One of the primary attempts to silence her came from a man named Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and an extreme racist, even for the 1930s. In the end, Billie Holiday’s insistence on performing “Strange Fruit” may have been responsible for her demise. Racism, combined with a popular desire to limit federal power over local concerns,kept people in the North from making any successful moves to end lynchings in the South. Though many people knew that lynchings of African-Americans in the South were common, there was resistance to ending the practice among Southern whites. The song’s lyrics were shocking to some members of Holiday’s mostly white audiences: 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 treesĪt times, her performance of the song was met with fierce pushback. Jazz writer Leonard Feather referred to the song as “the first significant protest in words and music, the first significant cry against racism.” “Lady Day,” as Holiday was called by many at the time, began to work the song into her repertoire sixteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The song was so poignant for Holiday that she laid down some rules when she sang it at her gigs: She would close the evening with the song the waiters would stop service when she began and the room would be in total darkness except for a spotlight on her face. “But I have to keep singing it, not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died, the things that killed him are still happening in the South.” “It reminds me of how Pop died,” she wrote in her autobiography.
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