Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday, Café Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights,, By David Margolick, Running Press, Philadelphia, Pa.

What made a white, Jewish Communist write a song exposing the horrors of lynching, a song called by the late jazz writer, Leonard Feather, "the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism"?

Meeropol, who adopted the orphaned Rosenberg children, said " I wrote ‘Strange Fruit’ because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it."

David Margolick, author of Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday, Café Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, does the public an important service by bringing to light the origins of this song. Meeropol is best known for the lyrics to "The House I Live In," co-written by Earl Robinson and sung by Frank Sinatra.

Many myths and stories surround "Strange Fruit" and its authorship. One of the stories has to do with Billie Holiday, herself, claiming authorship in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues. Margolick does a good job presenting the complexities of Holiday as an artist and her struggles as a Black woman. Through interviews and comments from intellectuals, writers, jazz lovers, musicians, celebrities, students, and historians you see the evolution of the song and how Holiday made it her own.

Meeropol, whose pen name is Lewis Allan, came across in a 1930 civil rights magazine a photograph of a ghastly lynching that haunted him. Although pictures often speak louder than words, Meeropol, a New York City high school teacher and part-time poet and composer, was moved to write a poem about that scene.

And so "Strange Fruit" was born, originally published in the left and communist cultural journal New Masses in 1936 as "Bitter Fruit."

Holiday was not the first to sing "Strange Fruit." The poem was set to music by Meeropol and sung by his wife at Communist Party and other progressive meetings. Notable singers in the left at that time, Josh White and Laura Duncan, also performed "Strange Fruit."

But not until Meeropol, gave the song to Holiday did the song reach its full impact. Holiday was a regular performer at Café Society, a nightclub with a decidedly anti-rich and progressive outlook reflective of the growing left upsurge of the time. Café Society was one of the first and only integrated nightclubs, serving Black, as well as white, customers.

Myths surround the origins of "Strange Fruit" as well as swirling around Holiday herself. Ferociously attacked in the mainstream press and by many record executives and promoters for singing such a political song, Holiday’s life was a parallel to the brutal racist atmosphere that made lynching conceivable.

Journalist and author Vernon Jarrett wrote "She impressed me as someone who had also been wronged, as if she’d been lynched herself in some fashion or another. There was a sense of resignation, as if ‘these people are going to have power for a long time and I can’t do a damn thing about it except put it in a song’ ... To me, that was part of the whole lynch syndrome, the lynching of the body and the spirit put together. That’s the way her face looked when she sang that."

Tony Bennett said, "When you listen to her, it’s almost like an audio tape of her autobiography. She didn’t sing anything unless she had lived it."

Holiday faced constant racist humiliation and degradation, including the questioning of whether she "understood" the song.

Margolick, on a whole, portrays Holiday as a complicated, talented and courageous American artist. He quotes the great Black American drummer, Max Roach, who said that "when she recorded it, it was more than revolutionary, she made a statement that we all felt as Black folks. No one was speaking out. She became one of the fighters, this beautiful lady who could sing and make you feel things. She became a voice of Black people and they loved this woman."

This book is a history of the Café Society as well, the club at which Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit." The book gives you an inkling about the breadth of the left at the time. It was a time when the Communist Party was welcomed and accepted in the American political landscape. Where artists like Holiday performed at rallies for Ben Davis, the Communist councilman from Harlem. The book also gives an idea about the impact of the McCarthy-era on Communists and the left and how it chilled political expression and creativity. The book opens the doors to the times but does not fully explore them.

It also doesn’t explore, and maybe it shouldn’t, the role of a Communist in creating such a powerful indictment of racism. Maybe the author leaves this to others to explore. It does open the door to Black and white unity in the fight against racism.

The book traces the song and the influence it had on American history, as well as the world, and why, as Time magazine called it, "The best song of the century."

– Amina Baraka and Terrie Albano