Seventy years ago in New York City, a combination of outraged political radicalism and artistic grandeur derived from wounded humanity produced a song that struck to the heart of racism in the US.
"Strange Fruit", made famous by Billie Holiday, still stands as a pointer to how far the US has come in the struggle for human rights and, as the current right-wing backlash against US President Barack Obama shows, how far it has to go.
Two African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were lynched on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. Copies of a photograph of their limp bodies hanging grotesquely, surrounded by grinning racists were sold by the thousands in following years.
It moved Abel Meeropol, a New York school teacher and communist, to write a poem, which he published in the New York Teacher, a union magazine. He set the lyrics to music and began singing it around New York City.
The song achieved its greatness when Billie Holiday introduced it at Harlem's Cafe Society, the first racially integrated night club in the US. She was the child of a father who had been lynched, raped at age 10, forced into prostitution and was eventually to die penniless of a drug overdose,
Holiday bore the stigmata of US racism and her courage in projecting it through her sensitive voice could reduce audiences to tears.
The Cafe Society audience was contemptuous of class and racial discrimination. Black and white militants of various left persuasions rubbed shoulders with veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Holiday's performance of "Strange Fruit" became the closing highlight of each of her performances.
First the stage lights were extinguished and the waiters would stop serving drinks. A respectful hush would descend and a spotlight would suddenly focus on Holiday's face, haloed with her signature gardenia in her hair. With only piano accompaniment she would intone the words:
"Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
Blood at the root
Black bodies 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
The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then 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 the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop "
Holiday wept whenever she sang it, as the song reminded her of her father.
"Strange Fruit" was not the first popular anti-racist protest song. Louis Armstrong's 1929 performance of Andy Razaf's "Black and Blue" and Irving Berlin's "Suppertime" preceded it.
But the song was the first to express revulsion at the favourite form of terror perpetrated against Black Americans.
"I wrote Strange Fruit, because I hate lynching, I hate injustice and I hate people who perpetuate it", Meeropol said.
Holiday's record company, Columbia, refused to record the song, fearing a racist backlash. Eventually she managed to record it with Commodore and it became her biggest selling record.
Meeropol, no stranger to struggle having served in the anti-fascist forces in Spain, was targeted because the song was seen as "anti-patriotic". In 1940, a government investigative committee barred him from teaching because of his political beliefs.
In the 1950s, when McCarthyist hysteria carried Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, Meeropol and his wife, Ann, adopted the Rosenberg's children.
In 1943, Meeropol composed "The House I live In", a hit for Frank Sinatra. The song painted a kind of poetic, liberal vision for the United States, linking the struggle for equal rights between Blacks and whites and the antifascist struggle. This song popped up recently in the context of the Obama presidential campaign.
The US may now be able to cope with Meeropol's gentler lyrics, but the history of "Strange Fruit", which combines, as Angela Davis says "the elements of protest and resistance in the heart of contemporary black music", points to the "Blood at the root" of US capitalism and what is required to end it.
[Barry Healy will edit Cultural Dissent from 2010. Please send reviews or other cultural copy to Barry at cultural.dissent@gmail.com.]