APPENDIX 9
THE SONG OF THE CENTURY
In 1999, Time magazine named the song “Strange Fruit” to be the Song of the Century. “Strange Fruit” is a tragic song famously performed by Billie Holiday, one of America’s most star crossed singers. The devastating image of “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” is the mournful heart of this anti-racism song. The lyrics were written by Abel Meeropol, an English teacher from the Bronx who in 1937 ran across a photograph of a lynching that both disturbed and inspired him. The resulting poem became the basis of the song two years later. Holiday’s live version of “Strange Fruit,” with only a piano backing her, is even more raw and heartfelt than the recording. The listener can feel her anguish, can feel her sadness, can feel her anger. As sung by Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” became a song that is complicated in a unique way — such beautiful humanity expressing soulful anguish over a grossly inhuman act.
The shocking symbolism of “Strange Fruit” made it a song that no one who heard it could forget. This jarring song about the horrors of lynching was not only Holiday’s biggest hit, it also would become one of the most influential protest songs of the 20th Century – continuing to speak to us about long term consequences of racial violence even today. The story of the conception of “Strange Fruit” has entered legend. Originally a poem called “Bitter Fruit,” it was written by the Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen in response to lynching. Although Abel Meeropol never personally witnessed a lynching, he wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing Lawrence Beitler’s distressing photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. Beitler’s photographs like the song they would inspire seared these graphic images of the inhumanity of lynching into public consciousness.
Soon after publication of “Bitter Fruit”, Meeropol set the song to music. It was performed at union meetings and even at Madison Square Garden by the jazz singer Laura Duncan. It was there that Robert Gordon, the new floor manager at the jazz club Café Society, supposedly first heard “Strange Fruit” in 1938. He mentioned it to Barney Josephson, the club’s founder, and Meeropol was invited to play it for Holiday.
After listening to the song, Holiday began the process of molding it. Holiday, her accompanist Sonny White and arranger Danny Mendelsohn, worked solidly for three weeks before debuting the revamped “Strange Fruit” at Café Society. In his 2001 book Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, the writer David Margolick suggests the club, with its policy of complete integration, was “probably the only place in America where Strange Fruit could have been sung and savoured”. To ensure that it was indeed savoured, Holiday and Josephson created specific conditions for the performances. It would be the last song in the set, there would be absolute silence, no bar service and the lights would be dimmed save for a single spotlight on Holiday’s face. As Josephson said, “People had to remember Strange Fruit, get their insides burned with it.”
What happened on the first night Holiday performed “Strange Fruit” at Café Society foreshadowed the response it would get when released as a record. “The first time I sang it I thought it was a mistake … there wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping,” said Holiday in her autobiography. To hear Holiday sing of “the sudden smell of burning flesh” minutes after her jazz ballads was disquieting.
As the song became a feature of her sets, Holiday witnessed a range of reactions, from tears to walkouts and racist hecklers. Radio stations in the United States and abroad blacklisted it and Holiday’s label, Columbia Records, refused to record it. When she toured the song, some proprietors tried discouraging her from singing it for fear of alienating or angering their patrons. It was not just the song’s political nature that startled and moved listeners but the way Holiday performed it, a manner often described as haunting.
While the symbolism of “Strange Fruit” is unquestioned, what has escaped many is that the title of the song is arguably the accurate name for not just the song but for other consequences that transpired from the events that occurred some ninety years ago in Marion, Indiana.
On August 7, 1930, a large white mob used tear gas, crowbars, and hammers to break into the Grant County Jail in Marion, Indiana, to seize and lynch three young black men who had been accused of murder and assault. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19 years old, were severely beaten and hanged, while the third young man, 16-year-old James Cameron, was badly beaten but not killed. Photographs of the brutal lynching, taken by a local studio photographer named Lawrence Beitler, were shared widely. The photos featured clear images of the crowd posing beneath the hanging corpses. Thousands of copies of these photographs were purchased over the next ten days. Despite clearly showing the faces of those who participated in the hanging, no one was ever prosecuted or convicted. It was these haunting images which would inspire writer Abel Meeropol to compose the poem that later became the song "Strange Fruit".
However, one of the more unusual aspects of this lynching was that there was a survivor … the only known record of anyone having survived a lynching. James Cameron survived and his life story is also a “strange fruit” that came about from this inhuman act.
On the night of August 6, 1930, when Cameron was 16 years old, he went out with two older teenage African-American friends, Thomas Shipp (age 18) and Abram Smith (age 19). A white couple, Claude Deeter (age 23) and Mary Ball, was parked in a lovers’ lane when the trio came upon them and one of the group suggested robbing the couple. Later, Shipp and Smith killed Deeter. Deeter's girlfriend, Mary Ball, said she had been raped. Cameron said he ran away before Deeter was killed. The three youths were caught quickly, arrested, and charged the same night with robbery, murder and rape. (The rape charge was later dropped, as Ball retracted it.)
A lynch mob broke into the jail where Cameron and his two friends were being held. According to Cameron's account, a lynch mob gathered at the Grant County Courthouse Square and took all three youths from the jail. The older two, Shipp and Smith, were killed first. Shipp was taken out and beaten, and hanged from the bars of his jail window. Smith was dead from the beating he received from the mob. The mob then hanged both of the boys from a tree in the square.
Then came Cameron's turn.
In his autobiography, Cameron recalled the raw, inhuman sound of the mob, which included members of the local Ku Klux Klan. He once said he still could remember the faces of the 2,000 white people who gathered there, some with their children, some eating. He prayed for his life.
Cameron was beaten and a noose was put around his neck. Then, as the noose grew tighter around his neck, the voice of an unidentified woman called out: "Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or shooting of anybody." Frank Faunce, a local sports hero and football All-American from Indiana University, also intervened and removed the noose from Cameron's neck, saying he deserved a fair trial. Faunce then escorted the young man back to the jail. Cameron's neck was long scarred from the rope.
Flossie Bailey, a local NAACP official, and the State Attorney General worked to gain indictments against leaders of the mob in the lynchings but were unsuccessful. No one was ever charged in the murders of Shipp and Smith, nor for the assault on Cameron.
Cameron was convicted at a trial in 1931 as an accessory before the fact to the murder of Deeter, and served four years of his sentence in a state prison. After he was paroled, he moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he worked at Stroh Brewery Company and attended Wayne State University. (In 1991, Cameron was pardoned by the State of Indiana.)
Cameron studied at Wayne State University to become a boiler engineer and worked, off and on, in that field until he was 65. At the same time, he continued to study lynchings, race, and civil rights in America and trying to teach others.
Because of his personal experience, Cameron dedicated his life to promoting civil rights, racial unity, and equality. While he worked in a variety of jobs in Indiana during the 1940s, he founded three chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This was a period when the Ku Klux Klan was still active in the Midwest, although its numbers had decreased since its peak in the 1920s.
Cameron established and became the first president of the NAACP Madison County chapter in Anderson, Indiana. He also served as the Indiana State Director of Civil Liberties from 1942 to 1950. In this capacity, Cameron reported to Governor of Indiana Henry Schricker on violations of the "equal accommodations" laws designed to end segregation. During his eight-year tenure, Cameron investigated more than 25 incidents of civil rights infractions. He faced violence and death threats because of his work.
The emotional toll of threats led Cameron to search for a safer home for his wife and five children. Planning to move to Canada, they decided on Milwaukee when he found work there. In Milwaukee, Cameron continued his work in civil rights by assisting in protests to end segregated housing in the city. He also participated in both marches on Washington in the 1960s, the first with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the second with King's widow, Coretta, and with Jesse Jackson.
Cameron studied history on his own and lectured on the African-American experience. From 1955 to 1989, he published hundreds of articles and booklets detailing civil rights and occurrences of racial injustices, including "What is Equality in American Life?"; "The Lingering Problem of Reconstruction in American Life: Black Suffrage"; and "The Second Civil Rights Bill". In 1982, he published his memoir, A Time of Terror: A Survivor's Story.
Cameron worked in a brewery for a few years and at Milprint packaging company awhile. He also went to a trade school to become a boiler engineer. He worked at one of the biggest malls in Milwaukee, Mayfair Shopping Center, until age 65. He also owned a rug-cleaning business, which afforded him the chance to travel.
After being inspired by a visit with his wife to the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel, Cameron founded America's Black Holocaust Museum in 1988. He used material from his collections to document the struggles of African Americans in the United States, from slavery through lynchings, and the 20th-century civil rights movement. When he first started collecting materials about slavery, he kept the materials in his basement. Working with others to build support for the museum, he was aided by philanthropist Daniel Bader.
America’s Black Holocaust Museum started as a grassroots effort and became one of the largest African-American museums in the country. In 2008, the museum closed because of financial problems. It reopened on Cameron's birthday, February 25, 2012, as a virtual museum.
James Cameron died on June 11, 2006, at the age of 92, after a long and productive life … a life that was a product … a “strange fruit” of the lynching that occurred on August 7, 1930. In many ways, James Cameron’s life was a song … a Song of the Century that was.
Another “strange fruit” that can be attributed to the lynching that occurred on August 7, 1930, is the life of the songwriter, Abel Meeropol.
Abel Meeropol was born in 1903 to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, New York City. Meeropol graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1921. Meeropol earned a bachelor of arts degree from City College of New York, and a master of arts degree from Harvard. He taught English at DeWitt Clinton High School for 17 years. During his tenure, Meeropol taught the notable author and racial justice advocate, James Baldwin.
Meeropol wrote the anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit" (1937), which was first published as "Bitter Fruit" in a Teachers Union publication. He later set it to music. The song was recorded and performed by Billie Holiday and Nina Simone among other artists. Holiday claimed in the book Lady Sings the Blues that she co-wrote the music to the song with Meeropol and Sonny White.
Meeropol wrote numerous poems and songs, including the Frank Sinatra and Josh White hit "The House I Live In." He also wrote the libretto of Robert Kurka's opera The Good Soldier Svejk (1957), which was premiered in 1958 by the New York City Opera.
The songs "Strange Fruit" and "The House I Live In," along with the Peggy Lee hit "Apples, Peaches and Cherries," provided most of the royalty income for the Meeropol family.
Meeropol was a communist and sympathetic to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, leaving behind two sons, Michael and Robert. Not long after the execution, Michael and Robert were introduced to Meeropol and his wife, Anne, at a Christmas party held at the house of W. E. B. DuBois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A few weeks later, the boys were living with the Meeropols. In due time, Abel and Anne adopted the Rosenbergs' two sons, Michael and Robert, and lovingly raised them as their own. Michael and Robert, in tribute to their soft-hearted father, took the surname Meeropol.
Abel Meeropol died on October 29, 1986, at the Jewish Nursing Home in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. He had many significant legacies. Indeed, his life was truly a song, … a song which in itself could be described as the “Song of the Century.”
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