Yesterday, in teaching a class on the development of the Civil Rights Movement, I started off by playing these two very important songs. The first song King new well, the second, written and sung after his death, he certainly would have understood and respected, even its voice reflected the rage in the African-Amercian Northern slum ghettoes that he encountered in the very last years of his life.
The first song is what I consider to be the most powerful anti-racist song in U.S. history, Billie Holliday's recording of "Strange Fruit," a meditation on the barbarity known as lynching. First recorded in 1939 at a time of ongoing struggle to enact anti-lynching legislation, the song was based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, New York teacher and Communist who wrote major work under the name of Lewis Allen. The poem was originally published in The New Masses, the CPUSA supported cultural journal, which continued to the tradition of The Masses, the pre World War I Socialist Paty supported cultural journal. After the political executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, Abel Meeropol and his wife adopted their young sons, Robert and Michael, who took their names. The song is a powerful today, and as meaningful in today's world, as it was then,
The second song, originally from a 1971 album, the classic "Johanessburg" from Gil Scot Heron, the African-American singer composer, whose songs reflected the influences of the Black power political and cultural movements, third world liberation movements, and a larger peace movement, can be seen as a tribute to both Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Journalists often make the point that the song raised consciousness in the U.S. about Apartheid. Gil Scot Heron was making the connection between racism in South Africa, the U.S. and everywhere.
Norman Markowitz
