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morning. [ applause ] i have the privilege of serving as director of growth -- speaking for the president of hunter college, i want to welcome you to this historic place for this amazing convening we are having. hello to the c-span audience which will also be privileged to see the event we have to bring to you this morning. an extraordinary one, not only a chance to mark black history month, not only an opportunity to honor the unsurpassable billie holiday but to do so in the longtime home of her favorite american president, franklin d roosevelt. we have evidence of that you may hear today. i have not seen his book but i

will find the location and the brand-new book by our convener, paul alexander, is really what brings us together today. i will hold it up. his extraordinary new account of the final year of billie holiday . doesn't that look like an album cover when we were younger? brilliant concept, i love it. welcome to michael, and my friend, david. great to have you here. as of last night, we had more than 1200 people register in person as well. so as of last night we had more than 1,200 people registered either in person or online for this event. [ applause ]

weave never we've never had a response quite like this. it's a tribute to you, as well. many of you are on zoom, many hundreds of you are on zoom, many of you may be in overflow rooms during the evening, but please, be patient. stay where you are, stay tuned because the conversation, the commentary and the performances will be truly amazing. again, billie really liked fdr and maybe because fdr was the first president to actually embrace contemporary music. yes, his favorite singer may have been kate smith, at least that's what he told kate smith and the king of england during a visit to hyde park, but maybe he had kind of cooler taste when he was staying here in town because he was -- and he ran his presidential campaign from here.

fdr was the first presidential candidate to choose his official campaign song from a modern source. happy days are here again was actually from a 1930 musical called chasing rainbows. i looked in vain for the ultimate keck that the composer and lyricist might have produced a song that billie holiday sang, i didn't succeed there, but i did try and it's also notable that during the new deal which was planned upstairs in fdr's library during the presidential trance igs of 1932-33, this small house, in fact, one small room served as the entire transition headquarters for that momentous four-month period inaugurations were in march. during that time, the administration that was incoming conceived the idea of a relief program that not only constructed buildings like one

of hunter college's buildings and not only put farm and factory workers back on the job, but also for the first time provided federal support to writers, artists and yes, musicians. so those are the connections, and speaking of writers, i do want again to acknowledge paul alexander who is a treasured teacher here at hunter and has -- this is his second produced symposium for roosevelt house. last year he presented a symposium on silvia plath which was enormously well received and if anyone is curious about those sessions they are available perpetually on the roosevelt house website. so be assured you will be able to pick up a copy of bitter crop upstairs during the breaks and also books by our special guest this morning. so, paul, thank you for

everything you did to bring us here, and i invite you to please, take it away. ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome and thank paul alexander. [ applause ] >> welcome, everyone, to the billie holiday symposium at hunter college. as harold said, i'm the author of this new book, and -- first of all, this picture up here is from billie when she was recording -- it was the recording session where she recorded "strange love." she may have been singing it at that point. as harold said, fdr was her favorite president and eleanor was also friends with billie as were the children who often went to see her at cafe society when she was playing downtown in '39 and '41. she had a strong connection with

roosevelt which makes a lot of sense since we're having this symposium for her here today. in terms of bitter crop, my book is different from a lot of what has been said and written about billie in the past because that often portrays her as a victim or as a failure, and i see her quite differently, and depict her quite differently in my book. i see her for what she was. she was a powerful woman who overcame the hardships of her life to create a body of work that made her a preeminent jazz singer and ultimately an american icon so that's my take on billie holiday, and the other depictions of her that we've seen through the years are, you know, they're valid, i suppose, from that point of view, but i have a quite different point of view of her and that's what will

be reflectioned ed in my book a reflected in the symposium today. obviously, strange is probably her most famous song and she recorded it in 1939, and i wanted to talk a little bit about the beginning about the song and how it came about, and by doing that i also get to talk about an oddity of billie's and that was her unique ability to fabricate -- periods from her life. episodes from her life or at least enhance them and so she did that with "strange fruit." in her autobiography, billie sings the blues which came out in 1956 and still available today. bitter crop, this is how i describe that. i read the following, in her autobiography billie describes

how the song "strange fruit" came about, this is her from her book. the term was appointed by lewis allen. i first met him and when he showed me the poem i dug it right off. allen suggested that sonny white, who had been my accomplice, and i turned it into music, so the three of us got together and did the job in three weeks and i also got a wonderful assist from danny mendelson, another writer who had done arrangements for me. he helped me with arranging the song and rehearsing it patiently was the end of her quote, and that may have been provided -- and may have provided another one for audience to relish, but none of the facts were true. none of them. [ laughter ] the creator of the song, as michael wells knows is abel

mirapo who was born in 1983 and raised in a russian-jewish family in manhattan and went to college and he was a gifted poet and a class genius and a masters in arts in english literature from harvard university. an english teacher from dewitt in the bronx and he was a member of the communist party having joined around 1932. he contributed to the young xhungist league, the theater arts committee and the lincoln brigade which was why he chose to publish under the pseudonym lewis allen. an homage to the stillborn son who would have been given that name and he did not wish his leftist politics to interfere with his ability to earn a living. still, he was sympathetic to the party's ocacy for racial equality particularly supporting

the anti-lynching legislation. throughout the jim crow era, lynching poseded a danger to blacks especially in the south. in the 1930s there was a concerted effort to pass legislation in the u.s. congress to outlaw the practice. mirapo saw this as an opportunity to contribute to the political debate when he ran across a picture in a civil rights magazine and this is a quote from mirapo, way back in the early '30s, he said, i saw a photograph of a lynching published in a magazine devoted to the exposure and elimination of racial injustice. it was a shocking photograph and haunted me for days, end quote. the picture of two black teenagers thomas ship and abraham smith lynched in marion, indiana, in 1930 was taken by lawrence bitler. that's the end of my quote from

the book. now let me point out that the federal anti-lynching legislation would not be passed for almost one full century until it was finally signed into law by president joe biden, and now recording in 1939 by abler's commodore records here is the original version of "strange fruit." ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ southern trees, they're a strange fruit ♪ ♪ blood on the leaves ♪ and blood at the root ♪ ♪ black bodies swinging in the

southern breeze ♪ ♪ strange fruit hanging from the popular ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪♪ ♪ the gallant south ♪ ♪ the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth ♪ ♪ magnolia, sweet and fresh ♪ ♪ then the sudden smell of burning flesh ♪ ♪ here is a fruit for the crows to pluck ♪

♪ for the, for the winter ♪ ♪ for the sun to, ♪♪ ♪ here is a strange fruit ♪ ♪♪ ♪ >> and now to introduce the guest for the morning panel, i'd like to introduce the chairman of the student committee who helps run the symposium, julie rosenberg. [ applause ]

>> good morning, everyone. mark o'meara po is an economist, educator and author. he was professor of economics and department chair. after his retirement there he taught for four years at john j. college of criminal justice in the city of new york. among his books is "surrender. how the clinton administration completed the reagan revolution." after the death of his parents he and his brother robert were adopted by abel marapol. he's written about his biological parents and the prison correspondence and with his brother authored, we are your sons. in addition, mirapol has lectured extensively about "strange fruit" as an anthem, the story of a protest song. to speak about abel mirapol and

the enduring power of strange fruit, please welcome michael mirapol. [ applause ] >> first of all, i want to thank harold and paul for including me on this fabulous, distinguished panel. it is wonderful to be sitting next to david and it is an absolute honor to share the stage with professor jefferson. i met my father when i was 10 years old, christmas eve 1953. my brother and i began living with dad and mom soon after and during the next seven years before i went away to college, i had the good fortune to live an extraordinary and, yes, privileged life. robbie and i won the lottery with our adoptive parents and their extended family and during those years and subsequent years as knowa adult, from time to time, i would learn things about dad's life that led me to the inescapable conclusion that he

was the most extraordinary human being. intelligent, funny, kind, loving, talented, a true mensch. i have learned more about him from the musicologist nancy baker and filmmaker joel katz who is in the audience and my father who knew about him later and before i get to the meat of my presentation and i will try to keep it to a time limit, i want to acknowledge the works of all four folks. nancy baker published an article entitled abel mirapol, aka, lewis allen and political commentator in the journal american music back in 2002. i'm not sure if it's behind the payroll or not online. you can find this in some libraries, anyway. david's work will be front and center after i finish talking, and joel's film is entitled

strange fruit, well worth watching. it is available on screening services canopy and vimeo on demand, and i can't speak enough of it, even though i was in it, i can't speak enough of it. finally, there is an exhaustively researched full-length bogiography of my father. he has an agent. he is searching for a publisher, he's on twitter and instagram and you can't make this stuff up, writes a blog called "the philosophy of shaving." true. i have never read the blog. i've read the book and it's pretty damn good. i will try to distill what i have learned from these four important points of information as well as my memories of dad to talk about the man as he grew to be the person who wrote strange fruit, set it to music and then played it for billie holiday.

five things, one, you've already heard. he was the son of immigrant jews from russia. two, he saw the connection between the oppression of jews and the second-class citizenship of black americans, three, he was a communist. having decided based on what he saw around him as a child of working class immigrants that the system he was under was unjust. four, he was very create of with a keen sense of humor and a feel for music although he never had any formal music training and took piano lessons when he was young and when he was at harvard he had a gig and a band and they never let him play a solo. five, very important, he was angry. his sense of injustice didn't just make him sad. it made him mad. okay. dad's mother was pregnant with him while she and her husband, the two older children made the trek from odesa on the black sea

to new york sea. my grandfather yev mirapolski had experienced one -- the ukrainian providence of the russian empire before moving to odesa. they were socialists, spoke russian at home and not yiddish. very important for those of you who know about the yiddish waves of jewish immigrants after 1880, most of them were yiddish speakers including my other three sets of grandparents. two, the connection between antisemitism and black second-class citizenship. as i said, yev mirapolski survived in kyiv where he was from. his wife, sophie, we always called her sonia grew up in odesa and was probably middle class because her family owned a pharmacy. i was going to say it in russian

because that's how she talked about it and she lived on the second floor. she spoke russian. she was literate and had taken some university classes. she had undoubtedly survived at least one in odesa, as well. dad would have been aware of antisemitism. he once told me when he was at harvard and he turns around and there were antisemites going, for those of you who don't know what that mean, this is making fun of jews because we talk with our hands and my father, it made enough of an impress on him, he was born in new york and grew up in new york and may not have experienced the triggering antisemitism when he went there for harvard and that was the first time i realized that this was an antisemitic trope that people would do with jews. it certainly is a hell of a lot better than yelling jew bastard, but it stayed with him long enough to mention it to me.

the poem that he wrote, five lines, very short makes that connection. it's in both nancy baker's article and in david newstead's book. i am a jew. how do i know? the negro lynched reminds me well, i am a jew. early in our lives today their mom and dad told robbie and me a story about how dad confronted a cop who seemed totally uninterested in getting medical help for a black man who had been injured. dad raised such a stink he was arrested and spent a night in jail. mom told me this was rafael, a jewish, fascist cop, and the anger in her voice was clear. how dare a jew be a racist? well, we know, unfortunately that there's no perfectness anywhere. luckily, dad didn't get into a fight with the cop and he spent one night in jail and the thing

was dismissed. three, he became a communist. he was a high school student during world war i. his father and brother had to register for the draft. he didn't, obviously. he was too young. he knew about the russian revolution, the russian civil war where the white armies massacred jews and he knew about the fact that the new soviet union had given jews full citizenship. he also knew because it was 1919, in 1919 he was already 16 years old and obviously a well-read high school student about the race riots that led to black veterans in uniform being lynched, among other things. because his parents were atheists, and he had no formal religious training he did not have to throw off the religious objections to godless communism that kept many americans from embracing the left. as a child of atheists, by the way, he was relatively rare for first-generation american jews. as paul mentioned, he probable ed joined the communist party

around 1932 although there's no record of when he joined the party. we know he joined the party because he talk at length about robbie and me about some of his activities in the party. he always told another story. he filled out an application for a ph.d program in english literature at columbia university, went up the steps, stopped at the door, turned around and went back. he wanted to be a creative rather than an academic, and i bet part of it was that despite his skills as a teacher, he never really liked it. his colleagues and many students thought he was good at it, but he mostly wanted to write. teaching put bread on the table, he and my mother who also worked as a teacher and now i'll do the shout out. my mother took classes in the 1930s to get her teacher's certificate and i don't know how many years you had to take at hunter in the 30s to become a teacher.

they both had teacher salaries during the depression and you can imagine they helped a lot with both families and i'll say more about the communist party from the historian ellen shrekker. during its most vibrant periods the communist party had been at the center of a dynamic left-wing world composed of dozens of organizations, labor union, dance groups, professional society, refugee societies, adult educators, choral societies, bookstores, theatrical troops, folk music clubs and ethnic and fraternal societies and literary magazines and dad as a member of local 5 of the teacher's union became involved in many cultural activities, and i'm going to read you a poem he wrote that actually was used at american federation of teachers conventions. we are marching hand in hand with labor in a rising tide, teacher, parent, neighbor marching side by side. we're one big union across the

nation built the aft, democracy for education and education for democracy. that was the theme for the old iww which described the future government once our rotten system had been overthrown as one big industrial union. when robbie and i joined the family, it seemed he could make us laugh all the time. he would do impressions. he would make sounds. he could open a bottle. he would be a dog. he would be a puppy. he created stories all sorts of characters and he'd send us postcards with drawings on him. while teaching full time people described him as always write. his first book was published in 1929 and in it is a sonnet to anne, my mother. dad told me when they first met that she was french-canadian.

boy was he surprised when he was greeted by the yiddish-accented of her mother. on the other hand, they were worried she brought home a guy because he didn't speak yiddish. in 1910, she was a mere 19. the biographer has fond her birth certificate. she was born in 1908 and 21 when they married. you learn something every day and that began a life long partnership. they worked together throughout their lives and oftentimes he was write a play. dad wondered if mom could have had an acting career had he not dominated their choices. i'm getting ahead of myself. mom was the first person to perform strange fruit as a song at various gatherings. david was the man who discovered the steps from the initial comp sigdz to billie holiday.

he can say anything he wants to about that. i said about mom and hunter college, now an example of dad poking fun at oppressors. he wrote a song which he called the southern senator, and my daughter tells me i've got to say about it before i sing it. poll tax. how many people know what the southern poll tax was? a large percentage. for those of you who don't, it was a way of making sure black people couldn't vote, you had to pay a poll tax. a lot of poor white people were ng god out of voting because of poll tax. i want to tell you all it's a very old tax, my. y used to have it and everybody's pappy long before the civil war. the trouble with you all is that you all don't understand, everyone is happy in the dixieland. stop the agitating and let the good old poll tax be and learn to love the sunny south, the same way you love me. boom, boom, boom ♪

♪ it will protect you from the feather you'll learn to love the south. they're the laws of antebellum, you'll learn to love the south ♪ ♪ that southern fried chicken, corn, liquor and grits brings epileptic fits ♪ you'll learn to love the south, if you ever get out of jail, you go on the rail, you'll learn to love the south ♪ ♪ way down along the swannee river far, far away, push it further ♪ ♪ >> now if you actually look at the words instead of the sort of performance, it isn't all that funny. it's got a hell of an edge to it and that brings me to my last point. dad was angry. he wrote it, quote, because i hate lynching and i hate the

people who do it, and that line was very important to me and i thanked joel. he put it in the film, he put me in there saying that one of the funniest people i ever knew in my life was also one of the angriest people i knew in my life. in summary, the man who wrote "strange fruit" was a first-generation american born of jewish immigrants fleeing antisemitic vileness in the old country. he grew up with socialist vibes in his family and he early on discovered a way with words and a love of music, taking piano lessons allowed him to play chords. he became a school teacher and continued to live at home and joined the teachers union in the communist party and he saw the parallels between the treatment of jews in europe and not only in the south as the picture of the two young men, that was indiana and finally, a picture

of a lynching called forth the poem bitter fruit, the poem that became strange fruit, the song, and that leaves us in the transition to the next speaker david margolic who will be introduced by art. ♪♪ [ applause ] >> hello again. so david marvelic is a veteran journalist and frequent contributor to newsweek, vanity fair and the new york times review of books. are for several years he wrote for "the new york times" entitled at the bar. the short life and gay times of john horns. a world on the brink, undue influence, the epic battle for the johnson & johnson fortune, elizabeth and hazel, two women of little rock, a study of two women associated with the desegregation crisis surrounding little rock central high school

in 1957 and strange fruit, the biography of a song which chronicles the history elements of the song. margolic is at work to be published by randomhouse. please give a warm welcome to david margolic. [ applause ] >> well, thanks very much for that nice introduction, and thanks, i think, to michael for an impossible act to follow. i don't have any song to sing. i want to thank harold and paul for reminding us of this wonderful event and it is reminding me of the world that i enjoyed when i ote my book about "strange fruit" and i feel

like i'm back in that world for the first time in a long time and it's conjuring up lots of happy memories for me. it was an accidental book and i was always intrigued by the song and i remember it on an album jacket and a few of the list of the songs with no album, and i thought i didn't know what strange fruit was. i had no idea what it meant, what, where it came from and what the fruit referreded to. i was blown away when i first heard the song. no one had prepared me for it so it's great to be thinking about all of these things again on this occasion. when paul offered me a chance to participate in this i immediately wondered how to get back into a topic i wrote about so long ago, 25 years ago, and

my mind fastened on a tiny advertisement on an old magazine. that magazine was "the new yorker" and the ad was one of those mini rectangles that used to be stacked in the back of the magazine mostly for wedding bands and pork pie hats. it ran in march 1939 and it read, have you heard strange fruit, sung by billie holiday, a cafe society. i first saw this ad at the lincoln center and library of the scrat book at the publicist for cafe society, the hip nightclub at sheridan square that billed itself famously as the wrong place for the right

people. it was odd, this ad. first, it didn't get the name of the song right and then it mangled the lyrics itself, strange fruit growing on southern trees. that aside, i found the notice extraordinary. it was something i'd never seen before, an advertisement for a song, not for billie holiday who was already a popular young performer at the peak of her powers or for her repertoire, but for a single song she was singing, a song evidently unusual enough in and of itself to go down to greenwich village to hear. for me, it offered corroboration, reassuring corroboration that had been elusive up to that point of the premise of my project that "strange fruit" was unique, an event in and of itself. why so elusive?

because there was so little out there about it. true in that pre-digital age it was much harder to find anything about anything from that far back. type strange fruit into various databases now and you'll come up with more, but still surprisingly little and it had fallen between the cracks. there was almost nothing in the mainstream press about it. "the new york times" for instance which was everybody's go-to paper for anything historic hadn't covered something so pointed and angry and disruptive and left of center, a song written by a communist and sung by a young, opinionated black woman. the daily news and the hearst papers ignored it altogether they were too right wing and even the liberal press of the day and in that day it seems now

"the new york post "treaded lightly. it was less amazingly, in the black press which was conservative and culturally cautious. as much as it covered lynching, it was more comfortable with duke ellington and ella fitzgerald than billie holiday. none of the leading black weeklies like the pittsburgh courier or public defender had strange fruit and the few references in it to these papers to it were passing and awkward, like the amsterdam news calling it a swell piece of propaganda. there was nothing in the newsreels, of course, they played in, among other places, the south and even had the radio broadcast of that era been preserved which they mostly weren't, there had been little on them -- on the song in them. stations weren't playing many

records in those days. much of the music on the air was performed live, and even in new york they played popular upbeat, cheery stuff. quote, wnew has been trying to get up the courage to allow billie holiday singing at cafe society to render the anti-lynning song "strange fruit growing on the trees down south," they couldn't get it right either. [ laughter ] to render the anti-lynching south strange fruit growing on the trees down south on one of the night spot's regular broadcast, the post reported in november 1939. the station turned thumbs down a week ago, but approved the number for last night's airing and then it said no again, but has agreed to let billie sing it tonight at 1:00. if billie did sing it at 1:00

that night there's no record of it. have you heard strange fruit growing on southern trees sung by billie holiday the new yorker had asked, and the short answer each among new yorker readers would almost always have been no, but that publicist knew what he was doing. the new yorker's readers, largely middle to upper class, well-educated, sophisticated, politically progressive white were strange fruit's target audience. the cafe society was officially integrated, look at a picture of holiday performing there. it's in my book. everyone's well dressed. the women in hats, the men, lots of them, college boys, it seems, in jackets and ties and all of them wide. no such ads for strange fruit ran in the amsterdam news. the great historian of the jazz and blues, albert murray put it

best and most bluntly, strange fruit was something, he said, that most blacks didn't need and didn't want to hear. they knew about it already. strange fruit had a bigger moral and sentimental impact among white liberals mainly northern liberals and do-gooders than among blacks, northern or southern, he told me. you don't celebrate new year's over chit lings and champagne over strange fruit, who the hell wants to hear something that reminds them of a lynching? in his world, count basse's was sentimental and strange fruit was the big hit that year. for those who got to hear billie holiday sing "strange fruit" at cafe society it was certainly an event and it was decreed by barney joseph's and the man who

ran the place. it was also a ritual. billie was to close all three of her nightly sets with it. as she prepared to sing it, all service stopped. waiters, cashiers and bus boys all stood still. the room went completely dark, safe for a pin spot on holiday's face. when she finished, the lights went out. when she went back out -- when they came back up, she was gone and no matter how thunderous the applause she was never to return for a but. my instruction was to walk off period, josephson recalled. people had to remember "strange fruit" get their insides burned by it. it was a bflly rendered thing like a great, dramatic moment in the theater one of the people in the audience one night the cartoonist al hirschfeld remembered, and it struck me.

i don't think al hirsch heard billie holiday sing "strange fruit." she was painting her own picture. it didn't need any elaborating. i'm just amazed that every time i hear the song i hear something new in it, and i am grateful to paul for playing it because i never noticed before that it -- she gets louder as she goes along. it gets louder and more intense and fiercer as she goes along. of course, things are rarely so neat. the old cbs sports reporter hayward heal broon who some of you will remember for his colorful sports coats, tell me the angst at cafe society when billie sang strange fruit was, in fact, quite short lived. after we'd oohed and ahhed in a kind of liberal way, the band would hit a sharp cord and into

them their eyes, he recalled. the setting was the problem. even an enlightened nightclub was still a nightclub. i wondered then whether it made sense to sing such a song, one of the bruins' classmates said. it belonged instead in a concert setting without beer, whisky and cigarette smoke. on april 20th 1939 holiday backed by eight musics as michael and paul have said, made the first recording of strange fruit. overseeing the session was the aforementioned milt gable of commodore records who doubles as billy crystal's uncle, who would assume the task after a skittish columbia records passed on the song. gabler gave holiday $400 for the four songs she recorded that day, one of them fine and mellow which is on the flip side and $1,000 later on.

how much she eventually earned on the song she being want say. he used to give her cash when she was in trouble right out of the cash register in the store, he said. we never really kept a record of it. that recording, the one that we just heard, differs dramatically from the several versions that ensued over the course of billie holiday's career. most notably the verve recording of 1956 and the film performance in london shortly before holiday died which at this point is probably the most familiar version. those laterity rags speak volumes about holiday and the life she went on to live, but obscure just how radical the song and the singer originally had been. that day in the studio billie holiday, ail ll of 24 years olds jaunty, cocky, defiant, proud. there was no weeping nor

histrionics. her tone was langerous, but unflinching, raw yet smooth, youthful, yet worldly, spitting out references to southern gallantry and fragrant magnolias. i even noted how she said sweet and fresh. fresh. she radiated con temp rather than anger or grief. no longer then would you have to go down to sheridan square to hear strange fruit. it is now the record. this is about a phonograph record, in october 1939, it is called strange fruit and it it will, even after the tenth hearing, make you blink and hold on to your chair. even now, as i think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tighten, and i want to hit somebody, and i think i know who.

it was grafton went on, a fantastically perfect piece of art, one which reversed the usual relationship between a black entertainer and her white audience. i have been entertaining you, she seems to say, now you just listen to me. the polite convention of this -- the polite conventions between race and race are gone. it is as if we heard what was spoken in the cabins after the night riders had clattered by. if the anger of the exploited ever aims high enough in the south it now has its marseilles, but if "strange fruit" wasn't music to dance by, nor it was music to march to, even milt gabler conceded it was a downer. at least initially its appeal was more limited, even rarefied.

the people who bought the record were the same who read w.e.b. dubois and listened to the almanac singers and marched for and in some cases marched off to loyalist spain. they were disproportionately jewish, mirapol, we heard about josephson, the man who had cafe society. "strange fruit" was another one of the black-jewish collaborations of yore which by definition meant it wasn't part of the mainstream. its cult status makes it fanciful that that federal narcotics agents listened to it, let alone, hounded holiday for it as a recent book and movie have represented and as lewis porter refuted recently in an article in "jazz times." that claim is no truer than the

suggestion in the film "lady sings the blues" that holiday wrote it herself while happening upon a lynching while touring in the south. it was to remind people that it was he, damn it, who had written it and when you go through the clippings and the files, you see many letters to the editor that he was forever writing saying this was mine. i did it. holiday kept singing it though she was selecting about where, limiting it to new york and other big northern cities, progressive nightclubs, concert halls and black theaters, demanding attention whenever she did, stalking off sometimes when she didn't get that attention. i only do it for people who might understand and appreciate it, she told daddy-o daily, the chicago disk jockey who would sneak the song on to his

playlist sometimes. saying when a local cop beat a black kid for running a red light. she said this is not a june moon croon tune, she explained. even in the friendly venues the occasional redneck stumbleded in and there would be trouble, and she'd give command performances of the song for special 14s like studs turkle, serenading him at the party marking his departure for world war ii. when turkle spoke to me about strange fruit, he had to reach back two centuries to shubert's vinterisa and the song about the man cranking his instrument with frozen fingers to find another song so devastating. holiday performed "strange fruit" on a european tour in 1954. that may have inspired someone over there in france to

translate the song into french, but that's as far as it ever got. quote, with all of the troubles the french are currently having with colored people in indochina and north africa, i do not think it would be possible to get a french recording of the french writer who wrote mirapol. even over there it caused trouble. not everyone loves strange fruit. not all liberals call strange fruit. it made her the darling of left-wing intellectuals, he complained leading her to take herself too seriously, but with every defeat she suffered, with every additional increment of abuse she endured or inflicted on herself the more personal and even autobiographical the song came to seem. only toward the end when it seemed to take too much out of

her and there was less call for it anyway did her performances of it tape r off. by then and forever forward with everyone from nina simone, to diana ross to cassandra wilson, aund ra mcdonald and sting singing it, it was a much broader audience than when it first appeared. that's presumably why 60 years after dismissing it as, quote, a prime piece of prop gand for the naacp, time magazine crowned it the song of the century. since billie holiday introduced it, our capacity has shrunk, novelty itself has grown more novel, but always there will be this unique and uncanny song, the song that was also an event.

the question is no longer have you heard "strange fruit," but has a strange fruit ever happened since and will, should or could a strange fruit ever happen again? thank you. [ applause ] jefferson was an ae editor at newsweek and ans an ae assist >> our next speaker will be margo jefferson, a graduate of columbia school of journalism, margo was associate editor of newsweek and professor of journalism at nyu university before joining the staff of "the new york times" in 1983. there she learned about being books, theater and for her criticism to quote the pulitzer prize selection committee jefferson was awarded the award

for criticism in 1995 . jefferson is the author of constructing a nervous system in negroland which in 2016 won for autobiography and was short listed for the gifford prize for non-fiction. her work appears regularly in numerous publications including harper's, vogue, the nation and the guardian. she teaches writing at columbia university. jefferson has long had an interest in jazz and appeared in ken burns' ten-part documentary film entitled "jazz." please welcome, margo jefferson. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. wait, are these yours? >> okay. [ laughter ] well, i'm very proud to be in this company. several of the quotes i was going to read have already been

done -- >> can't hear you! >> okay. i am very proud to be in this company. several of the passages i was going to read have already been read and not to mention -- no, it's fine. not to mention the perspective of both mr. mirapol and mr. margolic. so i am going to focus, in part, on its historical -- its place in the evolving history of -- of jazz which -- the term itself is always debated. so, all right. just a little cultural placement. a little repeating. from the left, a popular song, a collaboration of jewish and

black artists and progressives, too, and radical leftists. the idea that it made its way from the -- the communist party magazine would not publish it, right? okay. they wouldn't, but teachers union, it made its way from the teachers union on the left to barney josephson who was a leftist nightclub owner to popular -- to popular music is in its own way phenomenal. american music does many things wonderfully, but it's that space we often call nightclub music or tin pan alley or musical theater really tends to specialize in its most serious subject tends

to be love and romance. so in just in that way alone this is extraordinary. i was trying to think of a predecessor, and i will happily take other examples. not, again, from folk music, but from this popular, we must somehow or another make money while we're making our -- and all i can think of was brother, can you spare a dime from 1932. the lyricist was also a leftist. i don't know if he was a cper, was he? we know not. this is all still a little secret in the annals, but the big difference, i'm sure a number of you. who knows this song? "brother, can you spare a dime"? of course, you know it's gripping, it's dramatic. it's also a plea, you know? there's mournfulness there, there's need. it was also, you know, being as it was based on the

demonstrators, veterans in front of the white house who were -- who wanted their bonus pay in the midst of the depression. the government turned the troops against them, but they were -- it would have been assumed and i'm sure, they were almost entirely white. i suspect any black veterans who had joined this might have been arrested and beaten up rather than more severely, but in any case, the difference is between a dramatic plea that asks you to empathize and to pity and to bring generosity and change of heart out of that pity and maybe some guilt. this has, david said, is an anthem, "strange fruit." it is also a kind of initiation ritual into horrors.

it's a poem, but it also has something in common with documentary witnessing. it could, in its own way, be a film, and it is, in its way, an exorcism. now, that sets up -- well, it was framed very cleverly and that theatrically more claimed a song that had to be performed in silence and whose -- whose singer, whose barred, if you will, who's witnessed, closed her eyes. when david was talking i thought to myself the discordancies of progressive or liberal, well-healed audience, the singer on stage and the facts of that song, the discordance, the clashes must be so acute that

sometimes closing her eyes was an emotional relief in terms of almost detaching oneself from the audience in the setting, and then -- but then at the end of it, she disappears. i think there -- there's something -- i don't want to say unsavory but that -- that relationship, that strange cohabitation between ritual, political testimony, declaration and entertainment and this is something we very much struggle with today between art and politics and how they collaborate or clash. so it seems to me in that way to prefigure very much struggles that figures much later -- look

at someone like bob dylan. first he's very serious and leftist and then no, that's not what i do. i do other things and -- margo, leave that alone. [ laughter ] but i was talking to an artist justthe other day about even the most -- even a kind of experimental musician like thelonious monk was and you are put on the cover of "time" magazine and what is the relationship between the searness of your music and your popularity? so holiday, as a very popular young singer when she records this is already navigating that. "the new york post" quotes that date red, suddenly she said you listen to me for a while. this is racial.

this is huge, but it is also very much gendered. this is a black woman who is described in one of the quotes in your book as who is it? was it "time"? a rolly polly negro woman "time" magazine these were a times when people could speak of a woman, even a black woman, even if she was gifted. i other toet which magazine ran an item when ella fitzgerald who was hefty got stuck in an elevator shaft and had to be helped out. chubby negro songstress gets stuck in elevatorand mock is rey . the other thing, one of the other things going on with this song, it moves into becoming very -- best-selling record, is,

jazz is being taken seriously by some critics but, in general, among serious music writers, the finding of jazz as in the big band era, it is an entertainment, intrinsically linked to dance and it has no ability to express certain kinds of subtle. complicated emotions. classical music does. i think a song like this very much just slices that down. it slices down the notion, which was still going, many black singers don't have the

diction to deliver the sustained discipline to deliver this kind of work, both in terms of content and form. that languorous, salty voice of holiday's was great but how many people expected it would somberly serve as an anthem and an art song, and a kind of call. a call to arms, once you can take it in. i think the recordings made a huge difference in how one internalized the song, if you are in a nightclub, they will play them there eyes, next. you will talk to the person next door. you will adjust the jacket you

are wearing, if you're listening to it at home, maybe in a theater, all black theater where there is safety, or a theater full of white and hopefully some black -- if that is where you are listening, you know you are there to internalize it and walk away thinking through it. my parents, black chicagoans, they were not -- they did not go to cafe society. certainly, my mother, bought the record. by the time i came along as a child in the 50s, it was a sanctioned -- a sacred object

if you will of black music, jazz , of holiday, her particular gifts and skills. wait, i just want to be sure. let me go back to my point about female anger. as you said, your father was angry. i wrote this down, his words. i hate lynching and i hate the people who do it. that is who billie holiday was embodying in a very record, control, rigorous, incredibly intense. that is what i call it an exorcism way.

you know, yes, bessie smith, love, careless love, that is why i sing the song of hate. but, for a woman, in the world of popular music, to be so in control of her anger, and to be using it as a kind of -- a weapon, as a call to an awakening, this is extremely unusual. her other peers, who i love, i love ella fitzgerald, it was not done by anybody else and was not being done, albert murray's words make it clear,

the great bands of the day. ellington would start writing a different kind of race conscious , uplifting music soon, but not yet. he had not written "black- brown." she really was very much -- she was in the vanguard. let me point out the musicians who i think came after. it comes sometime after, may i point out, the musicians in their own weight were political, but they were thinking instrumentally. who is she helping set the bar for in terms of jazz as

politically radical and aesthetically there? thinking of the 1950s, charles mingus, sonny rollins, abby lincoln. of course, nina simone. not on the first 1959 album, that does not happen until later. that is remarkable. go further and think about a venue and the difficulty of jazz negotiating itself as complicating and demanding music. a dance hall. think to the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, loft jazz movement in new york, aac musicians in

chicago. so, you know, all of these connections, these locations, locating of the setting, the proper setting, yes, the proper setting for this son, song,-- the question of what audience it reaches. once could track, i am being a little frivolous, miles davis turning his back to the audience. that is a this indent of billie holiday , closing our eyes and singing the song. turn my back and i leave. i think, in certain ways, david's discussion of the cultural and social

complications of its audiences and it's place, rarefied object is also a political document. and a political stimulant. there is -- boy, you know, i kept saying i would not say this but i think i will for example, when you read accounts of abolitionists materials and novels, early novels at the turn of the 19th century and into the 20th, but sometimes come up is questioning, it can come up from the opponents of abolition, but questioning of what someone erotic, sexual thrills, reading about abuses of blacks may be stirring up.

i think it is crudely put, the assault, the attacks, the implications are, but no way around, certainly, when you are talking about an attractive black performer, a woman, these questions of how a work, even a work like this, can get eroticized? one could argue, not criticizing, cafe society, one could argue presented in a certain kind of somewhat glamorized setting, it is eroticized. the question, the use in terms of the purpose of the song, the intent of the artist, does it

patronize? does it open up ways to think about all of the feelings from outrage to analysis to go into our political responses and artistic responses? you know, there is that air around the song and its history and billie holiday and her history of the decadence in many ways and the grief of her life. very much, over the years, been romanticized, somewhat eroticized. i suspect that has also happened with strange fruit and shameful and embarrassing to people. it is worth thinking about. very interesting and mellow is on the other side. all right, i think that people

want -- my goodness, close to 1:00, to ask everybody questions . let me finish and thank you. [ applause ] >> we will take a couple of questions from the audience. while we are getting settled, let's think about strange fruit being called by time magazine the song of the century. >> always behind the times. [ laughter ] >> particularly after they were so insulting to billie after they describe the song in 1939. >> what year did the call it the song of the century? >> 1999, 60 years later.

i am glad they caught up, eventually. do people have questions from the audience? >> i enjoyed all three of the very excellent presentations. i was shocked to hear from you that the black community in the late 1930s and 1940s did not view race or consume strange fruit. >> some blacks did consume. >> okay. >> my mother and her friends. when i was coming up, it was a given, by the 1950s blacks were buying it, distinction is the early years. albert is not wrong. at all. the newspapers could be

conservative but they were progressive in black communities as well i am sure my parents bought it first, and it was the liberal ones >> is the disagreement about the black communities and consumption of the song, strange fruit, hearing two things today , thinking about my parents, for example, they marched on washington, my grandmother was born in 1903. they were very angry and very political. i do not know the song from my childhood and from being with them and listening to their music. i was first aware of strange fruit by nina simone in the 1960s . >> we are hearing two different , two different sizes of audiences. in the late 1930s and early 1940s, large numbers of blacks

were not buying this record. or going to listen to it, or writing about it in newspapers. as the decade moved on, david mentioned the black theaters, that she performed it in. as the decade went on and moved into the 1950s, she found more and more of black listeners and fans. >> the point, early on, it came out of cafe society, a liberal white audience, embraced -- >> right. if you go through the black papers, virtually nothing in there, i went through a dozen and i can only find these little fragments, and nobody was focusing on it exclusively in writing stories about it. almost more coverage for fine

and mellow then for strange fruit >> i point out in my book, the three main men early on, white, jewish liberals and lefties. that was her base of support billie was aware of what cafe society represented . interview in the mid-1940s with the magazine, she set herself she was a communist. >> john hammond was always busy chastising blacks for being too serious. >> frankie newton -- >> he was a vanderbilt. >> frankie newton was a leftist and on that recording. >> yes, sir? here. >> my question is, the first

part of the discussion, roosevelt, in the roosevelt house, was billie holiday ever invited to the white house ? >> she was. >> why did strange fruit and the movement of blacks for equality affect franklin roosevelt? >> she did visit the white house when roosevelt was in the white house. with a famous pianist and probably her best friend, or one of her best friends. it was a fundraiser for infantile paralysis. she ran into him in the basement in his wheelchair. they had a conversation. yes, she was invited to the

white house and she did go to the white house and abel scott went with her. >> franklin roosevelt was not as progressive as his wife. >> after this brilliant dissection of the song, what is the appropriate for us to close the session with another hearing of the original performance. >> i am sorry? let's get a question over here first. >> c-span wants to record. >> when the new yorker had the advertisement, it was to get people to go to cafe society, and add for the song, what was the gist of the new yorker advertisement? >> i read the whole thing, that was it, a tiny ad, apart from

the phone number, chelsea something or other, the address on sheridan square, that was the entire ad, a tiny reminder billie was singing the song at cafe society. it was an advertisement for the song at cafe society. >> it was not yet a record when she started to sing it. >> billie holiday led us to believe she was the writer. >> in the current version of lady sings the views -- lady sings the blues, that is not true. >> at any point did she acknowledge that she exaggerated it? >> she is possessive of the song, she loved the song. what she was a later on, it was written especially for me, also not true.

[ laughter ] more questions? in the very back. >> thank you. i had my head up for the longest time like billy joel. does anyone know where billie holiday was born , when she died and how she died? >> do you want me to cover that? billie thought she was born in baltimore, her family told her she was born in baltimore and did not find out she was born in philadelphia until 1954 when she got her passport for her european tour. again, she continued to tell everybody she was born in baltimore even after she knew she was born in philadelphia her mother brought her to baltimore when she was a few

days old. she was raised in baltimore. until she was about 12, and she moved to new york. first, to harlem, queens, back to harlem. she died in july of 1959, on the 17th. she had become ill six weeks before and they had hospitalized her at at metropolitan hospital in harlem. i covered this in great detail in my book, a drama, because she said, i think they planted heroin in her room and she was

arrested for narcotics possession and fingerprinted, mug shot, the whole thing. so, the last two to three weeks of her life was taken up -- they wanted her to appeared before a grand jury but she was bedridden but they wanted her to appear before a grand jury florence kennedy was a lawyer who did a great job in blocking a lot of the attempts of the city government. new york's behavior was shameful at that time, the police department and mayor's office. she died of cirrhosis of the liver. that was the cause of death which triggered a heart attack. i would say that the way she was harassed at the end of her life is significant and had a significant effect on her. if she gave up the will to live because of what was going on?

this will be the last question. >> what was the take by the naacp of the song, did they accept it or reject it? >> i don't remember any reaction from the naacp. instinctively, they would have steered clear of it. it would have been too left for them. >> margo? >> i don't know, but i agree with that. not the leftist cultural vanguard. >> they were not progressive at the time >> the song was taken up by the antilynching movement. david, you may know the year, they were trying to consider an anti-lynching bill. >> which they had been trying -- >> and joe biden signed it. >> i did a story about the man

responsible for integrating stylus in town, he was another former communist, and he had -- he was written out of the naacp and thurgood marshall was very determined to get him nowhere close to the naacp. they wanted no communists. they did not want to be saddled anything smacking of communism. >> that is true. >> i want to thank our panelists for the day. [ applause ] i think our suggestion from the audience is a good one. let's end with billie singing "strange fruit" once again. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪

>> ♪ 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 trees. ♪ >> ♪ pastoral scene of the gallant south. he bulging eyes

and the twisted mouth. scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. here is fruit for the crows to pluck. for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck. for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop. here is a strange and bitter crop. ♪ [ applause ]

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