Prelude and aftermath of a lynching in Georgia, depicting the South's unsolved racial problem.

Tells the story of how Billie Holiday and songwriter Abel Meeropol combined their talents to create "Strange Fruit," the iconic protest song that brought attention to lynching and racism in America.

The story of the song that foretold a movement and the Lady who dared sing it. Billie Holiday's signature tune, 'Strange Fruit', with its graphic and heart-wrenching portrayal of a lynching in the South, brought home the evils of racism as well as being an inspiring mark of resistance. The song's powerful, evocative lyrics - written by a Jewish communist schoolteacher - portray the lynching of a black man in the South. In 1939, its performance sparked controversy (and sometimes violence) wherever Billie Holiday went. Not until sixteen years later did Rosa Parks refuse to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Yet 'Strange Fruit' lived on, and Margolick chronicles its effect on those who experienced it first-hand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students, budding activists, even the waitresses and bartenders who worked the clubs.

It's 1927 in the town of Chatterlee, Mississippi, drowned by heavy rains. The Mississippi River is rising, threatening to break open not only the levees, but also the racial and social divisions of this former plantation town. A fiery messenger from the skies heralds the appearance of a being, one that will rip open the tensions in Chatterlee. Savior, or threat? It depends on where you stand. All the while, the waters are still rapidly rising...

"In its title, Strange Fruit refers to the song of a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday and to the malign persecution that drove Kamau Brathwaite from his New York home to resettlement in his native Barbados. But the title also points to the enigma of beauty created out of that experience of cultural lynching, in poems of urgency, elegance, wisdom and brave humour. ... It is a collection full of beauties of form, phrase and sound, such as in the poem “Sleep Widow” where instead of finding comfort, the poet and loved woman “bull-fight like lock-horm logga-head until the evening pools the grief along our edges/ and cools us to this peace”, the very sounds in the poem fighting their way towards resolution."--Back cover.

Recorded by jazz legend Billie Holiday in 1939, "Strange Fruit" is considered to be the first significant song of the civil rights movement and the first direct musical assault upon racial lynchings in the South. Originally sung in New York's Cafe Society, these revolutionary lyrics take on a life of their own in this revealing account of the song and the struggle it personified. Strange Fruit not only chronicles the civil rights movement from the '30s on, it examines the lives of the beleaguered Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol, the white Jewish schoolteacher and communist sympathizer who wrote the song that would have an impact on generations of fans, black and white, unknown and famous, including performers Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, and Sting.

Debates about race are back and they're only getting bigger. There has recently been a massive upsurge in scientific racial research. The US government has licensed a heart drug to be used only on African Americans. A genetic study claims that Jews are more intelligent because their history of financial occupations favored genes associated with cleverness. Malik argues that this rise in racial ideas is paradoxically due to the efforts of liberal anti-racism.

Set between the rise of the U.S. and Japan as Pacific imperial powers in the 1890s and the aftermath of the latter’s defeat in World War II, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific traces the interrelated migrations of African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos across U.S. domains. Offering readings in literature, blues and jazz culture, film,theatre, journalism, and private correspondence, Vince Schleitwiler considers how the collective yearnings and speculative destinies of these groups were bound together along what W.E.B. Du Bois called the world-belting color line. The links were forged by the paradoxical practices of race-making in an aspiring empire—benevolent uplift through tutelage, alongside overwhelming sexualized violence—which together comprise what Schleitwiler calls “imperialism’s racial justice.” This process could only be sustained through an ongoing training of perception in an aesthetics of racial terror, through rituals of racial and colonial violence that also provide the conditions for an elusive countertraining. With an innovative prose style, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific pursues the poetic and ethical challenge of reading, or learning how to read, the black and Asian literatures that take form and flight within the fissures of imperialism’s racial justice. Through startling reinterpretations of such canonical writers as James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Toshio Mori, and Carlos Bulosan, alongside considerations of unexpected figures such as the musician Robert Johnson and the playwright Eulalie Spence, Schleitwiler seeks to reactivate the radical potential of the Afro-Asian imagination through graceful meditations on its representations of failure, loss, and overwhelming violence.

"These lynching dramas may not present the picture that America wants to see of itself, but these visions cannot be ignored because they are grounded—not only in the truth of white racism's toxic effect on our national existence but also in the truth that there exists a contesting, collective response that is part of an on-going and continually building momentum." —Theaatre Journal "A unique, powerful collection worthy of high school and college classroom assignment and discussion." —Bookwatch This anthology is the first to address the impact of lynching on U.S. theater and culture. By focusing on women's unique view of lynching, this collection of plays reveals a social history of interracial cooperation between black and white women and an artistic tradition that continues to evolve through the work of African American women artists. Included are plays spanning the period 1916 to 1994 from playwrights such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Lillian Smith, and Michon Boston.