Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" Invoked By CNN's Don Lemon To School Trump On "Lynching"

When Donald Trump tweeted yesterday that the impeachment inquiry against him was similar to "lynching", many critics were swift to point out that it was nothing like lynching at all. Lynching was mob justice, often against the falsely accused, often against Black men... Thousands of innocents were killed in the same of "justice", merely because of their race.

Don Lemon on CNN brilliantly invoked Billie Holiday's classic song about lynching, "Strange Fruit" to school Trump about what lynching really means:

[Verse 1]
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

[Verse 2]
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

[Verse 3]
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop


It is said that when Holiday performed the song (always her last) at Cafe Society in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, waiters would stop serving drinks and everyone would listen in pin-drop silence (see Frank O'Hara's tribute to Holiday below).

"Strange Fruit" was written as a poem in 1937 by Abel Meeropol and recorded as a song by Holiday in 1939. It became her signature song.

Meeropol was an activist and one-time Communist Party member who adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after they were executed in 1953. Michael and Robert took the surname Meeropol after their adoption.

 

The Day Lady Died

BY FRANK O'HARA

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                        I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing