Holiday’s Performances Left Audiences Silent

After overcoming a reluctance to tackle it, Holiday made “Strange Fruit” her signature closing. As her set was coming to an end, waiters would stop serving. Then Holiday would sit by herself on a stool with only the mic and a pin spotlight on her face as she sang. After the last lines: “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck/For the rain to gather/For the wind to suck/For the sun to rot/For the tree to drop/Here is a strange and bitter crop”—a chilled silence often followed, and Holiday would leave the stage.

“When the lights came back on, she would be gone, there’d be no encore,” says Whitehead. “She would be off the stage—that was her request—but she wanted to just let the song hang there. And that would be her final statement. And they often talk about how the white audiences would be uncomfortable to clap.”

Whitehead, who is also founding director of the The Karson Institute For Race, Peace & Social Justice adds: “We often think about Billie Holiday as a singer. And we think about Black women at that time as just big singers, but I don’t think we talk enough about them using their platform to make a stand against injustice, and then the cost and the price that they paid doing that.”