Strange Fruit Ap Language

The song Strange Fruit was first sang by Billie Holiday, who was a new performer on stage at Cafe Society, a new and popular cabaret club. The song was written in 1937 by a man named Abel Meeropol to criticize the racial discrimination in American South. Abel Meeropol, who was a Jewish-American school teacher from New York City, wrote Strange Fruit after seeing a shocking photograph of a lynching in a magazine. This song became very popular in 1939, the year where racial tension was at its height. Racism and ethnic discrimination in America has been a serious issue since the Civil War. The Jim Crow law, which was a policy of segregating against the blacks, was enacted from the 1880’s into the 1960s, and was enforced by most of American states. It was a tough time for African American people in United States. The song Strange Fruit was written for these people, who were experiencing an extremely tough period, as they hardly gained any acceptance in the society. Billy Holiday was the perfect example of a person discriminated by the society because of her skin color. She was an extraordinarily talented singer who could not find fortune in the music industry dominated by white people. It was important for her to sing that song, because …show more content…
The phrase “blood on the leaves and blood at the root” is used as a metaphor to symbolize the dead bodies that can be found anywhere; hanging on the trees and abandoned on the land. Also, the author of the song presented the second stanza wonderfully as he described a peaceful scene with sweet aroma suddenly turned into an ugly scene with gross smell. The stanza proved that the undemocratic ‘white’ people really don’t care about the other race, they just wanted to get rid of them. The lyrics were written in a manner which created deep feelings and thoughts about the huge injustice that the ‘black’ people are