Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit is the first documentary exploring the history and legacy of the Billie Holiday classic. The song's evolution tells a dramatic story of America's radical past using one of the most influential protest songs ever written as its epicenter. The saga brings viewers face-to-face with the terror of lynching even as it spotlights the courage and heroism of those who fought for racial justice when to do so was to risk ostracism and livelihood if white - and death if Black. It examines the history of lynching, and the interplay of race, labor and the left, and popular culture as forces that would give rise to the Civil Rights Movement.
While many people assume Strange Fruit was written by Billie Holiday herself, it actually began as a poem by a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music. Disturbed by a photograph of a lynching, the teacher wrote the stark verse and brooding melody about the horror of lynching under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in 1938. It was first performed at a New York teachers' union rally and was brought to the attention of the manager of Cafe Society, a popular Greenwich Village nightclub, who introduced Billie Holiday to the writer.
Holiday's record label refused to record the song. Holiday persisted and recorded it on a specialty label instead. The song was quickly adopted as the anthem for the anti-lynching movement. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, between 1882 and 1968, mobs lynched 4,743 persons in the United States, over 70 percent of them African-Americans. The haunting lyric and melody made it impossible for white Americans and politicians to ignore any longer the Southern campaign of racist terror.
The documentary includes a moving recitation of the lyric by Abbey Lincoln and a powerful musical performance by Cassandra Wilson. But it's the footage of Lady Day herself performing her bitter and heart-wrenching signature song that stands at the center of the film. Holiday sang it until her death in 1959.
Folk singer Pete Seeger, playwright and critic Amiri Baraka, veteran Civil Rights activist Rev. Dr. C.T. Vivian, and Milt Gabler of Commodore Records, which first recorded Strange Fruit with Billie Holiday in 1939, add their voices to the story.
The schoolteacher who penned Strange Fruit under the pseudonym Lewis Allan was named Abel Meeropol, the same Abe Meeropol who adopted the two sons of "atom bomb spies" Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their 1953 execution. The brothers help relate the tale, illuminating the fevered world of art and politics in which they grew up.
Educators in American History, Black Studies, American Studies, Social History, Jewish American History, Radicalism, Popular Culture, Social Movements, and Ethnomusicology will find Strange Fruit and its multi-level themes a teaching tool. The film concludes with a montage of recent hate crimes indicating that Strange Fruit remains all-too-relevant today.
STRANGE FRUIT
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning 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 a tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
-- Music and lyrics by Lewis Allan, copyright 1940
"A devastating yet inspiring reminder of when racial terror raged through this country and when Blacks and whites worked together to stop it. This film can help strengthen this same struggle in our own era."
Morris Dees, Co-Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center
"Straightforward yet nuanced, Strange Fruit tells a story that must be told. We know the importance of Billie Holiday's recording. But this indispensable video fills in the history binding the struggle against lynching and for Black rights with a wealth of common history of African Americans, Jewish Americans, and the American Left. We need to learn this chapter in our past."
Nell Irvin Painter, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
"Part of our history, part of our heritage. Strange Fruit captures with vivid imagery the history of a song that created immediate controversy as a grim reminder of a necessarily painful and ugly chapter in American history. The song retains its force, because the issues it raises about the legacy of racial terrorism in American society still resonate. Except for Strange Fruit, none of the victims were ever memorialized, their stories & legacies are all but forgotten. This is a fascinating story about a song that compelled its audiences to confront the past in ways that could be genuinely disturbing. It is no less disturbing today."
Leon F. Litwack, A.F. & May T. Morrison Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
"This film is an invaluable illumination of how a singer and a song helped to permanently awaken Americans to a horrifying part of our past that still affects the present. I knew Billie Holiday and how deeply Strange Fruit affected her -- as this film vividly shows."
Nat Hentoff, Village Voice
"An excellent documentary...A thoughtful discussion prompter."
Booklist
"For all audiences, this reflection on a unique song brilliantly captures the relationship between social art and our real lives and history."
Library Journal
Strange Fruit
Awards
2004 American Library Association Notable Video Award
Biography
An independent NY filmmaker, producer, director, and editor Joel Katz's filmreel includes His Corporation with a Movie Camera (1992), and Dear Carry (1997). Katz also serves as an associate professor of Media Arts at New Jersey City University and is on the board of directors of NY's Third World Newsreel, a NY-based advocacy and distribution organization for filmmakers of color.
For Screenings on 35mm Film, please contact the Producer, Joel Katz.
Links
For more information about Strange Fruit visit www.pbs.org.
The Equal Justice Institute has released a groundbreaking new report Lynching in America Confronting the Racial Legacy of Racial Terrorism which documents at least 700 more lynchings of Black people than previously reported.
Ways to Watch
Educational Streaming
Recommended for Colleges, Universities, Government Agencies, Hospitals and Corporations
Community Screening
Short-term use for small groups, organizations, or high school classes (where no admission is charged)
Home Viewing
48-hour, personal rental for in-home use only, restrictions apply