Today's Strange Fruit Mention of the Day: Protest songs in honor of Black Music Month (in June), featuring Joe Hinton and Billie Holiday.

"In 1939, singer Billie Holiday recorded a song called 'Strange Fruit' – a song composed by Jewish American Abel Meeropol (under the pseudonym Lewis Allan). The story goes that the lyrics were taken from a poem Meeropol wrote which was published in 1937. The protest song depicts the lynching of Black Americans hanging on trees like fruit. It makes you wonder why it took until 2022 to pass the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law."

Today’s Strange Fruit Mention of the Day: “Brooklyn-based photographer Jon Henry has spent the last nine years in the making of his project ‘Stranger Fruit,’ a book with photos of Black mothers from every state in the country, who worry about the safety of their sons in the hands of the police.

Today's Strange Fruit Mention of the Day comes to us from Torri Williams, a Coalition Leader of the Marion Community Remembrance Project. The city of Marion in Indiana served as the inspiration for Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching song, "Strange Fruit," when he came across a gruesome photo of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abe Smith which took place there.

Torri shared with us the winning entry of a recent Racial Justice Art Contest, a sculpture entitled "Strange Fruit," created by 17-year-old student artist, Claudia McGinness.

Today’s Strange Fruit Mention of the Day features “Tony-nominated and Bessie-winning choreographer Donald Byrd and his Seattle-based company Spectrum Dance Theater” and their Feb 10-13 dance-theatre performance of Strange Fruit at Montclair State University.

As Byrd explains, "For 100+ years, there's been no acknowledgement for the most part about these lynchings. It's a little bit like those people have not been buried. We are offering a prayer up to them. To their memory."

Strange Fruit MOTD: “‘The people on my quilt didn’t get funerals’: 10-ft quilt at ArtPrize honors victims of lynching"

"‘They were lynched. They were murdered. They were shot. So, I want [viewers] to look at it as memorial for ppl who have been murdered in this most horrific way,’ says April Shipp. Her quilt ‘Strange Fruit: A Century of Lynching & Murder’ is on display at the Grand Rapids African American Museum and Archives.”