The Seed
The events leading up to, and the night of, August 7th 1930. Marion, Indiana.

(The quotations are James Cameron’s own words, from his 1982 autobiography, “A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story”)

Two 19 year olds, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith persuaded 16 year old James Cameron to join them in a robbery at a local “lovers’ lane”.
Handing the younger boy a gun, they found a car parked there. Inside was white factory worker, Claude Deeter and his girlfriend Mary Ball.
When James realised that he recognised the man as one of his regular shoe-shine clients, he declared that he wanted no more to do with it, and handing the gun back to the others, ran for his home.
As he ran off he heard two gunshots fired.

Within hours the three had all been arrested and taken into custody.

Rumours quickly spread that three black men had committed a murder and robbery and raped a white woman.
A mob, numbering thousands, swarmed to the Grant County Courthouse with torches guns and any tool that lay to hand that could be used as a weapon, to “get those goddamn Niggers.” Ku Klux Clan members were among the throng and many police officers mingled amongst, and joked with the crowd.

Despite there being a reported fifty armed guards in the building, the mob smashed down the doors, grabbed Thomas Shipp dragging him out into the street and beat the life out of him.

It seemed “all of those ten to fifteen thousand people were trying to hit him all at once.”
They dragged his body with a rope, hauling it in front of the windows of the cell of Abram Smith, they went for him next.

He too was beaten and mutilated.

“Those who were not close enough to hit him threw rocks and bricks. Somebody rammed a crowbar through his chest several times in great satisfaction.”
The bodies of the two men were dragged with ropes to the court house square and hung from a tree.

Returning to the jail, the lynch-mob grabbed James Cameron and “mauled him all the way to the square.”  The crowd were baying for him to be strung up. He was dragged to the tree and a noose put around his neck.

An unknown woman’s voice called out over the crowd. “Take this boy back. He doesn’t have anything to do with any shooting or raping.” The mob pulled back and Cameron was led back to the jail.

“Slowly, painfully, I started limping back towards the jail, dragging myself as best I could.

Each step was a prayer and each prayer was a ‘thank you, Jesus!’ No one touched me on the way. No one called out any angry epithets. I looked into the faces as I limped along. They were tired, serious faces now, with shame in their eyes.”

The Sowing
The photographer and the photograph

Image source

That night the photographer Lawrence Beitler was present.

Beitler had bought an existing photographic studio business in Marion in 1925

His usual calling was for studio work and panoramic portraits. He later recounted that on the night in question he hadn’t wanted to go to the square or be any where near it, but” taking pictures was his business.”

Certainly, on setting up his camera, some people seemed only too happy to pose for a picture, even pointing out the body of Abram Smith, with his trousers removed by souvenir hunters and replaced with a clansman’s robe.

For whatever reason Beitler took the photograph, it proved to be very lucrative for him, as he spent the next ten days and nights printing thousands of copies which were sold at fifty cents apiece.

The Germination

The teacher and the poem.

In 1936 in the Bronx, New York, a Jewish school teacher, Abel Meeropol teaching English at the De Witt Clinton High School, saw a copy of the photograph. It had a prolific effect upon him. He recounted that the picture “haunted me for days”.
He transferred his thoughts and horror to paper in a three verse poem, which he entitled “Strange Fruit”.

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,
The 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.

Unwilling to go into print in his own name, he offered it for publication in the less Semitic sounding pseudonym of Lewis Allen (the names that would have been given to his two stillborn children)

It was published in the “New York Teacher” , a union publication in January 1937 and later in the Marxist magazine “New Masses”.

He tried to get the poem reproduced as a song and after unsuccessfully approaching Earl Robinson amongst others, to put it to music, he did so himself.

The Cultivation

The entrepreneur, the singer, the record producer and the song

The song gained popularity when it was performed in and around New York. In fact Abel, his wife and black singer Laura Duncan performed it at Madison Square Garden.

Barney Josephson had opened a club in 1938 called Café Society. Here he put on cabaret featuring the talents of African-Americans, which would play to an integrated audience; unlike the Cotton Club which would employ African-Americans but not admit them as clients (The very name of the club thumbed its nose to the pretentious upper society venues, advertising itself as “The wrong place for the right people.”)

After hearing the song he introduced it to Billie Holiday and it was in Café Society that she performed the song for the first time in 1939.

Columbia, her recording label refused to record the song.
They feared that retailing outfits in the south would not only boycott the song, but boycott its other material as well. They also feared negative reaction from its partners on the co-owned CBS radio.

Billie took the song to her friend at Commodore Records, Milt Gabler. He was so moved by the song that he worked out a deal for Vocalian records to record and distribute it.

Columbia, on their part, agreed to lift their contract with her for one recording session, in 1939, in order to allow her to record it.

The Crop

The song became the anthem of the anti-lynching movement and contributed to what would later become the Civil Rights movement.

Not everyone took to the record.

Time magazine condemned it as “a prime piece of musical propaganda” for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).

However in 1999 it called it the song of the century

Billie holiday said “The first time I sang it I thought it was a mistake. There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping and cheering.”

The song became her biggest selling recording, and her version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978.

In October 1939 Samuel Grafton in The New York Post wrote:
“This is about a phonograph record which has obsessed me for two days. It is called Strange Fruit and it will, even after the tenth hearing, make you blink and hold to your chair. Even now, as I think of it, the short hair on the back of my neck tightens and I want to hit somebody. I know who, too. If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise.”

Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, said of the song: “16 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, this was a declaration of war….the beginning of the civil rights movement” 

In her book, “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism” Angela Y. Davis argues that “Strange Fruit” rejuvenated “the tradition of protest in African-American and American traditions of popular music and culture”

Marshall Bowden, in his article “Strange Fruit, Jazz and Civil Rights”: “…it says something more deep and profound than lynching itself is wrong. It intimately whispers to the listener “this is a scene made possible by racism…It is the extreme case, but it is the logical conclusion of the smaller racist acts committed daily by one group against another.” It is this subtext that gives the song power even now when many Americans tell themselves that racial inequality and racism are things of the past, even though they know there is evidence to the contrary.”

Epilogue

Clive Deeter: was murdered at the scene with a gunshot/s.

Mary Ball: declared that she had not been raped and that James Cameron had not been involved in the incident.

Two members of the lynch mob were charged in relation to the murders of Abe Smith and Tommy Shipp but the charges were quickly dropped.

James Cameron: was convicted of being an accessory before the fact to voluntary manslaughter and served four years in prison.

In 1982 he published an auto biography of the night: “A Time of Terror”

After seeing a Jewish holocaust museum, he became the founder and director of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in 1988, a museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, dedicated to the history of lynching in the United States.

He received a pardon in 1993 from Indiana Governor Evan Bayh.

He died on June 11, 2006 at age 92 of congestive heart failure.

He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Milwaukee.

Lawrence Beitler: is believed to have purchased the Dexheimer Studio in Marion, Indiana in 1925. He operated photography studios in Marion through the 1950’s and died in 1961.  Indiana History: Manuscripts Collection

Abel Meeropol continued living and teaching in New York for 27 years. As a member of the American communist party he was unable to continue teaching during the McCarthy era.

Following the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in June 1953, for spying, Abel and his wife adopted their sons Michael and Robert Rosenberg.

(It is interesting to note that Nobel prize-winner, Jean-Paul Sartre, referred to the case against the Rosenbergs as “a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation”.)

Abel continued to write songs including the best sellers “The House That I Live In” for Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee’s “Apples, Peaches and Cherries”

He died in 1986 at the age of 83.

Billie Holiday retained “Strange Fruit” as a regular part of her performances for the next twenty years. The song went to number 16 in the charts on its release in 1939.

It is difficult to know what is true and what is not about her life, due to discrepancies in her autobiography “Lady Sings the Blues” Certainly she was among the first black women to work with a white orchestra.

Critic John Bush wrote that she “changed the art of American pop vocals forever.”

Despite a having a successful career, drink and drugs and a bad choice of men were her downfall.

She died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 44, July 17 1959. She had 70 cents in the bank.

Milt Gabler founded Commodore records, and went on to have a successful career at Decca, signing and producing such acts as Bill Haley and the Comets and producing albums such as “Jesus Christ Superstar”

For his lifetime achievements he received the Trustees Award at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science in the 1991 Grammy awards and in 1993 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by his nephew, the actor Billy Crystal.

Milt died in 2001 at the age of 90.

“There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.” Mahatma Ghandi

It is an interesting fact that if an American citizen was born on, or before August 7th 1930 and was alive in 2009, then in a lifetime, that person has gone from Strange Fruit to Barack Obama being elected as president.

The picture and quotations are used

·                           To illustrate the subject in question

·                           Where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information

The Incredible Story of Strange Fruit © C. Jordan

Other work by this writer:

In the Shadow of Jack the Ripper: The Lambeth Poisoner

The Mystery of the Screaming Man

The Mystery of Bedlam Revealed