Strange Fruit By Eva Stuart Grade 8, Jackson Creek Middle School

The smell of spring fills the air. Flowers are blooming and sunshine filters through the large vibrant trees. You see butterflies and bumblebees lazily flying towards the fragrant flora, and children playing with their toys on the full green lawns. The air is hot, but you don’t mind. Then you hear noises. Cheering and screaming rips through your ears. Your small town utopia toples in on itself as angry people of all ages drag three black men through the street. You smell the metallic scent of blood cutting through the humid air. Women clap as men crack the arm bones of one. He can no longer try to escape. The other one cries out as he is repeatedly stabbed. There are no police nearby. You want to scream and cry and fight and vomit all at once, but you are paralyzed. Stuck in time. The screaming stops. One man is dead. Another is hoisted up the central tree. Snap! His pleading for freedom is silenced. A man snaps a photo of the dangling bodies. The scene described above is what you might’ve seen if you were in Marion, Indiana on March 7, 1930. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith were publically killed, and a photographer named Lawrence Beitler snapped a photo of the aftermath. White citizens are smiling and giving thumbs up underneath the corpses of these men. This image quickly became one of the most well known photos of lynching in America. Thousands of copies were sold, and the picture was burned into the minds of Americans in all corners of the nation. Abel Meeropol was a normal white American man. He taught High School English classes at Dewitt Clinton High School, and lived in New York with his family. But then something changed. He saw a picture of two black men hanging from a tree in a small town somewhere Midwest. Meeropol later said that the photograph “haunted him for days.” He wanted to make a difference, so in 1937 he wrote a poem titled Bitter Fruit. It symbolized the inhumanity of slavery by comparing black people to a bad crop that is treated as though it is worthless and unordinary. Meeropol published his poem under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. Meeropol transformed Bitter Fruit into a song titled Strange Fruit and it became widely popular when artist Billie Holiday performed it in 1939. She performed the song for the first time in the first integrated nightclub in New York, Café Society. Strange Fruit became time’s song of the Century and a powerful symbol of the movement. Holiday and Meeropol inspire me because they knew that something wasn’t right and fought against it using their talent and creativity. In this time of police brutality and racist government powers, it is easy to be angry. In fact you should be angry. Take that fire inside of you and make a change through words or song, just like Holiday and Meeropol. The twenty first century has been a turning point for fighting for equality in many communities, including the African American community, and that’s because we are finding our voices. We are coming together as a nation, and ending what we know is wrong. Don’t stand paralyzed, use your voice and join millions in making a change.