Strange Fruit

By Billie Holiday and Lewis Allen


Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.


Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.


Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.


The words were written by Lewis Allen, a New York school teacher, and the music by the famous Billie Holiday to protest the treatment of African Americans in the South and to bring attention to the lynchings. The lynchings were generally a result of the enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the South. Explore the following web sites to get a feeling for life in the Jim Crow South and the world in which Richard Wright lived. After you are done, write a periodic paper. This assignment and the web sites are linked on Oldani's homework central page.


Jim Crow museum http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/


Interactive maps, be sure look at the map on lynchings: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/themap/map.html


Personal stories of people from the Jim Crow South: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people.html


The Government and Jim Crow: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/struggle.html


American Holocaust is a site that graphically shows what happened at lynchings: http://www.maafa.org/


The Periodic Paper


Step one: Before you start exploring the “text� (Websites in this case.) think of questions you have, information you might need, and issues to consider for writing your paper.


Step two: Read and analyze the websites above or the “text�. “Text� is used loosely, “text� could be in the form of an article, a picture, a cartoon, a video essay, a painting, a poem, or a website for you to analyze.


Step three: Write a one page paper that:


Due at the end of class