Today's Strange Fruit Mention of the Day: Protest songs in honor of Black Music Month (in June), featuring Joe Hinton and Billie Holiday.

"In 1939, singer Billie Holiday recorded a song called 'Strange Fruit' – a song composed by Jewish American Abel Meeropol (under the pseudonym Lewis Allan). The story goes that the lyrics were taken from a poem Meeropol wrote which was published in 1937. The protest song depicts the lynching of Black Americans hanging on trees like fruit. It makes you wonder why it took until 2022 to pass the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law."

Today’s Strange Fruit Mention of the Day: “Brooklyn-based photographer Jon Henry has spent the last nine years in the making of his project ‘Stranger Fruit,’ a book with photos of Black mothers from every state in the country, who worry about the safety of their sons in the hands of the police.

In what has become an annual 4th of July tradition, we’re sharing this remarkable alternative "National Anthem: Arise Arise" by activist artist and RFC friend, Jean Rohe. It's gorgeous and hits on so many topics, so gracefully… We love to imagine stadiums of people rising to sing an anthem that references "Strange Fruit" and the electric chair and back alley abortions and slavery and class issues and everything else this gorgeous song explores. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay1iC1zt24A

Earlier this month marked Paul Robeson's 125th birthday. Robeson was a fierce civil rights and antifascist activist, musician and a supporter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (he even participated in a rally to save the Rosenbergs in 1953).

According to The Progressive, even the words inscribed on his tombstone encapsulate his passion and resistance. They read, "The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."

Happy birthday to a human rights legend.

Today's Strange Fruit Mention of the Day comes to us from Torri Williams, a Coalition Leader of the Marion Community Remembrance Project. The city of Marion in Indiana served as the inspiration for Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching song, "Strange Fruit," when he came across a gruesome photo of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith which took place there.

Torri shared with us the winning entry of a recent Racial Justice Art Contest, a sculpture entitled "Strange Fruit," created by 17-year-old student artist, Claudia McGinness.

Today's #StrangeFruitMOTD comes from Austin, TX where a Houston native high school student, Douglas Mills, Jr. auditioned for this season of American Idol with a powerful rendition of "Strange Fruit."

The song, written by Abel Meeropol and made famous by Billie Holiday, protests lynchings of Black Americans and is a staple of the civil rights movement.

The emotional and captivating performance left the judges in awe. After giving Mills a standing ovation, country music singer Luke Bryan said, "I'm speechless about it."

This video from SALT was produced in 2014 to honor the 75th anniversary of Billie Holiday's first recording of "Strange Fruit."

The narrators take a faith-based/religious lens, which we think is pretty interesting, drawing parallels between the story of the Marion, IN lynching that inspired the writing of the protest song, "Strange Fruit," and passages from the Bible.

The video also speaks to the power of art and performance. Of Abel Meeropol and his writing of "Strange Fruit," Rev. Dr. Frank A. Thomas (one of the two narrators) says,

One day after her birthday, another Nina Simone-focused Strange Fruit Mention of the Day highlights her “five greatest isolated vocals”: “Billie Holiday is the artist...most intrinsically linked with ‘Strange Fruit’... During the ’60s, Simone paid tribute to Holiday by covering the classic. Sadly, the lyrics were still relevant as Black people fought for their rights to be recognized as equal citizens. She was a key player in the Civil Rights Movement, and the raw emotion in her voice throughout this isolated version of ‘Strange Fruit’ will touch your core.”

#OnThisDay, February 14, 1910 Abel Meeropol was born. He was a teacher and a poet, most famous for writing the anti-lynching poem, "Bitter Fruit," which he would later adapt to music and retitle as the song, "Strange Fruit."

He once said, “I wrote ‘Strange Fruit’ because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetrate it.”

Today’s Strange Fruit Mention of the Day features “Tony-nominated and Bessie-winning choreographer Donald Byrd and his Seattle-based company Spectrum Dance Theater” and their Feb 10-13 dance-theatre performance of Strange Fruit at Montclair State University.

As Byrd explains, "For 100+ years, there's been no acknowledgement for the most part about these lynchings. It's a little bit like those people have not been buried. We are offering a prayer up to them. To their memory."