn't a southern-specific phenomenon, either. In 1712, colonial authorities in New York City manacled, burned and broke on the wheel 18 enslaved blacks accused of plotting for their freedom.

Communities of free blacks also faced the constant threat of race riots and pogroms at the hands of white mobs throughout the 19th century and continuing into the lynching era.

Among the best known of these was the decimation of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, neighborhood of Greenwood in 1921, after a black man was falsely charged with raping a white woman in an elevator. The Greenwood neighborhood was sometimes referred to as "Black Wall Street" for its economic vitality before the massacre. According to the Tulsa Historical Society, it is believed 100 to 300 blacks were killed by white mobs in a matter of a few hours.

Similar events, from the New York draft riots during the civil war to others in New Orleans, Knoxville, Charleston, Chicago, and St Louis, saw hundreds of blacks killed.

The start of the lynching era is commonly pegged to 1877, the year of the Tilden-Hayes compromise, which is viewed by most historians as the official end of Reconstruction in the US south. In order to settle a razor-thin and contested presidential election between the Republican Rutherford B Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, northern Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the last of the formerly renegade states.

The move technically only affected South Carolina and Louisiana but symbolically gestured to the south that the north would no longer hold the former Confederacy to the promise of full citizenship for freed blacks, and the south jumped at the chance to renege on the pledge. The end of Reconstruction ushered in a widespread campaign of racial terror and oppression against newly freed black Americans, of which lynching was a cornerstone.

Left to right: a flag announcing lynching flown from the NAACP headquarters, New York, in May 1916; an NAACP pin; and news clippings. Composite: National Archives/Library of Congress

Were people ever punished for carrying out lynchings?

The vast majority of lynching participants were never punished, both because of the tacit approval of law enforcement, and because dozens if not hundreds often had a hand in the killing. Still, punishment was not unheard of - though most of the time, if white lynchers were tried or convicted, it was for arson, rioting or some other much more minor offense.

According to EJI, of all lynchings committed after 1900, only 1% resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense of any kind.

When and how did lynchings end?

Lynchings slowed in the middle of the 20th century with the coming of the civil rights movement.

Anti-lynching efforts predominantly led by women's organizations had a measurable effect, helping to generate overwhelming white support for an anti-lynching bill by 1937 (though such legislation never made it past the filibusters of southern Dixiecrats in the Senate).

Also playing a major role was the great migration of black people out of the south into urban areas north and west. The exodus of some 6 million black Americans between 1910 and 1970 was pushed by racial terror and a waning agricultural economy and pulled by a surfeit of industrial job opportunities.

The year 1952 was the first since people began keeping track that there were no recorded lynchings. When it happened again in 1953, Tuskegee suspended its data collection, suggesting that as traditionally defined, lynching had ceased to be a useful "barometer for measuring the status of race relations in the United States".

But foregrounding the intense new waves of brutality that would greet the nascent civil rights movement, Tuskegee continued in its final lynching report that the terror was switching modes by "the development of other extra-legal means of control, such as bombings, incendiarism, threats and intimidation".

In The End of American Lynching, Ashraf HA Rushdy argues: "The violence meant to act as a form of social control and terrorism had become less ritualistic and less collective. Individuals and small groups could throw bombs, perform drive-by shootings and torch a house," as the resurgence of the KKK and similar violent white hate groups proved.

The end of lynching cannot be said to be purely academic, though. While targeted violence against black people did not end with the lynching era, the element of public spectacle and open, even celebratory participation was a unique social phenomenon that would not be reborn in the same way as racial violence evolved.

Despite the shift, the specter of ritual black death as a public affair - one that people could confidently participate in without anonymity and that could be seen as entertainment - did not end with the lynching era.

Who took a stand against them at the time?

Generally speaking and especially early on, the white press wrote sympathetically about lynchings and their necessity to preserve order in the south. The Memphis Evening Scimitar published in 1892:

Aside from the violation of white women by Negroes, which is the outcropping of a bestial perversion of instinct, the chief cause of trouble between the races in the South is the Negro's lack of manners. In the state of slavery he learned politeness from association with white people who took pains to teach him. Since the emancipation came and the tie of mutual interest and regard between master and servant was broken, the Negro has drifted away into a state which is neither freedom nor bondage ...

In consequence ... there are many negroes who use every opportunity to make themselves offensive, particularly when they think it can be done with impunity ...

We have had too many instances right here in Memphis to doubt this, and our experience is not exceptional. The white people won't stand this sort of thing, and ... the response will be prompt and effectual.

The black press, on the other hand, was arguably the primary force in fighting against the phenomenon.

The Memphis journalist Ida B Wells was the most strident and devoted anti-lynching advocate in US history, and spent a 40-year-career writing, researching and speaking on the horrors of the practice. As a young woman she travelled the south for months, chronicling lynchings and gathering empirical data.

Wells eventually became an owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight before being chased out of town by white mobs and relocating to New York and then Chicago.

Eventually many white publications began to turn with overall white attitudes about lynching. "Missouri in Shame" was the headline of the first editorial in the Kansas City Star on the 1931 Maryville Lynching of Raymond Gunn.

It read, in part:

The lynching at Maryville was about as horrible as such a thing can be. Lynching in itself is a fearful reproach to American civilization. Lynching by fire is the vengeance of a savage past ... The sickening outrage is the more deplorable because it easily could have been prevented.

This article was amended on 1 May 2018 to correct the date of the 1811 New Orleans slave rebellion.

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How white Americans used lynchings to terrorize and control black people

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The Guardian is in Montgomery, Alabama, to cover the opening of America's first memorial to lynching victims. The legacy of such brutal, racist murders is still largely ignored

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This study shows interesting finds about white Americans dehumanizing African Americans because they would subconsciously associate them with apes. An interesting take on the actions of white Americans, it helps to show the psychology behind the horrific events during this time.

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Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.

Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is black, said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work-intuitions-you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was-how we were able to pick it up every time."

The paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies conducted by Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former student of Eberhardt's) and Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces.

The researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"Despite widespread opposition to racism, bias remains with us," Eberhardt said. "African Americans are still dehumanized; we're still associated with apes in this country. That association can lead people to endorse the beating of black suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of other consequences that we have yet to uncover."
Historical background
Scientific racism in the United States was graphically promoted in a mid-19th-century book by Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon titled Types of Mankind, which used misleading illustrations to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between "Greeks" and chimpanzees. "When we have a history like that in this country, I don't know how much of that goes away completely, especially to the extent that we are still dealing with severe racial inequality, which fuels and maintains those associations in ways that people are unaware," Eberhardt said.

Although such grotesque characterizations of African Americans have largely disappeared from mainstream U.S. society, Eberhardt noted that science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration, "March of Progress," published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a white man. "It's a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man," Eberhardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that people of African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. When people think of a civilized person, a white man comes to mind."
Consequences of socially endorsed violence
In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates with words associated with either apes (such as "monkey," "chimp," "gorilla") or big cats (such as "lion," "tiger," "panther"). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described by his family as "a loving husband and father," the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest.

The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those who thought the suspect was black were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words. "Taken together, this suggests that implicit knowledge of a Black-ape association led to marked differences in participants' judgments of Black criminal suspects," the researchers write.

According to the paper's authors, this link has devastating consequences for African Americans because it "alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects." For example, the paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." "Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not," the researchers write.
The way forward
Despite the paper's findings, Eberhardt said she is optimistic about the future. "This work isn't arguing that there hasn't been any progress made or that we are living in the same society that existed in the 19th century," she said. "We have made a lot of progress on race issues, but we should recognize that racial bias isn't dead. We still need to be aware of that and aware of all the different ways [racism] can affect us, despite our intentions and motivations to be egalitarian. We still have work to do."

For Eberhardt, two stories of race exist in America. "One is about the disappearance of bias-that it's no longer with us," she said. "But the other is about the transformation of bias. It's not the egregious bias anymore, but it's modern bias, subtle bias." With both of these stories, she said, there is an understanding that society has moved beyond the historic battles centered around race. "We want to argue, with this work, that there is one old race battle that we're still fighting," she said. "That is the battle for blacks to be recognized as fully human."

This research was supported by a Stanford University Dean's Award to Jennifer Eberhardt.

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racial issues; social psychology; language acquisition; psychology; racial disparity; popular culture; education and employment; privacy issues

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Discrimination Against Blacks Linked To Dehumanization, Study Finds

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Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream US culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

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Abel Meeropol grew up during a time of lynchings, and was horrified when he saw a picture of two men being lynched. This source goes through his journey to writing this poem and how it became "Strange Fruit".

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The story behind “Strange Fruit,” the most haunting song about race in America

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Not only did Abel Meeropol write "Strange Fruit", but was also part of another incredibly famous story in the 20th century. This provides background on the influential writer and looks into his life, and how he was deeply affected by the world around him.

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One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to another watershed moment in America's history.

The man behind "Strange Fruit" is New York City's Abel Meeropol, and he really has two stories. They both begin at Dewitt Clinton High School, a public high school in the Bronx that has an astonishing number of famous people in its alumni. James Baldwin went there. So did Countee Cullen, Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon, Richard Avedon and Ralph Lauren.

Meeropol graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, says Gerard Pelisson, who wrote a book about the school.

In the late 1930s, Pellison says, Meeropol "was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge."

Meeropol once said the photograph "haunted" him "for days." So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner - who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.

When Holiday decided to sing "Strange Fruit," the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Pastoral scene of the gallant South, 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 a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
In 1999, Time magazine named "Strange Fruit" the "song of the century." The Library of Congress put it in the National Recording Registry. It's been recorded dozens of times. Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller did an instrumental version, with Miller evoking the poem on his mournful bass clarinet.

Miller says he was surprised to learn the song was written by a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. "Strange Fruit," he says, took extraordinary courage both for Meeropol to write and for Holiday to sing.

"The '60s hadn't happened yet," he says. "Things like that weren't talked about. They certainly weren't sung about."

New York lawmakers didn't like "Strange Fruit." In 1940, Meeropol was called to testify before a committee investigating communism in public schools. They wanted to know whether the American Communist Party had paid him to write the song. They had not - but, like many New York teachers in his day, Meeropol was a Communist.

Journalist David Margolick, who wrote Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, says, "There are a million reasons to disparage communism now. But American Communism, one point it had in its favor was that it was concerned about civil rights very early."

Meeropol left his teaching job at Dewitt Clinton in 1945. He eventually quit the Communist Party.

And that's where the second part of Meeropol's story begins. The link is the pseudonym he used when writing poetry and music: Lewis Allan.

"Abel Meeropol's pen name 'Lewis Allan' were the names of their children who were stillborn, who never lived," says his son, Robert Meeropol. He and his older brother, Michael, were raised by Abel and his wife, Anne Meeropol, after the boys' parents - Ethel and Julius Rosenberg - were executed for espionage in 1953.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs had also been Communists.

The couple's trial and execution made national headlines, and there was also something of a salacious element, given that the Rosenbergs were a married couple. News accounts described it as "the first husband and wife to die in the electric chair."

At the time, the Rosenberg sons, Robert and Michael, were 6 and 10, respectively. News photographs of the boys show them dressed in suits visiting their parents in prison.

"They're these little boys and they're wearing these caps, and they look so young and so vulnerable. It's really a very poignant image," says Margolick.

Robert Meeropol says that in the months following his parents' execution, it was unclear who would take care of him and his brother. It was the height of McCarthyism. Even family members were fearful of being in any way associated with the Rosenbergs or Communism.

Then, at a Christmas party at the home of W.E.B. Du Bois, the boys were introduced to Abel and Anne Meeropol. A few weeks later, they were living with them.

"One of the most remarkable things was how quickly we adapted," Robert says. "First of all, Abel, what I remember about him as a 6-year-old was that he was a real jokester. He liked to tell silly jokes and play word games, and he would put on these comedy shows that would leave me rolling."

There is something else about Abel Meeropol that seems to connect the man who wrote "Strange Fruit" to the man who created a loving family out of a national scandal. "He was incredibly softhearted," Robert says.

For example, there was an old Japanese maple tree in their backyard, which sent out many new seedlings every year.

"I was the official lawnmower," Robert says, "and I was going to mow over them, and he said, 'Oh, no, you can't kill the seedlings!' I said, 'What are you going to do with them, Dad? There are dozens of them.'

"Well, he dug them up and put them in coffee cans and lined them up along the side of the house. And there were hundreds of them. But he couldn't bring himself to just kill them. It was just something he couldn't do."

Abel Meeropol died in 1986. His sons, Robert and Michael, both became college professors. They're also both involved in social issues. Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children. And he says that even after all these years, he still finds himself unable to kill things in his own garden.

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The Strange Story Of The Man Behind 'Strange Fruit'

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One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to an iconic event in America's history.

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Here is an interactive map of America from 1877-1950 that displays the reported lynchings during that time. Most of the lynchings are recorded in the South, but were not restricted to solely Confederate states. This also includes 5 lynching stories, placing reality right in front of the reader, like Abel witnessed when he saw the picture.

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ListenAudio stories from generations affected by lynching.

WatchA film exploring one family's painful past and journey south.

ExploreInteractive maps on the impact of lynching.

Learn MoreJoin our efforts to fight racial injustice today.

The ReportThe full report with additional research and materials for educators.

AboutMore about the project and the Equal Justice Initiative.

Strange Fruit

/explore

Over 4,000 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950.

Over 4,000 racial terror lynchings occurred in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950.

Racial terror lynchings were not limited to the South, but the Southern states had the most in the nation: over 4,000 between 1877 and 1950.

Reported lynchings by county

More than six million African Americans fled the South in the first half of the 20th century. Terror lynchings and other racial violence played a key role in this forced migration of Black Americans to the North and West. Many fled in fear for their lives.

Percentage of total U.S. African American population
/california /district-of-columbia /mississippi /north-dakota /pennsylvania /west-virginia /north-carolina /south-carolina /south-dakota
After her 3 friends were lynched, Ida B. Wells wrote editorials urging the Black community to flee Memphis. A mob retaliated by destroying her offices. This is her story.

After her friends Calvin McDowell, William Stewart, and Thomas Moss were lynched in Memphis on March 9, 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells published editorials urging the black community to leave Memphis since it "will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons." A mob retaliated by destroying Ms. Wells's offices, and on May 27, 1892, she fled for the North. From there she continued her work, becoming the nation's foremost anti-lynching activist, collaborating with leaders like Frederick Douglass and helping to found the NAACP. Ms. Wells died of natural causes in 1931. Lynchings still raged across the South, and more than six million African Americans fled as refugees from terror. Over the course of the Great Migration, the number of lynchings declined, but not until 1952 did a full year pass without a recorded lynching in the United States.

In 1892 in Memphis, TN, being Black and successful was a threat to the racial hierarchy. This is the story of Calvin McDowell, William Stewart, and Thomas Moss, owners of People's Grocery.
/calvin-mcDowell-william-stewart-thomas-moss
In the late 1800s, three black men, Calvin McDowell, William Stewart, and Thomas Moss, opened a store, People's Grocery in Memphis, Tennessee. The success of the black-owned business posed an economic threat to the status quo, resulting in a violent confrontation between the owners and a group of white men. The white men, who were law enforcement officers, responded by jailing over 100 black men, including the store owners. On March 9,1892, 75 masked men seized Mr. Moss, Mr. McDowell, and Mr. Stewart from jail. They placed ropes around their necks, murdering them in an open field. Asked for his last words, Mr. Moss responded, "Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here." Despite several eyewitnesses and a grand jury investigation, no one was ever held responsible. In the days following the incident, the African American community continued to be terrorized by white citizens, causing over 6,000 black people to flee Memphis in just three months.

In Grayson County, TX, 10,000 people witnessed Henry Smith's lynching. It was a carnival-like event, with vendors selling food and photographers printing postcards. This is his story.
/henry-smith
When Henry Smith, a black man, learned that he was suspected of killing a white girl, he fled his home of Paris, Texas, likely fearful of being lynched. Soon after, a posse seized Mr. Smith and without a full investigation or trial, named him the murderer of the girl. The police did not intervene at any time. On February 1, 1893, a mob of 10,000 gathered, stripping Mr. Smith naked and beating him. He was placed on a carnival float and paraded through town to the fairgrounds. There, he was tortured before a cheering crowd, including children, and burned alive. Afterward, the crowd clamored for souvenirs of the lynching: ashes and pieces of bone. Mr. Smith's death was one of many public spectacle lynchings, in which crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness heinous killings that featured prolonged suffering of the victim. Many were carnival-like events, with vendors selling food and photographers printing postcards.

In 1934 in Jackson County, FL, lynchings were often supported by the community, press, and government officials as a tactic for maintaining racial control. This is the story of Claude Neal.
/claude-neal
On October 19, 1934, Florida farmhand Claude Neal was arrested, accused of the murder of a local white woman. Lynch mobs began forming before 23-year-old Neal had even been formally charged. On October 26, Mr. Neal was seized from jail by six white men and brutally killed. Soon after, his corpse was presented to the community. They castrated, shot and burned his body. When the sheriff cut the body down from a tree and refused to rehang it, an angry mob rioted, burning the homes of Mr. Neal's family and threatening black residents until they fled. A grand jury did not indict anyone for the lynching of Mr. Neal. While lynchings are often thought to have been carried out by a handful of vigilantes, in truth they were often events supported by the community, press, and government officials. These lynchings were a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing not merely an individual, but the entire African American community.

In 1904 in Marengo County, AL, Black men like Rufus Lesseur often never got the chance to defend themselves in a court of law. This is his story.
/rufus-lesseur
On August 14, 1904, a posse of white men seized Rufus Lesseur, a black man, and locked him in a makeshift jail, accusing him of sexually assaulting a white woman. During this era, black people were often the targets of suspicion when a crime was alleged. These accusations were rarely subjected to scrutiny. On August 16, without an investigation, trial, or conviction, a mob of men dragged Mr. Lesseur outside the makeshift jail and lynched him, leaving his body riddled with bullets. He was 24 years old. Rufus Lesseur was one of four known lynching victims in Marengo County, Alabama. He was lynched by a mob of unmasked white men in a town with only 300 residents, but the state claimed that no one could be identified, arrested, or prosecuted for his murder. Today, the makeshift jail where he was held still stands in Thomaston.
/california /district-of-columbia /mississippi /north-dakota /pennsylvania /west-virginia /north-carolina /south-carolina /south-dakota
/texas/ida-b-wells/calvin-mcDowell-william-stewart-thomas-moss/henry-smith/claude-neal/rufus-lesseur

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ListenAudio stories from generations affected by lynching. WatchA film exploring one family's painful past and journey south. ExploreInteractive maps on the impact of lynching. Learn MoreJoin our efforts to fight racial injustice today. The ReportThe full report with additional research and materials for educators. AboutMore about the project and the Equal Justice Initiative.

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After writing "Strange Fruit", Meeropol wrote music under the name Lewis Allan. He was an accomplished writer and was famous for his moving songs in the 20th century. Dying at the age of 83, he left the world with impactful music.

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He wrote the words for ''The House I Live In,'' a motion-picture short that won an Academy Award in 1945, and was the librettist for the opera ''The Good Soldier Schweik,'' drawn from the satire by the Czechoslovak novelist Jaroslav Hasek.

Last year, in a letter to The Times, Robert and Michael Meeropol told of their pride in hearing Frank Sinatra sing ''The House I Live In'' as part of the 100th birthday celebration for the Statue of Liberty.

''We hope that 'The House I Live In' will serve to remind all Americans that patriotism is not limited to the right wing,'' the letter read. ''We hope our father's life and work can help convince people to view with suspicion anyone who would curtail political freedom and limit the range of acceptable politcal debate in the name of anti-Communism, of anti-terrorism or of some 'higher' morality.''

Mrs. Meeropol, the former Anne Shaffer, died in 1973.

In addition to his sons, both of Springfield, Mass., Mr. Meeropol is survived by four grandchildren.

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He wrote the words for ''The House I Live In,'' a motion-picture short that won an Academy Award in 1945, and was the librettist for the opera ''The Good Soldier Schweik,'' drawn from the satire by the Czechoslovak novelist Jaroslav Hasek.

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This is the short film "The House I Live In" that was written by Lewis Allan. It shows the impact his other creations had on society as well.

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Still sung today, "Strange Fruit" is often sang to remind people of how far African Americans have come, and to never forget their heritage. Jill Scott sings at Shining a Light: a concert to celebrate African American culture. This shows that the same raw emotion of the poem is carried throughout time and displayed by other artists.

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Jill Scott Sings "Strange Fruit" (Full Performance) | Shining A Light Concert | A&E

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This is a powerful video created to display an interpretation of Nina Simone's version of "Strange Fruit". With an African American female dressed as the Statue of Liberty, painted in white, it manifests a profound image of America. With the actress crying, she shows the pain that America went through, and the suffering and sorrow of her people. A powerful video that is one way of expressing artistry.

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BLOOD ON THE LEAVES (Strange Fruit)  [Video] (1080p)

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This performance was by a white female. Although there is some controversy behind her singing the song, many have argued that no matter what race, everyone can show compassion during this time of violence. "Strange Fruit" was written by a white Jewish male who was in horror after seeing a photo of a lynching. Annie Lennox sings beautifully, demonstrating the power and emotion the songs is meant to carry.

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In addition to the video above, this explains why she sang the song and her take on the controversy.