Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees

This ominous lyric portrays black lynching victims as fruits that hang from a tree before rotting and decomposing.

After over 120 years of trying, warriors for human rights finally got the U.S. government to establish an anti-lynching bill. Congress passed, and President Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law last week.

I think of 14-year-old Emmett Till. I was in Mississippi the summer he was brutally lynched.

And I keep hearing a song – the great Billie Holiday singing her signature song, “Strange Fruit.”

And I see Abel Meeropol, a Jewish musician and songwriter, being so repulsed upon seeing a picture of the bodies of lynched black men hanging from trees after torture and mutilation that he sits and writes this haunting song, Strange Fruit, the first verse of which starts this article.

Meeropol wrote the song in 1937, and Holiday recorded and began singing it in 1939. Although she did not enjoy singing the song, she felt she had to — for its meaning and impact.

The song quickly became a protest song that she continued to sing despite grave threats from people who wanted her not to sing the song.

That she continued performing the song for the next and final 20 years of her life, disregarding the personal stakes at hand, landed her in prison, banned her from select nightclubs, and played a large part in her untimely passing in 1959.

Billie did her part, and many people have done their part through the years.

America must acknowledge and deal with its past or never move forward

Ida B. Wells petitioned seven U.S. Presidents to come out against lynching, to no avail.

I see the NAACP run an American flag out the window every time they knew another black person had been lynched. But FDR did not budge.

I see Rosa Parks invoking the name of Emmett Till to explain her actions that started the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

And more recently, I see Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Institute (EJI) establishing a monument at their Peace and Justice Memorial Center in Montgomery, Alabama, to the nearly 6,500 black men and women lynched since 1865.

Stevenson is one of my heroes because he tremendously argues my soapbox—America must acknowledge and deal with this past or never move forward.

“This marks a new day in our country’s continuing struggle to provide equal justice to all citizens,” said EJI Director Bryan Stevenson, whose research President Biden cited in his remarks at the bill signing.

Stevenson continued in a statement from EJI.

“Lynching and racial terror undermined enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, reinforcing disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, and racial hierarchy… 

“Black people like Anthony Crawford were lynched just for being successful businessmen. This is why we must still create economic programs today to help communities of color that have yet to recover from decades of [lynching assisted oppression]…

“Octavius Catto was lynched in 1871 because he voted and encouraged others to register to vote in Philadelphia. This is why ensuring voting rights is such a critical priority…

“Mary Turner was lynched because she wanted law enforcement to hold the people who lynched her husband to be held accountable.

“Black veterans were prime targets of lynching because they proudly and honorably served this country. However, they returned home and were often attacked because they represented a threat to racial segregation…

“Our nation failed, our courts failed, and Congress failed to intervene when the rule of law was mocked by violent mobs that pulled people out of jails to brutally torture and lynch them on the courthouse lawn…”

Finally, an acknowledgment of this Strange Fruit.