Strange Fruit: International Jazz Day

 Strange Fruit
 By Abel Meeropol 
Pen Name Lewis Allan

Southern trees bear 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.

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.

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.

I was reflecting on how far expanded and removed International Jazz Day is from the roots of Jazz and its role in Black culture. My mind has been on one song and particularly all the women of color who sang it in protest of acts of violence against our people. Jazz day keeps colliding with my thoughts about the Equal Justice Initiative's  Lynching in America project and the memorial museum dedicated to its victims. Strange Fruit seems to whisper through the entire mental narrative. The pain is both a personal and a collective one.

When you understand the poem, the memorial's purpose, and the historical importance of this pain being communicated to an entire nation through jazz, you might begin to feel this deep feeling of what it means when we experience continued devastating harm because of our race. Maybe for a moment in the agony of a wailed musical note, you may all feel it.

Certainly, Abel Meeropol did.

Everyone assumed poet Lewis Allan was the pen name of an African American teacher but Abel Meeropol was, in fact, a Jewish educator from the Bronx. Already very concerned about racism in America, he saw a photograph of a lynching and overcome with shock and grief, wrote this poem. He later set  Strange Fruit to music and eventually someone, I believe a  nightclub owner, gave it to Billie Holliday and she sang it.

Opposing the wrongs that any nation continues to do does not require anti-Semitism or racism.

I am trying, as much as I can, to discuss the pivotal role individuals of all races and faiths and sexual orientations had in Black civil rights history because it was the combination of people and moments like these that have brought us any progress in stemming the tide of hatred in America. As the hidden pestilence of intolerance spews to the surface again, we cannot lose sight of the truth that we can only create permanent positive change if we remember we got this far together. We will either win because we fought back injustice together or lose because we squabbled with one another. 

For my children and their children's sakes, I hope we win.

Happy International Jazz Day. Here is my favorite version of Strange Fruit, sung by Nina Simone: