Billie Holiday: There was Never a Federal Campaign against "Strange Fruit"--Part 1 of 4; Award Winner

NOTE: This series is an expanded version of my article that was originally published in Jazz Times magazine, and I thank the editor Mac Randall for his fine work. Here is the original article, winner of the 2022 Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism in the pop music field. Let’s begin:

In Lee Daniels’ film The United States vs. Billie Holiday, the words “Earle Theater, Philadelphia, May 27, 1947” flash onscreen, and one sees a row of policemen, with Holiday’s manager Joe Glaser standing at the center of them. Billie comes onstage and sings the first words of “Strange Fruit,” solo. Immediately, Glaser orders the police, “Get her off that stage!” and they storm forward.

But wait! Holiday was not at the Earle Theater on that date. She never sang “Strange Fruit” as the first number in a set, and never sang that or anything else a cappella. Glaser didn’t generally attend the performances of the many artists he managed. Most significant, never in her entire career was Billie stopped while performing “Strange Fruit.” Yes, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics pursued Holiday for her drug use. But there was no federal objection to the song “Strange Fruit,” nor was there any campaign to suppress it—certainly not during the Truman administration, of all things! (About Truman, see, for example, here.)

If you believed this film—and so far as I can tell, almost everyone did, even the many critics who rightly panned it for artistic reasons, for being poorly made—you have been the victim of one of the worst instances of rewriting history in the annals of Hollywood. Even the usual spate of articles about “what’s true in this based-on-fact movie” missed the boat. The Los Angeles Times stated that “[a]lthough some details of the relationships have been fictionalized …, the … conspiracies are well documented.” Documented where exactly? In the movie, and nowhere else.

I was inspired to write this report when I read and heard supposedly reputable academics citing this movie as though it were proven fact. Thanks to them passing this tale on to their students, the mythical claim of a campaign to suppress “Strange Fruit” is already becoming part of the “official record.” But, as I’ll show, it’s built on a misunderstanding of a quote attributed to Billie in an interview for DownBeat in 1947.

I want to be very clear—I mean what I say, and Only what I say. Am I saying that the government’s campaign against narcotics wasn’t all that bad? No. In my opinion, drugs should never have been criminalized. Am I saying that Black people like Holiday weren’t unfairly targeted by the police in this country? Of course not. It’s crystal clear that they got worse treatment, and still do. I am Only saying that “Strange Fruit” had nothing to do with that, and that it is thoroughly irresponsible to add that to our list of complaints against the federal government. We can point to plenty of problems with the past actions of our government, without fabricating things, and without getting our “facts” from Hollywood movies! Nobody who writes or teaches should be using this movie as a source of information.

To begin with, there is no record anywhere in U.S. government files of such a campaign; its presumed director Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, only mentioned Holiday two or three times in all his writings, and always sympathetically, as a victim of “hoods, quick-money characters, grafters, and pushers” (his 1961 book The Murderers). He never specifically mentioned “Strange Fruit” or even demonstrated awareness that it existed. In his book The Protectors (1964), he described her as “the lady of the white gardenias and boxer pups, of ‘Travelin’ Light’ and half a hundred other heartbreaking songs.”

(By the way, The Protectors was written with the help of the brilliant Black novelist John A. Williams, who I knew a little when he taught in English and I taught in Music at the Rutgers University campus in Newark, New Jersey. He retired from Rutgers in 1994. About Anslinger, Williams wrote: “Anslinger wanted to do this book, but he couldn't write. I could, and I needed money, as usual. I'd never worked with any kind of cop before, but I found Harry to be very cooperative with his files and chats. He was also fun to be with, since he drank a good martini and told lots of stories.”)

When it was announced in advance that Daniels’ film would focus on the government’s attempts to suppress “Strange Fruit,” some common-sense questions should have been raised, if one thought about it for a moment:

1. Why did nobody hear about this until recently? Holiday has been thoroughly researched. The late Linda Kuehl, who planned to write a biography of the singer, left behind an archive (owned by Toby Byron) of interviews with 125 people who knew her. Three books and two documentaries have drawn on this collection, and there has been no mention of such a campaign. It’s not even mentioned in published summaries of Kuehl’s interviews with the narcotics agents themselves, Jimmy Fletcher (who was assigned to Holiday’s case in 1947) and Colonel George White (who supervised her arrest in San Francisco in 1949—she was later cleared). And why didn’t Billie mention it in her book Lady Sings the Blues, written with William Dufty, even though she does include long discussions of “Strange Fruit” and of her 1947 arrest? Answer: The reason it only came to light recently is that it is a falsehood created recently.

2.     If, as the film depicts, the campaign began in 1947, why then? Holiday had been performing and recording the song since 1939. Answer: The DownBeat article from which this myth was created dates from 1947.

3.     If the police were to arrest Billie for singing “Strange Fruit,” what would have been the charge? The song is a poetic picture of the horror of lynching, with no potentially libelous or national security-endangering references to any government or individuals. Murder, of which lynching was one horrible type, was already illegal in every state. True, repeated attempts to pass a federal anti-lynching law during the first half of the 20th century had been shamefully blocked, as was all civil-rights legislation for many years, by a coalition of Southern states. But there was no support for lynching in the Truman administration of 1947, which would shortly order the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces. Answer: No charge would have held water.

It’s important to clarify that lynching, like all murder, was 100% illegal. The movie begins and ends with title cards indicating that anti-lynching bills were never passed—which is true, as I’ll explain—but falsely hints that therefore lynching was legal—which would have been unthinkable in any civilized society, and is false. Lynching was Never Ever legal--it was Murder, which was a crime in every state, of course! It mostly occurred in remote locations where there was little police presence, and mostly in Southern states. Before the Civil War, primarily whites were lynched, but as the years went on, eventually most of the victims were black. But the problem was that in these small Southern towns, many people participated in lynchings, and they covered for each other. The result was that usually nobody was arrested, or if so, they were usually released for "lack of evidence" because nobody would agree to serve as a witness.

The many many bills that were proposed but never passed by the federal government were not intended to make lynching illegal--it already was illegal, at the state level. They were intended to allow federal law enforcement to step in, because the state legal systems were not doing their job of prosecuting these murders. If one ever bothered to read what these bills proposed, one would learn that they would have set up mandatory prison sentences for all participants, penalized local law enforcement with hefty fines if they failed to properly investigate lynchings, and allowed for federal agents to come in and take over if state authorities failed to do their duty. Sadly, such bills could only get enough votes to pass if the Southern states voted for them, which of course they would never do, since they were the very states that were protecting the guilty murderers!

(Some info on the federal anti-lynching bills is here.)

So where did this fictional government conspiracy come from? I tracked down its origin, and it is, as you might expect, from a totally unreliable source. That will be the subject of Part Two of this series.

P.S. Special thanks to Julia Blackburn, Kevin Whitehead, Stuart Nicholson, Donald Clarke, David Margolick, Daniel Peterson, Aidan Levy, Loren Schoenberg, Rob Hudson (Manager, Carnegie Hall archives), and Tab Lewis (Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration).