may have been localized affairs, but as Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in An American Dilemma, his classic 1944 study of race relations in the United States, they brutalized feelings everywhere. “Even in the North, some people have ceased to be concerned when another lynching occurs, and they jest about going South to see a lynching,” he wrote. Meeropol, clearly, was not among them. In fact, it is possible that what inspired him to write “Strange Fruit” was a double lynching that took place north of the Mason Dixon line—in Marion, Indiana in 1930—immortalized in a shocking and widely publicized photograph. In any case, it was around that time that Meeropol, then in his early thirties, came across in a civil rights magazine a photograph of a particularly ghastly lynching, and he said it had haunted him for days. So he wrote a poem about it, one that the Communist journal The New Masses agreed in early 1936 to publish but that first saw print—as “Bitter Fruit”—in the January 1937 issue of The New York Teacher, a union publication.
Meeropol often asked others, most notably Earl Robinson, to set his poems to music. But with “Strange Fruit,” he insisted on doing the task himself. The song was then performed regularly in left-wing circles—by Meeropol's wife, by progressive friends at gatherings in hotels and bungalow colonies around New York, by members of the local teachers union, by a black vocalist named Laura Duncan (including once at Madison Square Garden), and by a quartet of black singers at a fund-raiser for the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. As it happened, the co-producer of that fund-raiser, Robert Gordon, was also directing the first floor show at Café Society, which had opened in December 1938. The featured attraction: Billie Holiday, who had just quit Artie Shaw's band in part because she'd been forced to take the freight elevator during a gig at a New York hotel. And not just any hotel, but one named after Abraham Lincoln.
tragic story of lynching
One of the first numbers we put on was called “Strange Fruit Grows on Southern Trees,’ the tragic story of lynching. Imagine putting that on in a nightclub!
—Nightclub owner Barney Josephson, 1942
CAFÉ SOCIETY, “a nightclub to take the stuffing out of stuffed shirts,” where left-wing WPA types (Ad Reinhardt, John Groth, Adolph Dehn, Sidney Hoff, William Gropper) did the murals and a simian-looking Hitler hung from the ceiling by the coat check—was unusual even for New York City. Dubbing itself “the wrong place for the Right people,” it mocked the empty celebrity worship, right-wing politics, snootiness, and racial discrimination of popular New York hangouts like the Stork Club.
At Café Society, the doormen wore rags and ragged white gloves and stood by as the customers opened the doors themselves; the bartenders were all veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; blacks and whites fraternized on stage and off. As one press account described it, the club had “no girlie line, no smutty gags, no Uncle Tom comedy.” George Avakian, the famed record producer, wrote that “the café was one of the ‘good’ places in which Negroes were permitted, and, if possible, given the best tables, while anyone in evening clothes would be placed behind a pillar or almost in the kitchen.” Its politics were somewhere left of the New Deal; when Eleanor Roosevelt made what might have been her only foray into a New York nightclub, it was to Café Society that she went.
Located in a one-time basement speakeasy on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, christened by the columnist and playwright Clare Booth Luce, (and commemorated today in the mosaic murals at the nearby subway stop), Café Society was the brainchild of Barney Josephson, a shoe salesman from Trenton, New Jersey with progressive sympathies. Its patrons, the historian David Stowe has written, consisted of “labor leaders, intellectuals, writers, jazz lovers, celebrities, students and assorted leftists.” As Michael Denning, an American Studies professor at Yale has put it, Café Society represented a unique synthesis of cultures, blending the politically radical cabarets ofWeimar Berlin and Paris with the jazz clubs and revues of Harlem. In both its Village incarnation and at a second location in midtown Manhattan, Café Society attracted people like Nelson Rockefeller, Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Heilman, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson; Lena Horne, Teddy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Imogene Coca, Carol Channing, and Zero Mostel performed there. It was probably the only place in America where “Strange Fruit” could have been sung and savored.
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