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THERE WERE LYNCHINGS IN THE NORTH, TOO  
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James Barron
March 6, 2024
New York Times
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_ An NYU project examines the history of lynching's after the Civil
War, including one in New York State. Billie Holiday sang a disturbing
ballad called “Strange Fruit” for the first time in 1939, referred
to lynching's in the South, and also the North _

Billie Holiday recording in New York City, in December 1951. (Vanity
Fair),

 

One night in 1939, in a Greenwich Village cafe that billed itself as
“the wrong place for the Right people,” Billie Holiday sang a
disturbing ballad called “Strange Fruit” for the first time.
“There wasn’t even a patter of applause when I finished,” she
said later. “Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then
suddenly everyone was clapping.”

The song referred to lynchings in the South. But after the Civil War,
there were also lynchings in the North, including one in New York
State.

A new website and research project, “Lynchings in the North,”
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of racial violence as part of the “Hidden Legacies” initiative
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by Rachel Swarns, a former New York Times reporter who is a journalism
professor at N.Y.U. Swarns is collaborating with the National
Memorial for Peace and Justice
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identify lynching victims, and her students are writing obituaries
based on archival records and interviews.

“The fact is that we often think about lynchings in the South, and
thousands took place in the South,” Swarns said. “But it’s
striking that Billie Holiday performed that song in New York, because
racial violence happened in the North, too, and in New York. It’s
important for Americans to know and understand that and reckon with
that. I was born and raised in New York, and I had no idea.”

She said she had come across — “completely by accident” — a
mention of a Black man who was lynched in Port Jervis, N.Y., in 1892.
“I thought, how did I not ever hear about this,” she said.

A map on the “Lynchings in the North” website identified him as
Robert Lewis, who was hanged as a crowd watched. Swarns said he had
worked in a hotel. He was accused of assaulting a white woman but said
he had been put up to it by her white boyfriend, who had been
blackmailing her.

One article from a few days after the lynching said that public
opinion had swung from “unqualified approval” to “bringing the
leaders of the deed to justice.” Several suspects were identified,
but there were no convictions.

Nationally, Swarns said, more than 4,000 African Americans were
lynched between 1877 and 1950. There was an anti-lynching protest in
Times Square in 1937, the year the poem that became “Strange
Fruit” was first published.

The words — and, later, the music — were the work of a Jewish high
school teacher from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol. The author David
Margolick
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that Meeropol and his wife were “closet Communists” who gave a
percentage of their earnings to the party. Meeropol, using the
pseudonym Lewis Allan, was also a prolific poet and songwriter.

“Strange Fruit” became closely identified with Holiday, but she
was not the first to sing it. According to Margolick, the song had
been “regularly performed in left-wing circles” and, at Madison
Square Garden, by a Black singer, Laura Duncan.

But that was before “Strange Fruit” became Holiday’s closing
number at Café Society, the Sheridan Square establishment that,
Margolick said, deliberately “mocked the empty celebrity worship,
right-wing politics and racial exclusion of places like the Stork
Club,” the swanky uptown nightclub. The Café Society’s owner,
Barney Josephson, once said that he had “wanted a club where blacks
and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out
front.”

Josephson said that when he looked at the sheet music for “Strange
Fruit,” Meeropol’s lyrics brought tears to his eyes.

“Strange Fruit” was not Meeropol’s only footnote in history. He
raised the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed
in 1953 after they were convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets
to the Soviet Union. The boys were raised as Michael Meeropol and
Robert Meeropol; they wrote in 2015 that they had concluded
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their father was guilty of conspiracy but not of “atomic spying.”
They also wrote that neither of their parents deserved to be executed.

_[JAMES BARRON writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup
of what’s happening in the city, for The New York Times. Email:
[email protected]]_
 

* lynching
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* Strange Fruit
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* Billie Holiday
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* Racism
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* African Americans
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* South
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* Abel Meeropol
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* Rosenbergs
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* Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
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* McCarthy Period
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* McCarthyism
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* Café Society
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