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Today, artists are still creating their own renditions of the song "Strange Fruit." Andra Day is a soul and R&B singer, attached below is her rendition of the song. While Day's version was created in 2017 it still has the same powerful advocacy for lynching and racism that the earlier songs and poem did during they're debut.

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Andra Day - Strange Fruit [Official Music Video]

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This New York Time's article written the day after Meeropol's death in 1986, provides detail about Meeropol's career and personal life. It discusses some of Meeropol's best work, including his poem "Strange Fruit."

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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 cite dedicated to Holiday is about many aspects of her life. I advise you to read Holiday's bio, as it very informative about her career. This website also has a timeline of Holiday's life and career along with quotes, videos, and fan photos of Holiday. This cite is uber helpful!

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This cite includes many links about Simone, including a biography, photos, videos, and fan art. It can give you great facts and details about Simone, especially about her role as civil rights leader.

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To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to play piano at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The owner informed her that not only would she be hired to play but she was also required to sing. Despite her dreams and plans to become the first Black female classical pianist, Eunice needed the income and accepted the job.

Word spread about this new pianist and singer who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice's mother would refer to the practice as "working in the fires of hell", overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname "Nina" meaning "little one" in Spanish and "Simone" after the actress Simone Signoret.

At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard.

One of Nina's stated musical influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of "Porgy" (from "Porgy & Bess") heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut "My Baby Just Cares For Me," previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial in Europe in the 1980's and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone's stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959's The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall.

Sensing that her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. "You Can Have Him," a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina's only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.

As Nina's reputation as an engaging live performer grew, it wasn't long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th, 1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to become Nina's longest-running musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune "Trouble In Mind" as a single gave Nina her third charted record.

Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonderful albums - nine in all - included Nina's version of Bessie Smith's blues classic "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out." Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina's second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label.

Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song "Cotton Eyed Joe," the torch tune "The Other Women," and the Norwegian folk rendition of "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair" - all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her storytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.'s "Brown Baby," which was included on her fifth album for the label, At The Village Gate.

"Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing," writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, "and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children's song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board - by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music." Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina's Colpix recordings cemented her appeal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch-owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her following globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964's In Concert, signaled Nina's undaunted stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspirational leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original "Mississippi Goddam" was banned throughout the South but such a response made no difference in Nina's unyielding commitment to liberty; subsequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like "Four Women" (recorded September 1965) and "Strange Fruit" continued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.

For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less than appealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.

"Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like 'Mississippi Goddam' just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn't like 'protest music' because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with 'Mississippi Goddam,' I realized there was no turning back."

Nina was deeply affected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted playwright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conversations with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transformation of Nina's career.

There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful version "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "I Put A Spell On You" (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; "Ne Me Quitte Pas" tender, poignant, filled with melancholy; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of "See-Line Woman." In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to venture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/manager Andy Stroud had negotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy "Do I Move You?" and the undeniably sexual "I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl" which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stellar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina's most down-home recording session. By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song "Backlash Blues," a song that's lyrics originated from the last poem Langston Hughes submitted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.

Nina's seven years with RCA produced some remarkable recordings, ranging from two songs featured in the Broadway musical "Hair" (combined into a medley, "Ain't Got No - I Got Life," a #2 British hit in 1968) to a Simone-ified version of George Harrison's "Here Comes The Sun," which remained in Nina's repertoire all the way through to her final performance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned by Bob Dylan ("Just Like A Woman"), the brothers Gibb ("To Love Somebody"), and Tina Turner ("Funkier Than A Mosquito's Tweeter") took pride of place alongside Nina's own anthem of empowerment, the classic "To Be Young, Gifted, & Black," a song written in memory of Nina's good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The title of the song coming from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.

After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970's and early 1980's living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was convinced by U.S. jazz veteran Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio album in six years and she recorded it in Belgium with strings and background vocals cut in New York City. With the kind of "clean" sound that was a hallmark of CTI recordings, the Nina Simone album that emerged was simply brilliant. Nina herself would later claimed that she "hated" the record but many fans strongly disagreed. With an eighteen piece string section conducted by David Mathews (known for his arrangements on James Brown's records), the results were spectacular. The title track, Randy Newman's evocative "Baltimore," was an inspired Nina Simone choice. It had a beautifully constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians producer Creed Taylor could find including Nina's guitarist and music director, Al Schackman.

Aside from 1982's Fodder On My Wings that Nina recorded for Carrere Records, two albums she made of the independent VPI label in Hollywood (Nina's Back and Live And Kickin') in 1985, and a 1987 Live At Vine Street set recorded for Verve, Nina Simone did not make another full length album until Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago persuaded her to record again. After much wining and dining, Nina finally signed on the dotted line. Elektra tapped producer Andre Fischer, noted conductor Jeremy Lubbock, and a trio of respected musicians to provide the suitable environment for this highly personal reading of "A Single Woman," which became the centerpiece and title track for Nina Simone's final full length album.

With two marriages behind her in 1993 she settled in Carry-le-Rout, near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She would continue to tour through the 1990's and became very much 'the single woman' she sang about on her last label recording. She rarely traveled without an entourage, but if you were fortunate enough to get to know the woman behind the music you could glimpse the solitary soul that understood the pain of being misunderstood. It was one of Nina's many abilities to comprehend the bittersweet qualities of life and then parlay them into a song that made her such an enduring and fascinating person.

In her autobiography, Nina Simone writes that her function as an artist is "...to make people feel on a deep level. It's difficult to describe because it's not something you can analyze; to get near what it's about you have to play it. And when you've caught it, when you've got the audience hooked, you always know because it's like electricity hanging in the air." It was that very electricity that made her such an important artist to so many and it will be that electricity that continues to turn on new people all over the world for years to come.

Nina Simone died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rout, Bouches-du-Rhone on April 21, 2003. Her funeral service was attended by Miriam Makeba, Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with the message, "You were the greatest and I love you". And the legacy continues...

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Biography - The Official Home of Nina Simone | The High Priestess of Soul

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To survive, she began teaching music to local students. One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to play piano at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The owner informed her that not only would she be hired to play but she was also required to sing.

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The cite provides vital information about the history of lynching. Some important facts to pay attention to are the number of lynchings in the US between 1882-1968. It is also interesting and saddening to realize that the 4,743 lynching were not all the lynchings accounted for.

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White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Learn more about the history of this barbaric practice and how NAACP worked to end lynching.

What are lynchings?

A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.

Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South. Lynchings typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but they involved other extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration. Some victims were burned alive.

A typical lynching involved a criminal accusation, an arrest, and the assembly of a mob, followed by seizure, physical torment, and murder of the victim. Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy. Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards.

"Southern trees bear a 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."

- "Strange Fruit," written by Abel Meeropol and recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday

How Many People were lynched?

From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP. Other accounts, including the Equal Justice Initiative's extensive report on lynching, count slightly different numbers, but it's impossible to know for certain how many lynchings occurred because there was no formal tracking. Many historians believe the true number is underreported.

The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. Lynchings did not occur in every state. There are no recorded lynchings in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren't the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching. Immigrants from Mexico, China, Australia, and other countries were also lynched.

Allegations behind lynchings

White mobs often used dubious criminal accusations to justify lynchings. A common claim used to lynch Black men was perceived sexual transgressions against white women. Charges of rape were routinely fabricated. These allegations were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors.

Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy.

Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime. They were killed for violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed.

How NAACP fought lynching

As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings, a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways. They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses. Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching.

And several important civil rights organizations - including NAACP - emerged during this time to combat racial violence.

NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching. In the July 1916 issue of The Crisis, ﻿editor W.E.B. Du Bois published a photo essay called "The Waco Horror" that featured brutal images of the lynching of Jesse Washington.

Washington was a 17-year-old Black teen lynched in Waco, Texas, by a white mob that accused him of killing Lucy Fryer, a white woman. Du Bois was able to turn postcards of Washington's murder against their creators to energize the anti-lynching movement. The Crisis's circulation grew by 50,000 over the next two years, and we raised $20,000 toward an anti-lynching campaign.

In 1919, NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919, to promote awareness of the scope of lynching. The data in this study offer the gruesome facts by number, year, state, color, sex, and alleged offense.

Among the campaign's other efforts, from 1920 to 1938, we flew a flag from our national headquarters in New York that bore the words "A man was lynched yesterday." The campaign turned the tide of public opinion and even persuaded some southern newspapers to oppose lynching because it was damaging the South's economic prospects.

We also fought hard for anti-lynching legislation. In 1918, Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri first introduced his Anti-Lynching Bill - known as the Dyer Bill - into Congress. NAACP supported passage of the bill from 1919 onward, though it was defeated by a Senate filibuster. NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s.

National lynching rates declined in the 1930s, a trend that NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White attributed to anti-lynching activism, shifts in public opinion, and the Great Migration. The first full year without a recorded lynching occurred in 1952.

The lynching of Emmet Till

The tide may have turned against lynching, but white supremacy and violence continued to terrorize Black communities. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Till's murder and subsequent injustice deeply affected the Black community and galvanized a young generation of Black people to join the Civil Rights Movement.

NAACP declared Till's murder a lynching. Southeast Regional Director Ruby Hurley, Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and Amzie Moore, president of the Bolivar County branch in Mississippi, initiated the homicide investigation and secured witnesses. An all-white jury acquitted the two men accused, who later bragged about their crimes in a magazine article.

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, Emmet Till's mother, decided to hold an open-casket funeral to put her son's brutalized body on display for the world to see. Jet Magazine published photos of his body in the casket, along with the headline "Negro Boy Was Killed for 'Wolf Whistle,'" causing national outrage among Black and white Americans alike, helping to catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.

Modern-day lynchings

You might think of lynchings as a disgraceful and barbaric practice from the past, but they continue to this day. In 1998, James Byrd was chained to a car by three white supremacists and dragged to his death in the streets of Jasper, Texas. In 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia. The three white men charged with killing Arbery claimed he was trespassing.

The videotaped death of George Floyd was a modern-day lynching. Floyd was killed in broad daylight by police officer Derek Chauvin, who held Floyd down with a knee on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Lynchings like these should not be part of American society today just as they should not have been 100 years ago. NAACP will continue to fight back against white supremacy and violence, and demand that people responsible, including law enforcement officers, be held accountable.

We can achieve greater in the fight against structural racism and inequality by honoring Black history all year long.

Learn More

Walter White, Investigator

In 1918, Walter White, NAACP Assistant Secretary, initially joined NAACP as an investigator. His fair skin and straight hair made him effective in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the South. He could "pass" and talk to whites but identified as Black. Through 1927, White would investigate 41 lynchings.

Walter White lynching investigations featured in The Crisis:
The Lynching of Mary Turner, May 19, 1918 - Georgia
The lynching of Mary Turner in Brooks-Lowndes County, Georgia, was one of the lynching investigations by Walter White on behalf of NAACP. Abusive plantation owner, Hampton Smith, was shot and killed. A week-long manhunt resulted in the killing of Mary Turner's husband, Hayes Turner. Mary denied that her husband had been involved in Smith's killing, publicly opposed her husband's murder, and threatened to have members of the mob arrested.

On May 19, 1918, a mob of several hundred brought her to Folsom Bridge, tied Mary's ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil and set her on fire. She was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife. Her unborn child fell to the ground, was stomped and crushed. Mary's body was riddled with hundreds of bullets.

The September 1918 issue of The Crisis carried an account of the lynching.
The Lynching of Jesse McIlherron, February 1918 - Tennessee
The lynching of Jesse McIlherron was another Walter White investigation for NAACP. Jesse was a Black man who resented the slights and insults of white men. He stayed armed and the sheriff feared him. On February 8, 1918, he got into a quarrel with three young white men who insulted him. Threats were made and McIlherron shot and killed two of the men.

McIlherron fled to the home of a Black clergyman who aided him to escape and was later shot and killed by a mob. McIlherron was captured and lynched. McIlherron was chained to a hickory tree, a fire was built, and the torture began. Bars of iron were heated and the mob amused itself by putting them close to McIlherron, at first without touching him. He grasped at a bar and as it was jerked from his grasp, the inside of his hand came with it. Then, the real torturing began, lasting twenty minutes.

During that time, while his flesh was slowly roasting, Jesse never lost nerve. He cursed those who tortured him and almost to the last breath, derided the attempts of the mob to break his spirit.

An account of the lynching of Jesse was carried in the May 1918 issue of The Crisis.

What are lynchings?

A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process. These executions were often carried out by lawless mobs, though police officers did participate, under the pretext of justice.

Lynchings were violent public acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South. Lynchings typically evoke images of Black men and women hanging from trees, but they involved other extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration. Some victims were burned alive.

A typical lynching involved a criminal accusation, an arrest, and the assembly of a mob, followed by seizure, physical torment, and murder of the victim. Lynchings were often public spectacles attended by the white community in celebration of white supremacy. Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards.

"Southern trees bear a 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."

- "Strange Fruit," written by Abel Meeropol and recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday

How Many People were lynched?

From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP. Other accounts, including the Equal Justice Initiative's extensive report on lynching, count slightly different numbers, but it's impossible to know for certain how many lynchings occurred because there was no formal tracking. Many historians believe the true number is underreported.

The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with 581 recorded. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. Lynchings did not occur in every state. There are no recorded lynchings in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren't the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching. Immigrants from Mexico, China, Australia, and other countries were also lynched.

Allegations behind lynchings

White mobs often used dubious criminal accusations to justify lynchings. A common claim used to lynch Black men was perceived sexual transgressions against white women. Charges of rape were routinely fabricated. These allegations were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors.

Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy.

Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime. They were killed for violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed.

How NAACP fought lynching

As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings, a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways. They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses. Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching.

And several important civil rights organizations - including NAACP - emerged during this time to combat racial violence.

NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching. In the July 1916 issue of The Crisis, ﻿editor W.E.B. Du Bois published a photo essay called "The Waco Horror" that featured brutal images of the lynching of Jesse Washington.

Washington was a 17-year-old Black teen lynched in Waco, Texas, by a white mob that accused him of killing Lucy Fryer, a white woman. Du Bois was able to turn postcards of Washington's murder against their creators to energize the anti-lynching movement. The Crisis's circulation grew by 50,000 over the next two years, and we raised $20,000 toward an anti-lynching campaign.

In 1919, NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919, to promote awareness of the scope of lynching. The data in this study offer the gruesome facts by number, year, state, color, sex, and alleged offense.

Among the campaign's other efforts, from 1920 to 1938, we flew a flag from our national headquarters in New York that bore the words "A man was lynched yesterday." The campaign turned the tide of public opinion and even persuaded some southern newspapers to oppose lynching because it was damaging the South's economic prospects.

We also fought hard for anti-lynching legislation. In 1918, Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri first introduced his Anti-Lynching Bill - known as the Dyer Bill - into Congress. NAACP supported passage of the bill from 1919 onward, though it was defeated by a Senate filibuster. NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s.

National lynching rates declined in the 1930s, a trend that NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White attributed to anti-lynching activism, shifts in public opinion, and the Great Migration. The first full year without a recorded lynching occurred in 1952.

The lynching of Emmet Till

The tide may have turned against lynching, but white supremacy and violence continued to terrorize Black communities. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Till's murder and subsequent injustice deeply affected the Black community and galvanized a young generation of Black people to join the Civil Rights Movement.

NAACP declared Till's murder a lynching. Southeast Regional Director Ruby Hurley, Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and Amzie Moore, president of the Bolivar County branch in Mississippi, initiated the homicide investigation and secured witnesses. An all-white jury acquitted the two men accused, who later bragged about their crimes in a magazine article.

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, Emmet Till's mother, decided to hold an open-casket funeral to put her son's brutalized body on display for the world to see. Jet Magazine published photos of his body in the casket, along with the headline "Negro Boy Was Killed for 'Wolf Whistle,'" causing national outrage among Black and white Americans alike, helping to catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.

Modern-day lynchings

You might think of lynchings as a disgraceful and barbaric practice from the past, but they continue to this day. In 1998, James Byrd was chained to a car by three white supremacists and dragged to his death in the streets of Jasper, Texas. In 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia. The three white men charged with killing Arbery claimed he was trespassing.

The videotaped death of George Floyd was a modern-day lynching. Floyd was killed in broad daylight by police officer Derek Chauvin, who held Floyd down with a knee on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Lynchings like these should not be part of American society today just as they should not have been 100 years ago. NAACP will continue to fight back against white supremacy and violence, and demand that people responsible, including law enforcement officers, be held accountable.

What we witnessed with George Floyd was that same public spectacle: someone in broad daylight with onlookers around, being killed at the hands of a law enforcement officer who has just complete disregard for human life and felt he was above the law.
- Derrick Johnson, NAACP President and CEO

Walter White, Investigator

In 1918, Walter White, NAACP Assistant Secretary, initially joined NAACP as an investigator. His fair skin and straight hair made him effective in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the South. He could "pass" and talk to whites but identified as Black. Through 1927, White would investigate 41 lynchings.

Walter White lynching investigations featured in The Crisis:
The Lynching of Mary Turner, May 19, 1918 - Georgia
The lynching of Mary Turner in Brooks-Lowndes County, Georgia, was one of the lynching investigations by Walter White on behalf of NAACP. Abusive plantation owner, Hampton Smith, was shot and killed. A week-long manhunt resulted in the killing of Mary Turner's husband, Hayes Turner. Mary denied that her husband had been involved in Smith's killing, publicly opposed her husband's murder, and threatened to have members of the mob arrested.

On May 19, 1918, a mob of several hundred brought her to Folsom Bridge, tied Mary's ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline and motor oil and set her on fire. She was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife. Her unborn child fell to the ground, was stomped and crushed. Mary's body was riddled with hundreds of bullets.

The September 1918 issue of The Crisis carried an account of the lynching.
The Lynching of Jesse McIlherron, February 1918 - Tennessee
The lynching of Jesse McIlherron was another Walter White investigation for NAACP. Jesse was a Black man who resented the slights and insults of white men. He stayed armed and the sheriff feared him. On February 8, 1918, he got into a quarrel with three young white men who insulted him. Threats were made and McIlherron shot and killed two of the men.

McIlherron fled to the home of a Black clergyman who aided him to escape and was later shot and killed by a mob. McIlherron was captured and lynched. McIlherron was chained to a hickory tree, a fire was built, and the torture began. Bars of iron were heated and the mob amused itself by putting them close to McIlherron, at first without touching him. He grasped at a bar and as it was jerked from his grasp, the inside of his hand came with it. Then, the real torturing began, lasting twenty minutes.

During that time, while his flesh was slowly roasting, Jesse never lost nerve. He cursed those who tortured him and almost to the last breath, derided the attempts of the mob to break his spirit.

An account of the lynching of Jesse was carried in the May 1918 issue of The Crisis.

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White Americans used lynching to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Learn more about the history of this barbaric practice and how NAACP worked to end lynching. A lynching is the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process.

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Other artists who advocated for the Civil Right's movement 

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Other artists who advocated for the Civil Right's movement 

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This article has a list of some of the top songs that advocated for civil rights during and around the Civil Rights movement. Some of the artists included on this list are Bob Dylan, The Impressions, and of course Nina Simone.

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Sadly hate groups of all sorts are still around today. This map displays groups in the US who still practice hate against other cultures. I thought this post is just good information to have in the back of your mind, while artists and activists like Meeropol, Holiday, and Simone have made huge progress for civil rights there is still so much work to be done!

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Subscribe to the https://soundslikehate.org/">Sounds Like Hate podcast to learn more about hate groups like the Proud Boys.​

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This cite displays the true meaning and imagery behind Meeropol's words. Readers, are provided with a line by line analysis of the poem.

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Song writer Abel Meeropol and singer Billie Holliday worked together to produce perhaps one of the most heart wrenching songs ever written. The words to Strange Fruit (where the poem was titled Bitter Fruit) reveal the tragic nature of some of the darkest times in American history. These words describe the bodies of black people who were lynched- apart from the law, with no chance at justice. The images portrayed here are meant to move the reader to his core. These images burn in one's mind so as to leave the reader unable to forget the bitter truth of the history of a nation plagued with racism. The trees in this poem, ironically, symbolize death. In most literature, the tree is the source of life and thus is symbolic of life. In Strange Fruit, the tree was used to bring death to innocent people, and thus it is a symbol of death.

Lines 1-4

In lines 1-4, of the poem, which can be read in full here, the writer creates an image the reader cannot easily forget. Whatever has happened, the speaker has not yet fully revealed, but it has left so much blood that there is blood on the leaves of a tree, and also at the root. These lines are highly important to the rest of the poem because they reveal two things: first, that the blood is from "black bodies" and second, that they are hanging from trees in the South. This creates the setting, and also reveals the event. In the Southern part of the united states, black people have been killed and can be seen hanging from blood spattered trees.

With these lines, the speaker subtly reveals how very unnatural a sight it is to see. To refer to the bodies as "strange fruit" allows the readers to grasp the sense of injustice. Whereas it is natural for fruit to hang from trees, it is inhumane to hang bodies from trees. This line also creates a grotesque image readers will not easily forget. Now, the reader or listener can imagine the bodies swinging from the trees like fruit. The use of the term "southern breeze" and the metaphor of the bodies as "fruit" allows for the juxtaposition of something very beautiful with something entirely grotesque. The reader can imagine fruit swinging in a warm southern breeze, and that is a natural and beautiful image. However, the reality of what has occurred here is one that is sickening, and the reader can understand the true horrific nature of what is being described because of the metaphor of the bodies as "fruit" and the description of the warm breeze.

Lines 5-8

The use of the word "gallant" here is clearly used in satire. While the people who committed these lynching crimes often considered themselves "gallant" for taking the law into their own hands and "protecting" their women and children, these lines reveal what a ridiculous notion that is. Those guilty of such grotesque crimes as to hang innocent people are clearly not gallant, but cowardly. The speaker describes the "bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth" of the victims to paint a picture of how truly horrible a sight it was to see the bodies of the innocent hanging in the trees.

The speaker continues to use the descriptions of the beautiful parts of the south to juxtapose with the atrocities committed there. Magnolias are often associated with the southern states, as they are found there most often. They are certainly sweet-smelling, and after the brutal description of the bodies, this description of the sweet scent of flowers serves to further exemplify the tragedies that have occurred in these beautiful southern states. The speaker then immediately follows the description of the scent of the magnolia's with the description of the scent of "burnin' flesh". This reveals that though the south may have it's share of beauty, the atrocities done by the people blot out the beautiful aspects of the south.

Lines 9-12

One of the most horrendous truths about the history of lynching in America, is that the bodies were often left to rot for days, so that people could not help but look up and notice. They were meant as a warning. People who committed these crimes took the law into their own hands, and often proceeded to hang someone even if that person had been cleared of charges or had only been accused of a crime against a white person. These lines refer to the fact that the bodies were left there long enough to rot, so that everyone would see that and take them as a warning. The speaker ends Strange Fruit with the line, "here is a strange and bitter crop". While the south was known for it's cotton farms along with other crops, the speaker believes the memory of this bitter crop will rise above them all so that the south would be remembered for the murder of innocent people. The use of the word "bitter" in the last line of this poem connects with the previous descriptions of the bodies and leaves the reader to ponder the bitterness of these untimely and unjust deaths at the hands of those who believed they could take the law into their own hands. These words struck the American public, allowing the bitterness of the reality of these occurrences to sink in and sober the American people with the realization of the tragedies that have taken place on their land.

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Analysis of Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol

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Song writer Abel Meeropol and singer Billie Holliday worked together to produce perhaps one of the most heart wrenching songs ever written. The words to Strange Fruit (where the poem was titled Bitter Fruit) reveal the tragic nature of some of the darkest times in American history.

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Attached below is a portion of my own personal analysis of the poem. In my notes I go deeper into the figurative language used within the poem. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions about the meaning of figurative language used or simply the message that Meeropol is conveying. My email is
mmakis@zagmail.gonzaga.edu