Strange Fruit: Learning the Cold Hard Truth From Billie Holiday

This rendition of "Strange Fruit" is performed by the great African American jazz singer Billie Holiday.

It has been about 15 years since I first heard the song, and it was a life changing moment for me.

The song was originally an anti-lynching poem written by Jewish writer Abel Meeropol, the original title was Bitter Fruit.

Meeropol wrote the poem after seeing this horrific photo of a 1930 lynching in Marion Indiana.

When I was in my early 20's, long before I had enough years behind me, I had an ignorant viewpoint that many people have in America: I did not have the knowledge of the first hand accounts of Jim Crow, or even modern day racism for that matter.

I couldn't grasp the magnitude of it all, the centuries of degradation? It has only been 50 years since the civil rights act was passed, it's unreasonable to expect those scars to have healed in only half of a century.

When you understand, that if things are better today, the residual effects of Jim Crow remain to this very day. Racism hides behind many guises, and even if you personally don't harbor those views, being able to accept it's a real cloud hanging over the African American community might allow you to look at it differently.

It was hard, maybe impossible to understand what whites only water fountains meant to a people, when I or my family never experienced that. I didn't understand how institutional racism, that treats it's victims as if they are sub-human, leaves deep scars that perhaps never heal.

While I will never completely understand it, "Strange Fruit" was the first time I felt at my core what that feeling might be for African Americans... that feeling of being alone in the world, being lost in a place made for you, not by you.

This feeling of being lost, combined with Jim Crow racism, must create a desperate lonely feeling inside for many African Americans. Perhaps recognizing this truth can allow you to just get a little sense of what it was, and at the very least be aware of it. At least you can't say you weren't told about it.

*Intro photo: Used with permission, via Amazon.com*

Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday April 20, 1939

What can I do? What can you do?

"Strange Fruit" opened a door for me, a new way to look at not just my own life, but the whole world in general. I began searching out black history, not just the civil rights era, but also art and music.

I was drawn naturally to jazz and blues music, and because of that, I wanted to learn about those people who made the music.

As I have read biographies about great African-Americans like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, and those Civil Rights Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. I was for the first time able to get a sense of what African Americans went through, and possibly find that empathy that so many people lack.

When I think about that infamous Birdland incident involving Miles Davis, being beaten outside the nightclub, bloodied just because he didn't move along fast enough to suit a racist cop. Davis at that time, may have been the most famous jazz artist in the world, but that title meant very little then because he was a famous"black" artist.

The great Miles Davis couldn't even smoke a cigarette outside the club where he was playing that very night. I began to really get angry inside about it. I thought, here I am angry about a photo of Miles Davis, imagine how the entire culture feels living through such things that are still so fresh in the mind?

No matter what the reasons, that's irrelevant, they are the feelings and emotions human beings who view life trough the prism racism.

The Moral of this story:

I know I won't change this world much in the long run, but empathy doesn't cost much, perhaps just eating a slice of humble pie once in a while can allow you at the very least to understand and accept some basic truths?

There is courage in challenging your beliefs, test them against other viewpoints, and you just might find in the end, that you had it wrong, or at least it isn't as cut and dried as you thought it was.