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niyad

(120,610 posts)
Fri Apr 27, 2018, 12:14 PM Apr 2018

How "Strange Fruit" Killed Billie Holiday

. . .


At times, her performance of the song was met with fierce pushback. Though many people knew that lynchings of African-Americans in the South were common, there was resistance to ending the practice among Southern whites. Racism, combined with a popular desire to limit federal power over local concerns,kept people in the North from making any successful moves to end lynchings in the South. In the end, Billie Holiday’s insistence on performing “Strange Fruit” may have been responsible for her demise. One of the primary attempts to silence her came from a man named Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and an extreme racist, even for the 1930s. As Johann Hari details in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Anslinger claimed that narcotics made black people forget their place in the fabric of American society, and that jazz musicians were dangerous in particular, creating “Satanic” music under the influence of marijuana.

Holiday, who throughout her career called public attention to the devastating impact of white supremacy, was also a drug user. She drew Anslinger’s notice, and he ordered Holiday to cease performing the song. Holiday refused, and Anslinger ramped up his efforts to silence her. After one of Anslinger’s men was paid to track Holiday and frame her with buying and using heroin, she spent eighteen months in prison. Upon her release in 1948, the federal government refused to renew her cabaret performer’s license, mandatory for any performer playing or singing at any club or bar serving alcohol.

This utterly undermined her career. Although Holiday was able to perform multiple sold-out Carnegie Hall performances over the next several years, she could no longer travel the nightclub circuit. Unable to perform regularly at the venues she loved, and to stop remembering a childhood that included being raped at age ten, and working in a brothel with her mother, Holiday eventually began using heroin again. When she checked into a New York hospital in 1959, her liver was failing and cancerous. She was emaciated, and her heart and lungs were compromised. Despite her condition, she didn’t want to stay there. “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them,” she presciently told friends and family. Indeed, Anslinger’s men, sensing a macabre opportunity, showed up at her hospital bedside, handcuffed her to the bed, took mugshots, removed gifts that people had brought to the room—flowers, radio, record player, chocolates, magazines—and stationed two cops at the door. Even so, as doctors began methadone treatment, Holiday began to improve, gaining some weight and improving slowly. But then Anslinger’s men prevented hospital staff from administering any further methadone. She succumbed to death within days.


http://progressive.org/dispatches/strange-fruit-caused-the-murder-of-billie-holiday-180220/

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Dennis Donovan

(27,308 posts)
4. Harry Anslinger was a HORRIBLE racist...
Fri Apr 27, 2018, 01:15 PM
Apr 2018
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger#The_campaign_against_marijuana_1930%E2%80%931937

He worked to have cannabis made illegal so it would give him an excuse to bust African-Americans and Mexican-Americans for using it (or, many times, they were FRAMED).

Bernardo de La Paz

(51,205 posts)
5. Thank you for posting this here & elsewhere. Must not forget. What a horrible man in so many ways.nt
Fri Apr 27, 2018, 02:30 PM
Apr 2018

lunatica

(53,410 posts)
7. Anslinger would feel right at home today
Fri Apr 27, 2018, 03:22 PM
Apr 2018

He would make it to the top easily, and hob nob with Republican governors, congress people and the President as well as our Attorney General. He would be an important Fundamentalist Church leader and would have his own radio or tv talk show. He would be a regular guest on Fox, or maybe even a host.

Eliot Rosewater

(32,537 posts)
10. Harry Anslinger, minus most brain cells, is now ACTUALLY and for real in the god damn Oval Office.
Mon Apr 30, 2018, 11:20 AM
Apr 2018

NOW

2018

Eliot Rosewater

(32,537 posts)
15. Night after night for months I watched as Rachel Maddow reported on the most
Mon Apr 30, 2018, 11:32 AM
Apr 2018

vile and disgusting human beings known to humankind showing support for Rump and Rump not denouncing said support.

Rachel reported this with a dropped jaw BUT with a tone of reassurance that no matter how bad this is, ultimately we wont have to deal with it because Hillary will win. She never said that but we felt that.

We knew Rachel believed that and we believed it and so on.

Hillary did win. The KGB flipped the counting of the votes in 4 states enough to make a difference.

The thing about this living nightmare are the alleged people on the left who say Rusher not so important but UNSEATING democrats is important. Those people are working to keep the GOP in power either on purpose or through ignorance of the system.

Right now as I type this women and children will be turned away at the border, some will die and we will do this to them ON PURPOSE.

niyad

(120,610 posts)
16. sadly, it was always on my mind that the pukes would do their best to steal the election--I told
Mon Apr 30, 2018, 11:37 AM
Apr 2018

people I would not draw a deep breath until HRC was actually sworn in (I am cynical and suspicious that way).

and now, that bloviating shitgibbon says we don't have ROOM for asylum seekers? I wish there were someplace worse than hell for him, and all his supporters.

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