Strange Fruit

“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” Strange fruit was written in 1937. For a protest poem, ostensibly intended to give voice to an explicit political agenda, “Strange Fruit” oddly provides no identifiable perspective. Written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and first published under the title “Bitter Fruit”, the poem was initially intended as a harsh indictment of racial violence and as propaganda for the passage of an anti-lynching bill. “Strange Fruit” is often considered Meeropol’s most famous and influential piece; with music composed by Meeropol himself in 1939, his words would eventually have their greatest impact

Aslinger. Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, from 1930 to 1962l, waged its own war, at first primarily on marijuana, but also to a great degree on jazz musicians and jazz culture. Anslinger came to power in the era of Reefer Madness, the title of a rather ridiculous 1938 anti-drug film that has come to stand in for hyperbolic anti-pot paranoia of the ’30s and ’40s. Much of that madness was the Commissioner’s special creation. Like so much of the post-Nixon drug war, Anslinger staged his campaign as a moral crusade against certain kinds of users: dissidents, the counterculture, and especially immigrants and blacks. According to Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, Anslinger’s “first major campaign was to criminalize the drug commonly known as hemp. But Anslinger renamed it “marijuana” to associate it with Mexican laborers, and claimed that the drug “can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.” Anslinger “became the prime shaper of American attitudes to drug addiction.” And like later despisers of rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop, Anslinger’s hatred of jazz motivated many of his targeted attacks. He linked marijuana with jazz and persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong was also arrested on drug charges, and Anslinger made sure his name was smeared

Traditional musical theory had been established by the Catholic Church during the Renaissance and hadn’t changed since. Jazz ignored these rules. Another hurdle Jazz had to overcome was that it started in the African-American community. For this reason alone, many whites were often openly dismissive. Jazz was not the only art form of this period that reacted to changing times by changing its rules. Many writers began to deviate from the literary forms and rules that had defined the last generation. The Jazz Age is defined as a cultural movement. Although it influenced every aspect of the art and literature in the period, the effect that it had on cultural ideals and norms was greater. It forced people to question the ideas that they had about what was appropriate and normal. This step from tradition gave people to opportunity to experience new forms of self-expression. The Jazz age was epitomized by a new cultural identity, defined by liberal ideas, radical self-expression, and newfound wealth. Jazz age truly was a unique time in American