and more from the world of politics, all at your fingertips. you can stay current with the latest episodes of "washington journal" and c-span's tv networks and radio, plus a variety of podcasts. c-span now is available at the apple store. visit our website, c-span dot okay/c-spannow. your front row neat to washington, any time, anywhere. weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history tv documents america's story, and on sundays, booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more, including midco. >> where are you going?

or maybe a better question is, how far do you want to go? and how fast do you want to get there? now we're getting somewhere. so, let's go. let's go faster. let's go further. let's go beyond. midco, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> good morning, everyone. good morning. [ applause ] i'm harold holzer, and i have the privilege of serving as director of roosevelt house, and speaking for ann kirschner, i want to welcome all of you to this historic place for this amazing convening that we're

having. greetings also to the c-span audience, which will also be prich privileged to see the event we have to bring to you this morning. it's a truly 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 long-time home of her favorite american president, franklin d. roosevelt. we have evidence of that, which you may hear along the way today. i haven't seen paul's book yet, but i will find validation in his brand of book. by the way, the brand new book by our convener and host, paul alexander, is really what brings us together today. so i'm going to hold it up. "bitter crop" is an extraordinary new account of billie holiday's final year. doesn't that look like an album cover when we were all younger?

that's a brilliant concept. welcome also to michael, marco jefferson, and my friend, david. so great to have you all here, as well. so as of last night, we had more than 1,200 people registered either in person or online for this event. [ applause ] we've never had a response quite like this. paul, i have a feeling, but billy, i'll tribute to you, as well. i know some of you, many of you are on zoom. some of you may be in overflow rooms during the day and evening. but please be patient, stay where you are. stay tuned, because the conversation, the commentary and the performances are going to be truly amazing. again, billy really liked fdr.

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 hide park. but maybe he had kind of cooler tastes 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 from a 1930 musical called "chasing rainbows." i looked in vain that the composer might have produced the song that billie holiday sang, i didn't succeed there. it's also notable that during the new deal, which was planned upstairs in fdr's library during

the presidential transition 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. 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 silvaia plath, which was 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 guests 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 symposium at hunter college. i am the author of this new book, and to follow -- first of

all, this picture up here is from billy when she was recording -- the recording stress, so she may have been singing it at that point. and as harold said, she was -- fdr was her favorite president. ellenor was also friends with billy, as were the children when she was playing downtown. so she had a very strong connection with the roosevelts, 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 she have seen through the years are -- 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 reflected in my book and the symposium today. obviously, "string anger" is probably her more famous song that she recorded in 1939. i wanted to talk about the beginning, about the overview of the song and how it came about. and then 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. or at least enhance them. so in her autobiography, which came out in 1956 and it's stale available today. so "bitter crop" this is how i describe that. i write the following. in her autobiography, billie described how the song "strange fruit" came about, and this is her from her book. the tope was from a poem written by lewis allen. when he showed me the poem, i dug it right off. allen suggested that sonny white be my accompanist and we got together and i did it in three weeks. i got a wonderful assist from danny, another writer who had done arrangements for me.

he helped me with arranging the song and rehearsing it patiently. that's the end of her quote. i write, that passage may have been provided -- may have provided another tale for the audience to relish, but none of the facts were true. none of them. the creator of the song, as michael wells knows, is able maripol, who was born in 1903 and raised in a russian jewish family in manhattan. he was declared a gifted poet and the glass genius and a masters in arts from harvard university. from harvard university. and english teacher at dewitt clinton high school in the bronx , he was an aspiring writer and member of the communist party. having joined in 1932. he contributed to the young

communist league, the theater arts committee and the lincoln brigade, which was why he chose to publish under the pseudonymallen . in homage to a stillborn son who would have been given that name. and he did not wish his leftist all it takes interfere with his ability to earn a living. still, he was sympathetic to the parties advocacy for racial equality, particularly in supporting its federal antilynching legislation. throughout the jim crow era, lynching pose 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 product this. he was seeing this as an opportunity to contribute to the political debate. when he ran across a picture in a civil rights magazine. this is a quote. 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. ". the picture of two black teenagers thomas ship and abram smith lynched in indiana in 1930 was taken by lawrence. that's the end of my quote from the book. let me point out that the federal antilynching legislation would not be passed for almost one full century until it was finally signed into law by president joe biden. and now, recorded in 1939 by the commodore records, here is the original version of strange fruit.

♪ so ♪ fruit,

blood on the knee. and blood at the root. black bodies swing in in sun, 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 soul. the bulging eyes and the

twisted mouth, sent to magnolia sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. here is the fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain together, for the wind to suck. for the sun to rise, for the tree to drop, here is a strange and bitter crop. ♪ ♪

>> to introduce the guest for the morning panel, i would like to introduce the chairman of the student committee who helps run this symposium, julie rosenberg. [ applause ] >> good morning, everyone. and economist educator and author, for many years he was a professor of economics and department chair at western new england university. after his retirement there he talked for four years at john jay college of criminal justice of the city of university of york. a number --. he is the biological son of julius and ethel rosenberg. after the

death of his parents, he and his brother robert were adopted by abel marable who wrote strange for. he has written about his biological parents and edited that rosenberg letters and his parents present correspondence. he authored, we are your sons. in addition, meeropol has written and lectured extensively about the importance of strange fruit as an anthem of her social reform appeared for example in strange fruit story of a protest song, documentary film by joel katz. to speak about meeropol and the enduring power of strange fruit, please welcome michael marable. [ applause ] . >> first of all, i want to thank harold and paul for including me in this fabulous distinguished panelists it's wonderful to be speaking next to david and an 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 became to live with mom and dad soon after. the next seven years before i went away to college i had the good fortune to live an extraordinary and yes alleged life. we won the lottery with our adoptive parents and their extended family. during those years and subsequent years as an adult, from time to time i would learn things about dad's life that led me to the inescapable conclusion that he was a most extraordinary human being. intelligent, funny, kind, loving, talented, a true mensch . since he died in 1986, i have learned even more about him from the work of musicologist nancy baker, david's book, filmmaker joel katz who was in the audience, and my father's biography about him later. and before i get to the meat of my presentation, and i am going to try to keep to a time limit, i want to acknowledge the works

of all four folks. nancy baker published an article entitled, able meeropol, a.k.a. allen, political commentator and social conscience in the journal american music, back in 2002. i'm not sure if it's behind the pay wall or not, online. but, you can find this in some libraries, anyway. david's work will be front and center after i finish talking and jewels film is entitled, strange fruit, well worth watching. it is available on screening services canopy and video on demand, and i can't enough about it, even though i was in it. i cannot speak enough. and finally, there is an exhaustively researched full- length biography of my father by a man named david newstead. been working on it for eight years and he has an agent. he is searching for a publisher , he is on twitter and instagram and you can't make this stuff up, writes a blog

called, the philosophy of shaving. it's true. i have never read the blog. i have read the book and it's pretty 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 plated for billie holiday. five things, one, we already heard. he was the son of immigrant jewish people from russia. he saw the connection between the oppression of jewish people throughout history 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 and the first two decades of the last century that the system he lived under was unjust. four, he was very creative, with a keen sense of humor and a feel for music although he

never had any formal music training. he took the lessons when he was young and when he was at harvard, he had a job and all he did was play chords. they never let him play a solo. five, very important, he was angry. is a 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 and two older children made the trek from odessa on the black sea to new york city. my grandfather anglicized to leo, dad's father, had experienced at least one in kiev ukrainian province of the question empire before moving to odessa. they were atheists him a socialist, question at home , 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 anti-semitism and black second- class citizenship. as i said, he survived in kiev where he was from. his wife sophie, we always called her sonja, grubbing odessa and was middle-class because her family owned a pharmacy. i was all set to say in question because that's how she talked about it. she lived on the second floor there and she question. she was literate and actually had taken some university classes. she had undoubtedly survived at least one in odessa as well. dad would have been aware of anti-semitism. he once told me a story that when he was at harvard, and he was with a bunch of fellow jewish students he turns around and there is a couple of anti- semites going, for those of you who don't know what that means, this is making fun of jewish people because we talk with her hands.

my father, it made enough of an impression on him because he was born in new york, grew up there and may not have experienced that kind of personal triggering anti- semitism before being in cambridge massachusetts when he went there for harvard. that was the first time i realized that this was an anti- semitic trope that people would do. it's a lot better than yelling best or orbiting them up but it stayed with him long enough to mention it to me. the poem that he wrote, five lines, very short. make 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 lynched reminds me well. i am a jew. earlier in our lives mom and dad told us the story about how debt confronted a cop who seemed totally uninterested in getting medical help or a black man who had been injured.

dad raised such a stink he was arrested and spent the 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, on -- unfortunately, there is no perfect anyway. dad didn't get into a fight with a cop. he spent one night in jail and it was dismissed. 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 come obviously. he knew about the question revolution, the question civil war, were the white armies massacred jews and he knew about the fact that the new soviet union had given jews and the soviet union full citizenship . he knew, because it was 1919, he was already 16 years old, obviously 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 he was relatively rare for first- generation american . as paul mentioned, he probably joined the communist party around 1932, although there is no record of when he joined. we know he joined because he talked at length with robbie and me about some of his activities in the party. he always told another story. he filled out an application for a phd 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 i but 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 and according to his biographer, he and my mother who worked as a teacher, and i will do the shout out, my mother took classes here at hunter in the 1930s to get her teachers certificate. there is no record that she got a bachelors degree so 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. you can imagine that they helped a lot with both families. i'm going to say a little bit more about the communist party. from the historian ellen schricker, 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 unions, dance groups, professional societies, refugee relief organizations, adult education centers, summer camps, legal defense groups, choral societies, tenants committees,

bookstores, theatrical trips, peace groups, clubs, ethnic and fraternal societies, literary magazines, and that as a member of local teachers union became involved in many cultural activities. 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 labored in a rising tide, teacher parent neighbor marching side-by-side, where one big union across the nation build of the aft, democracy and education, education for democracy. there's another verse that i'm going to skip over. notice the reference to one big union. that was the theme of 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, make sounds, open a bottle, he would be a dog, a puppy.

he created stories with all sorts of characters and then we went away to camp and he would send us postcards with drawings of them. while teaching full time, people described him as always writing. his first book of poetry was published in 1929 and in it is a sonnet and my mother. dad wants told me that mom told him when they first meant that she was french-canadian. boy was he surprised when he called her up that fall and was greeted by the yiddish accent english of her mother. on the other hand, mom's family was worried that she brought home a boy because he couldn't speak it is. you learn something every day. i always thought mom was born in 1910 and that when they married she was a mere 19. the biography has found her birth certificate. she was born in 1908 and was 21 when they married. you learn something every day. that began a lifelong partnership.

they worked together throughout their lives, and he would write the place or cantata. she would direct them. dad once said, he wondered if mom could have had a full acting career. had he not dominated their life choices. in fact i'm getting a bit ahead of myself. mom was probably the first person to perform strange fruit as a song at various teachers unions gathering. i think david is the man who discovered the steps from initial contribution, composition to billie holiday and i will let him say anything he wants to about that. one more about -- an example of dad poking fun at a presser's. he wrote a song that he called the southern senator. my daughter tells me, i have to say a little bit about it before icing it. poll tax. how many know what the southern poll tax was? for those of you who don't, it was a way of making sure black people couldn't vote. you have to pay a poll tax. an awful lot of poor white

people were knocked out of voting as well because of the poll tax. here it goes. mr. chairman on the question of the southern poll tax i want to tell you all is a very old textbook my pappy used to have it and his pappy did before and everybody's pappy long before the civil war. the trouble with you all is you all don't understand, everybody's happy and dixieland. stop this agitating and let the gold old poll tax to be and learn to love the sunny south, the same way you love me. tar and feather well protected from the weather. you learn to love this out. there the laws of antebellum, you can smell them, you learn to love this out. that southern fried chicken corn liquor and grits and some pappy gave me that brings apple at the fitz. the politics are stinking and you go to jail for thinking, you learn to love this out but if you ever get out of jail you go writing on the rail, you learn to love the self. way down upon the swan river, far, far away push it further.

now, if you actually look at the words instead of the performance, it isn't all that funny. it has a of an to it and that rings me to my last point. dad was angry. when he described what he wrote strange fruit he said, 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 thank joel that he put in the film. he put me in there saying that one of the funniest people ever knew in my life was also one of the angriest people i knew in my life. in summary, the man who wrote first strange fruit was a first- generation american born of jewish immigrants, fling anti- semitic violence in the old country. he grew up with socialist vibes in his family. he early on discovered a way with words and a love of music,

taking piano lessons allowed him to make money playing chords in cambridge massachusetts. he became a schoolteacher, continue to live at home, joined the teachers union and the communist party, saw the parallels between the treatment of jews in europe and the treatment of blacks not only in the south, as the picture of the two young men in indiana, and finally, a picture of a lynching. call forth the palm refute. the poem that became strange fruit the song and that leads us to the transition to the next speaker, david who will be introduced by our crowd. [ applause ] >> hello again. david is veteran journalist and frequent contributor to newsweek, vanity fair, new york times book review, new york times review of books.

for several years he wrote a column or the new york times entitled, at the bar. among his books are dreadful a short life and times of james, beyond glory, joe versus max and a world on the brink. undue influence, the epic battle for the johnson & johnson fortune, elizabeth and hazel, two women of little rock, city 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 and cultural relevance of the song. he is at work on a book about sid caesar and to be published by random house. please give a warm welcome to david margolick. [ applause ] >> thanks very much for that nice introduction and thanks to michael for an impossible act

to follow. i don't have any song to sing, for one thing. i want to thank harold and paul for inviting me to this wonderful event, and it's reminding me already of the world that i enjoyed when i wrote my book about strange fruit. i feel as if i'm back in that world again today, for the first time in a long time, and it is conjuring up lots of happy memories for me. it was an accidental book. i was always intrigued with the song. i remember seeing it on an album jacket. just one of these things that would list a few of the songs in the album and i thought, i didn't know what strange fruit was. i had no idea what it meant. where it came from, what the fruit referred to and so bubbly like a lot of people, i was

blown away when i first heard the song. no one had ever really prepared report. and 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. my mind fastened on a tiny advertisement in an old magazine . that magazine was the new yorker and the ad was one of those many rectangles that used to be stacked in the back of the magazine. mostly for wedding bands and porkpie hats. it ran in march 1939, and it read, have you heard strange fruit growing on southern trees

sung by billie holiday at cafe society? i first saw this ad at the lincoln center library in a scrapbook of the publicist for cafe society, the hip nightclub on sheridan square that billed itself famously as the wrong place for the right people. it was odd, this ad. it didn't get the name of the song right and then it mangled the lyrics themselves, strange fruit growing on southern trees . but that aside, i found the notice extraordinary. it was something i had 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 of itself, why so elusive? because there was so little out there about it. true and that predigital age it was much harder to find anything about anything from that far back. type strange fruit into various databases now and you will come up with more, but still surprisingly little. it had fallen between the cracks. there was almost nothing in the mainstream press about it. the new york times for instance, which is 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 winged. even the more liberal press of the day, and in that day in new york, that meant principally, as incredibly as it seems now, the new york post treaded lightly. there was even less amazingly in the black press, which was conservative and culturally cautious. as much as it covered lynching, it was more comfortable culturally with duke ellington and ella fitzgerald than with billie holiday. none of the leading black weeklies like the pittsburgh courier in the chicago defender devoted stories to strange fruit. there few references in them, it it in these papers to it

were passing an awkward like the amsterdam news calling it a swell piece of propaganda. there was nothing in the newsreels, of course. they played among other places the south. and even had the radio broadcast of that year had been preserved, which they mostly weren't. there would have 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, has been trying to get up the courage to allow billie holiday singing at cafe society to render the anti-lynching song, strange fruit growing on the trees down south, i couldn't get it right either.

to render the antilynching song strange fruit growing on the trees down south on one of the nice spots regular broadcast, the post reported in november 1939. station termed -- turned thumbs down a week ago but approved the number for last night airing. then he said, no again, but has agreed to let billie singing tonight at 1:00 . if billie did sing it at 1:00, there is no record of it. have you heard strange fruit growing on southern trees sung by billie holiday at cafe society? the new yorker had asked. the short answer, even 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 fruits target audience. the cafe society was

officially integrated. look at a picture of holiday performing there. it is in my book. everyone is well-dressed. the women in hats, the men, lots of them college boys it seems in jackets and ties, and all of them white. 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 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 that among lacks northern or southern, he told me. you don't celebrate new year's over chitlins and champagne with strange fruit. you don't get next to someone playing strange fruit.

who wants to hear something that reminds them of a lynching? in his world, count basie's blue and sentimental and not strange fruit was the big hit that your. for those who got to hear billie holiday sing strange fruit at cafe society, it was certainly an event. decreed by barney josephs and the men who run the place, it was also a ritual. billie was to close all three of her nightly sets with it . she prepared to sing it all service stopped, waiters cashiers, busboys, all stood still. the room went completely dark, say for a pin spot on holidays 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 bow. my instruction was to walk off period, josephson recalled. people had to remember strange fruit, get their insides burned by it. it was a beautifully rendered thing, like a great dramatic moment in the theater, one of the people in the audience one night, the cartoonist al hirsch felt remembered. it struck me, i don't think he drew billie holiday singing strange fruit but she was painting her own picture that night. it didn't need any elaborating. she said it all. i'm amazed that every time i hear the song, i hear something new in it. i'm grateful to paul for playing it because i never noticed before that it gets -- she gets louder as it goes along. it gets louder and more intense and more fierce as she gets going along. of course, things are rarely so

neat. the old cbs sports reporter heywood hale broome, and some of you who will remember him for his colorful sports coats, told me the angst at cafe society when billie sang strange fruit , was in fact quite short-lived. after we had food and odd in our liberal way, the band would hit a sharp court and go into them their eyes as he recalled. the setting was the problem. even enlightened nightclub was still a nightclub. i wondered then whether it made sense to sing such a song in such a milieu, one of his classmates said. it belonged instead at a concert setting, without beer and whiskey and cigarette . on april 20th, 1939 , holiday back to buy a musician as michael and paul have said, made the first recording of

strange fruit overseeing the session was the aforementioned milt gabler of commodore records , who doubles as ellie crystals uncle, who was soon that task after a skittish columbia records passed on the song. he gave holiday $400 for the four songs she recorded that day , one of them fine and mellow, which is on the flipside. and $1000 later on. how much she eventually earned from the song, he couldn't say. we used to give her cash, especially 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 ellie holidays career , most notably the verb recording of 1956 and the film performance made in london

shortly before holiday died, which at this point is probably the most familiar version. those later iterations speak volumes about holiday and the life she went on to live. but obscured just how radicalized the song and the singer originally had been. that day in the studio, billie holiday, all of 24 years old, was jaunty, cocky, defiant, proud, and there is no weeping nor histrionics. her tone was languorous but unflinching, raw yes mood, youthful yet worldly, spitting out references to southern gallantry and fragrant magnolias, i even noticed the way she said sweet and fresh. she radiated contempt rather than anger or grief. no longer than, but you have to go down to sheridan square to hear strange fruit.

there is no the record. this is about a phonograph record, which has obsessed me for two days samuel of the new york post road in october 1939. it is called strange fruit and it will, even after the 10th hearing, make you blink and hold onto your chair. even now, as i think of it, the shorthair in the back of my neck tightens and i want to hit somebody. 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 conventions, and this is still grafton speaking, the polite conventions between race and race are gone. it is as if we heard what was spoken in the cabins after the

night writers had clattered by. if the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the south, it now has its marseille is. but if strange fruit was not music to dance to bite nor was it music to march 2, even milt gabler conceded it was a downer. at least initially it's appeal was more limited even rarefied. the people who bought the record for the same folks who read wpb the boys and the crisis and the new masses, listened to the almanac singers, marched for and in some cases marched off to a loyalist spain. they were just disproportionately jewish as were for that matter, and meeropol we heard about josephson , the man who staged it at a cafe society and milt gabler. strange fruit was yet another one of those black jewish collaborations of your, which

by definition meant it wasn't part of the mainstream. its cult status makes it fanciful that federal narcotics agents even listen to it, let alone hounded holiday for, as a recent book and will be has represented it and as porter refuted recently, that claim is no truer than the suggestion in the film, lady sings the blues, that holiday wrote strange fruit herself after happening upon a lynching. meeropol worked in his last years to remind people that it was he who had written it. 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 selective 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 daniel daily, the chicago disc jockey who had snuck the song onto his playlist sometimes. when a local cop beat a black ticket for running a red light, this is not a june moon tune she explained. even in these friendly venues the occasional redneck stumbled and and there would be trouble. and she would give command performances of the song for special friends like studs terkel, serenading him with it at the party marking it his departure for world war ii.

when terkel to me about strange fruit , he had to reach back two centuries to schubert's and the song about the hurdy-gurdy man cranking his instrument with a frozen fingers to find another sound 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 is as far as it ever got. quote, with all the troubles the french are currently having with colored people in indochina and north africa, i do not think it will be possible to get a major recording, a french song publisher wrote meeropol. even over there it caused trouble. not everyone loves strange fruit. not all liberals love strange fruit. john hamm called the worst

thing that ever happened to billie holiday. 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 this 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 performance of a taper off. by then, and forever forward, with everyone from nina simone to diana ross, to cassandra wilson to audra mcdonald to ub40, to stink singing it, it radiated through the culture, touching arousing and inspiring a much broader and diverse audience than it did when it first appeared. that's presumably why 60 years after dismissing it as quote, a

prime piece of propaganda for the naacp, time magazine crowned at the song of the century. since billie holiday introduced it, our capacity to be shocked 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 and will, should, or could a strange fruit ever happen again? thank you. [ applause ] >> our next speaker will be

margo jefferson. a graduate of columbia university school of journalism, margo jefferson was an associate editor at newsweek. a stem professor at nyu university before joining the staff of the new york times in 1993. there she wrote about books, theater and american culture in general. for her first book reviews and other cultural criticism, to quote the pulitzer prize selection committee, jefferson was awarded the pulitzer prize for criticism in 1995. jefferson is the author of come on michael jackson, as well as two memoirs, constructing a nervous system and land which in 2016 won the book critics circle award for autobiography and was shortlisted for the different prize for nonfiction. her work appears regularly in publications including harpers vogue the nation and the guardian. she teaches writing at columbia university. jefferson has long had an interest in jazz and appeared in the 10 part documentary filmed entitled jazz.

please welcome margo jefferson. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. are these yours? okay. well, i am very proud to be in this company come in and i had several coats -- quotes i was going to read. okay i am very proud to be in this company, several of the passages i was going to read have already been read and claimed, not to mention note, no, it is fine. not to mention the perspective of both mr. meeropol and mr. margolis. i am going to focus, in part on its historical, its place in the evolving history of jazz,

which yeah, the term itself always debated. so, all right, just a little cultural placement, little repeating. from the left, a popular song, collaboration of jewish and black artists and progressives, too weak about word, radical leftist. the idea that it made its way from the communist party magazine would not publish it, right? they wouldn't but teachers union , it made its way from that teachers union on the left to barney josephson who was a leftist nightclub owner, to

popular music, is in its own way, phenomenal. american music does many things wonderfully, but it is that space we often call nightclub music or tenpin alley or musical theater. it really tends to specialize, it's the most serious subject tends to be love and romance. so, just in that way alone, this is extraordinary. i was trying to think of a predecessor and i will happily take other examples. not from folk music but from this popular, we must somehow or another make money while making art and all i could do was, brother can you spare a dime from 1932. yep harbor, the lyricist was also a leftist. don't know if

he was a cp, was he? we know not. this is all still a little secret. but, the big difference, i'm sure a number of you, who knows this song, brother can you spare a dime? of course you do. you know it's dripping, dramatic , it's also a plea. there is more in fullness, need, and it was also being as it was based on the demonstrators, veterans in front of the white house, who wanted their bonus pay in the midst of the depression, the government turned its troops against them, but they were -- it would have been assumed, and i'm sure was true, they were almost entirely white. i suspect any black veterans who joined this might have been arrested and beaten up rather more so be alert, 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 is an anthem, strange fruit. it is also an initiation ritual into horrors. has -- 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 -- pick that sets up. it was framed very cleverly and theatrically and i think even morally, well claimed as a song that had to be performed, in silence and whose singer, whose

witness closed her eyes. when david was talking, i thought to myself, the discordance he before progressive or liberal, all-white well-heeled audience, the singer on the stage and the facts of that song, 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. but then, at the end she disappears. i think --. there is something --. i don't want to say unsavory, but that relationship, that strange cohabitation between ritual, political, testimony,

declamation and entertainment. this is something we very much struggle with today in our relationship to 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 is very serious and leftist then, no, that's not what i do. i do other things. then he gets religious, margo, leave that alone. but i was talking to an artist the other day about, even the most, even an experimental jazz musician like thelonious monk was, you put on the cover of

time magazine and, what is the relationship between the seriousness of your music and your popularity? holiday, as a very popular young singer when she records this, is already navigating that. the new york post quotes that david red, my god, suddenly she sang, you listen to me for a while. this is racial. this is huge, but it is also very much engendered. this is a black woman who is described in one of the quotes in your book as -- pick was a time who said she is a roly- poly young woman. time magazine. these were the days when one could speak of a woman, particularly a black woman, even if she was famous and gifted in just that way. i forget which magazine ran an item when ella fitzgerald, who was have to got stuck in an

elevator shaft, and had to be helped out. shall be songstress stuck in elevator shaft. the disrespect. we very much are enjoying the need to also disrespect and mock, is really extraordinary. the other thing, one of the other things going on with this song, once it moves into becoming a best-selling record is, there is jazz that is being taken seriously by some critics but there is still, in general, and even among serious music writers, this confining and defining of jazz as particularly in the big band era. it's an entertainment music, it is intrinsically linked to dance

and it has no ability to express certain kinds of subtle and complicated emotions that say, classical music does brick. i think a song like this, very much just slices that down. it slices down the notion that, which again was still going, that many black singers don't quite have the diction to deliver the sustained discipline to deliver this kind of work, both in terms of its content and in terms of its form. that languorous salty voice of holidays was great for them but how many people had expected

that it would somberly serve as an anthem and an art song and a kind of call to arms once you can take it in? i think the recordings made a huge difference in terms of how one internalized the song. if you are sitting in a nightclub, they are going to play them their eyes next, you are going to pick up your glass. you are going to talk to the person next door. maybe you will adjust the jacket. if you are listening to it at home or maybe in a theater, an all-black theater where there is safety, or a theater just full of white and hopefully some black and other fans, if that is where you are listening,

you know you are there to internalize it not to take it in and to walk away thinking about it, and thinking through it. my parents, black chicagoans who listened to the audio daily, they did not go to cafe society. they did certainly, my mother and friends of hers bought the record, and 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 of jazz, of holiday, of her very particular gifts and skills. wait, i just want to be sure.. okay, let me go back to my point about female anger. as

you said, your father was angry , and he wrote --. i wrote this down, his words. i hate lynching and i hate the people who do it. that's what billie holiday was embodying, representing, and singing in that very controlled and rigorous and incredibly intense focus. that's why i call it an exorcism why. yes, there is bessie smith singing, and level careless love. that's why i singing this song of hate. that is surprising even in that song, but for a woman, in the world of popular music to be so contained, meaning in control of

of her anger him and to be using it as a kind of weapon, as a call to an awakening, this is extremely unusual. her other peers, her other peers whom i love, i love ella fitzgerald, and the ones who come after like serve on, but it wasn't done by anybody else. and it wasn't being done as albert murray's words made clear, by the great bands of the day. great black bands like ellington basye et cetera. he would start writing a different kind of race conscious and is that a sizing and uplifting music but he wasn't doing it yet. he had written black brown and beige yet. she really was very much, she was in the vanguard.

let me point out some of the musicians who i think came after. of course nina simone has already been mentioned but whose radicalism comes after. it comes sometime after me. i would certainly say that the musicians in their own way were political, but they were thinking instrumentalists. who is she helping set the bar in terms of jazz as politically radical and aesthetically daring? think about -- but the 50s, charles mingus, fables. your father's palm made me think of that. sonny rollins, freedom sweet, max roach and abby lincoln. we insist, of course, nina simone,

though not on that first 1959 album. not at all. that doesn't happen until later. so, that's remarkable. go little further and think again of venue and the difficulties of jazz negotiating itself as a complicated and demanding music in, god bless them, a dance hall. think ahead to the 70s, 80s, 90s and you have the loft jazz movement. and you have the a acm musicians in chicago. so, all of these connections, all of these locations, this locating of the setting, the proper setting, the proper setting for the song and it is the questions of, what audience it reaches.

all of those are going to be taken up. song and then leaving i turn my back i leave. i think in certain david's discuss kind of the the culture oral and social complications of of it's and it's its place as this rarefied object that is also a political document and a political stimulant. there is boy i you know i kept saying maybe i won't say this but i think i will when you for example, read accounts of. abolitionist material and

novels, early novels at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, what sometimes up is a it can come up from the opponent love of but a kind of questioning of what somewhat erotic sexual thrills people reading about these beatings and these abuses of blacks might be stirring up. i think crudely put, usually the the assaults, the attacks, the implicate asians are. but there is no way around when you particularly certainly when you're talking about an attractive black performer certainly you're talking about a woman. this question of how how a work even a work like this gets can eroticized one could argue and i'm very happy i'm not its

appearance in wonderful barney joseph since kraut cafe society. but one could argue that almost present it in a certain kind of somewhat glamorized setting gets it right size. the question then becomes how that eros of youths in terms of the songs purpose, the artist's intent does it patronized it open up spaces think about you all of the feelings from outrage to to eros to analysis that go into our political response in our artistic responses. but you know there there is that air also around the song and its history and billie holiday and her history of of a kind of the you know, the decadence in many

ways and the griefs of her life have very much over the years romanticized sentiment to lies, somewhat eroticized. i suspect that that has also happened with strange fruit and that it's often shameful and embarrassing to people. but it's it might it's it's worth thinking about very interesting that find in mellow is on the other is on the other side. yeah all right think that i think people probably want oh my goodness yes we're close to one to ask everybody questions. so let me finish and. thank you. okay. you're here city. yeah. i'm going to slip away now. i'll take a couple of questions from audience while we're getting settled.

what are we think about strange fruit being called by time magazine? the song of the century time particularly after the time the i always my microphone yes particularly after they were so insulting to billie when they describe the song in 1939 when it came out. well what year did they call it? song of the century? 1999. 1999, yeah. 60 years later. hmm i'm glad they caught up eventually. yeah, yes, yes. so does people have questions from the audience? stevie, come up here. oh, thank you. hello. enjoyed all three of the very excellent presenters and i was shocked to hear from you that the black community and the 19 late thirties and forties did not embrace or consume strange. they did some blacks did consume

it. okay. yeah absolutely. that's that's why i mentioned i see my mother and her friends and by the time again was coming up it was absolutely a given by the fifties. but in the forties. and she was also blacks were buying it. but, you know, the distinct thing he's making is those for know those early years and albert is not completely wrong is not wrong at all and the newspapers could be conservative but there were progressives in black communities as well. i'm my parents left wing bought it first you know and then it moved to the genuine generally liberal ones. so is there disagreement about, the black community and the consumption, the song strange fruit, i mean, i'm hearing two things today. i'm thinking about my parents, for example. so my parents marched on washington. my grandmother born in 1903, they were all very angry and

very political. but i don't know this song from my childhood and from being with them and listening to their music, i was aware of strange fruit by nina simone in the i guess the so maybe what we're hearing is two different desires to different sizes avoiding in the late thirties early forties large of blacks were not buying this record it or we are going to listen know to it or writing about it in newspapers. but as the decade moved on, she found again david mentioned the black theaters that she that she performed it in as the decade went on and moved into the fifties, it found more and more of black listeners and fans. i think the point though that you were making is that early on

because it came out of cass cafes the size and we're talking 1939 of a white audience really embraced wouldn't you agree right there just i mean if you go through the black paper is of that era there's nothing there's virtually nothing in there. i mean i through probably a dozen of them and i could only find these very little fragments and nobody was ever focused on it exclusively in writing stories about it. there was almost more coverage for, fine and mellow than there was for strange and. i point out in my book that three main man on milt gabler, barney josephson, abel meeropol, white jewish liberals, lefties and lefties i mean, that's really that was her base of support early on and billie knew exactly what she was you know she was very much aware of what cafe society represented. and in fact in an interview the mid-forties with pie magazine said she herself was a communist

so as i one thing john hammond was always busy. oh well john was busy chastising blacks for a little too lazy if you're a vanderbilt. frankie newton wasn't wasn't a vanderbilt it was yeah but but frankie newton, whom he said was prissy, a leftist as well. so know. and frankie newton was on that record. yes, he was. yeah. yes, sir. i'm here here. i'm michael meyers in new york, civil rights coalition. my question is to the first part of the discussion in roosevelt. we're in the roosevelt house. i really want to know, was billie holiday ever invited to the white house? yeah, she was. and what were the circumstances and why didn't you not? why did strange fruit and the and the and and the movement of blacks for equality affect. franklin roosevelt, as it affected eleanor roosevelt.

yes. she did attend the white house when roosevelt was in the white house. she attended hazel scott, the famous pianist and probably her best friend or one of her best friends. it was it was no, it was a fundraiser for the infantile paralysis. but she had yearly and they and she actually ran into him in the basement when was in his wheelchair. and they had a conversation. but yes, she was invited to the white house. she did go to the white house and hazel scott went her. yes. franklin roosevelt was never as daringly progressive as his wife, eleanor. we know that eleanor was much more liberal after this brilliant dissection of the song. wouldn't it be appropriate for us to close this session with another hearing of the original performance. i'm sorry. yes. let's get a question over here

first. i'm over here. not a lot. c-span wants to. all right, i'm just curious. the new yorker had that ad. so the ad was get people to go to cafe society. it was an ad for the song, which they got. right. i mean, what was the gist of the new yorker ad? i guess read i read the whole thing that it it was just this little tiny ad and apart from the phone number, chelsea something or other and the address sheridan square, that was the entire ad. it was just a little tiny reminder that that billie was singing this song, cafe society. it was really advertisement for the song at society, man, it not yet a record. when she started to sing it. you mentioned billie holiday led us to believe that she was the writer and it's still in the

current version of lady sings the blues. you go by the autobiography. it's still in there. it is not true that. but that's my question whether at any point she acknowledged that. well what she did after that she well she's very possessive of the song she loved this song. i mean, she was very possessive of it. and so what she was satelite iran it was a song written especially me, which was also not true. my question is. whether that. in the very back thank you i have my hands up the longest time like a billy joel regarding billie holiday. does anyone know why where she was born. yes. she died. yes when she died. how she died? yes. you want me to cover that. i just did that. billie thought she was born in

baltimore her family. told her she was born in baltimore, and she didn't find out that she was actually born in philadelphia until 1954, when she got her passport to do her 54 european tour and. she goes, i was born in philadelphia. who know? but again, she continued, tell everybody she was born in baltimore even after she knows she was born in philadelphia. so even though she was born in philadelphia, her mother brought to baltimore when she was a, you know, like a few days. and so she was actually raised in baltimore until was, i'd say 12 ish. and then she moved to new york to, well, first to harlem, then to queens, then back to harlem. yeah, yes. oh, death. she died and july of 1959, on the 17th, she had become ill about six weeks beforehand, they

had hospitalized, hospitalized her at metropolitan hospital up in harlem and there ensued a hall, which i cover in great detail in my book a whole drama because, as she said, when got in there, she's going to arrest me on my deathbed, you know. and sure enough, they did. they plant in my they planted heroin in room and she was arrested for narcotics possession. she was fingerprinted mug shot the whole thing. and so last 2 to 3 weeks of her life was really taken up with having do i mean, they were trying to they wanted to appear before a grand jury. she was bedridden. she literally couldn't get out bed. and they wanted to appear before a grand jury and and florence flo kennedy was her lawyer that time and did a great job and a lot of the attempts that the city government was trying to do

new york's behavior was shameful at that time. the police department, the mayor's office and she eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver. that was the cause of death. the trigger, a heart attack. but i would say that the way she was harassed at the end of her life, had a significant effect on her. it's almost if she had sort of gave up the will to live because of what was going on that was the last question. what was the naacp's take on the did they accept it rejected? i mean, what was their view of, you know, i don't remember any reaction from the naacp i think that instinctively they probably have steered clear of it. it would have just been too left for them. i mean, in my experience, margot, you know, i know. but i, i actually with that. yeah, but it was not the the

cultural, the leftist cultural among blacks when they were progressive at the time. but the song was taken up by the anti-lynching movement. it was delivered to every member of. david you might know the year it happened. i don't remember what year, but it was when they were trying to consider anti-lynching bill, which they'd been trying since. well and joe biden's signed it. i did story once about the man who more than anyone else was responsible for integrating stuyvesant town. and he was he another former communist in fact that unwra generated communist and he had awful he was written out of the acp and thurgood thurgood marshall was very determined to get him nowhere close to the end of acp they wanted communists they didn't want to be saddled with anything smacking of communism. that's right. that's right. that is true.

first, let's thank our panelists for today today. and i think i think our suggestion from the audience is a good one was end with billie singing fruit once again. should we sit down we can come down here.

some country is better with strange fruit blood on the knees and bloody at the root. black bodies swinging in the sun no free strange hanging from the poplar tree.

pastor rose seen of the gallon so no bulging i send that twisted. sent magnolia magnolia sweet and strange then the sudden smell no burning flesh here a fruit for them grow to pluck for the rain together for the wind to suck, for the sun to.

for the tree to drown. here is a stray. and me to. cry cry.

good evening from