August 7: Strange Fruit

The lynching on this date in 1930 of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two black men accused of murder and rape in Marion, Indiana, was captured by a local photographer, who sold the image in thousands of copies. The photo was seen in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, a New York school teacher, who was haunted by it “for days,” he said, and soon wrote “Strange Fruit,” the song about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous in 1939. Meeropol, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Allan, would later become the adoptive father of the orphaned sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. A third African-American man, James Cameron, who narrowly escaped being lynched in Marion when someone in the mob exonerated him, became the founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, dedicated to the terrible history of lynching in the U.S.

“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.” —Abel Meeropol

Rare live footage of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” (from December 8, 1957 CBS telecast, The Sound of Jazz)