Strange and Familiar Fruit: Remembering, Resisting, and Refusing to Forget

Say Something Real

By Michelle Bryant

Michelle Bryant

There are songs that haunt the American soul, but none more so than “Strange Fruit.” First made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939, its mournful melody and searing lyrics hold a mirror to the ugliest chapters of our nation’s past. Lynching.

Recently, I heard a pastor say, “You can’t fix what you won’t face.” America has failed to reconcile the hate that fueled these acts. Lynchings of the past are mirrored today and appear in modern headlines. It was through the work of journalists like Ida B. Wells that the horrific descriptions of lynchings were laid bare. Black media sounded the alarm then, and we need to sound it now.

“Strange Fruit” began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from New York. Moved by a 1930 p