“Strange Fruit” On Trial
“Why did you write Strange Fruit?” The question wasn’t innocuous and it wasn’t the opening to a conversation about art or civil rights. On the afternoon of September 8, 1941, investigators must have circled around the same topic in a dozen different ways, prying and pressuring their subject. The unusual thing was that the songwriter they were speaking to, a 39-year-old New Yorker named Abel Meeropol, wasn’t on trial. At least, not exactly.
Abel was an activist and a high school English teacher who wrote songs in his free time. For more than a decade, he had lived something of a double life. By day, he taught at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. And by night, he wrote songs under the pen name Lewis Allan. He regularly organized and contributed to performances that mocked fascism in Europe and drew attention to racial injustice in America like the brutal lynching described in “Strange Fruit.” And therein was the issue.
On the eve of the Second World War, public school teachers in New York came under intense scrutiny. This wasn’t a criminal investigation, but a political one. The state government had convened a special taskforce called the Rapp-Coudert Committee to investigate left-wing influences in schools and universities and their targets were ordinary teachers. In what would later be called a “dress rehearsal for McCarthyism,” educators were intimidated, surveilled, questioned without counsel present, told to denounce colleagues, and name names. For those affected, the stakes were high. Declaring any left leaning affiliations could mean losing your job, while attempting to hide personal information that the committee didn’t approve of could result in being arrested for perjury.
New York lawyer Paul Windels was the architect of this inquisition and the driving force behind the proceedings. “The first thing the Teachers Union did was to notify all its members,” he recalled years later, “And of course all the people whom we were interested were members of the Teachers Union.” This included Abel Meeropol who became one of over a thousand educators interrogated by the Rapp-Coudert Committee. But why?
The year before, in 1940, an activist group that Abel belonged to had mailed the lyrics of “Strange Fruit” to every member of Congress during one of the many attempts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. Of course, most elected representatives completely ignored the group’s message. Only one senator, a Republican from Kansas named Arthur Capper, replied to voice his support for this critical legislation that would make lynching a federal crime and punish local authorities who allowed prisoners in their custody to be attacked by vigilante mobs. Meanwhile, a Texas Democrat named Morris Sheppard went out of his way to let Abel’s group know that he was actually pro-lynching. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that these appeals for greater racial understanding fell on deaf ears at the time. Once again, anti-lynching legislation was stopped by solid Southern opposition. Terrorism committed against African American communities continued, while the perpetrators went unpunished.
But after this legislation failed in Congress (or rather after Congress failed this legislation), the story took an unexpected turn. Within a few months, the songwriter himself had been subpoenaed to appear before the Rapp-Coudert Committee and they weren’t really interested in his conduct in the classroom. In fact, their questions almost totally revolved around the song “Strange Fruit,” how and why it was written, and whether there was any Communist influence in its creation. The implication was that Abel Meeropol had been paid by the American Communist Party to write “Strange Fruit” in order to somehow stir up racial unrest. This put the songwriter on the defensive as he fended off these ridiculous accusations from investigators. Yet, the truth might have provided little solace in that moment. Inside those committee chambers, every aspect of Abel’s life and songwriting was being dissected. Outside of chambers, Abel’s career was being threatened, leaving him with little choice except to participate in these proceedings. Anyone who refused to be interviewed by the committee was targeted and automatically dismissed from their positions like in the case of 21 professors who would not submit to this kind of questioning.
Of course, the grotesque irony was that this was far more scrutiny than most perpetrators of lynching ever experienced despite many of their crimes taking place in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses and police. Abel Meeropol had only described lynching in song form, because these attacks had shocked and angered him for years. For his ideals, he was subjected to this bizarre legal inquiry meant to intimidate participants. Again, attorney Paul Windels explains the mechanics, “The persons who were testifying were not defendants, but were merely witnesses. As witnesses, they had no right to have counsel present. The inquiry was a legislative inquiry, and its proceedings were not subject to cross-examination. Its only purpose was to place on the public record such information as it had obtained in the private hearings.” The result was an absurdity.
“Did you sign this petition?”
“What friend suggested publishing the song?”
“Is this song a spontaneous development?”
“Have you been interested in the problem of the Negro for some time?”
Abel Meeropol was peppered with questions ranging from the tedious to the accusatory like “How many nights did a specific performance take place four years ago?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?”
The main reason you have never heard of these events is because the Rapp-Coudert Committee’s investigation of teachers did not undercover any elaborate plots against America. Instead, they discovered that Abel Meeropol was a committed supporter of civil rights, a loving husband, and agile enough on the witness stand to answer all their questions without naming names. For years afterwards, in fact, the suggestion that the Communist Party had paid him to write “Strange Fruit” particularly amused Abel since he wrote hundreds of songs and poems throughout his life, many focused on social justice. He did so habitually out of an intense impulse to create. Abel hadn’t been paid to write “Strange Fruit” and for decades there weren’t huge royalties to be made off the song in spite of Billie Holiday’s timeless performances. He wrote it to make a powerful statement forcing America to acknowledge the horrors of lynching.
Even for him though, the risks of the Rapp-Coudert Committee were very real. In total, 33 teachers from the City College of New York were fired that year for their political affiliations. Over fifty other educators were untenured, forced to resign, or dismissed. One tutor was arrested for perjury and the labor union that Abel belonged to, the Teachers Union Local 5, was collectively expelled from the American Federation of Teachers. Throughout the education system, the most vocal activists were being targeted, leading to self-censorship and job insecurity for those who remained.
In the aftermath of Abel’s own testimony, his teaching career didn’t end overnight and he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. However, this episode did mark the beginning of the end for Abel’s time in the classroom. Before the conclusion of the Second World War, Abel Meeropol would be pushed out of education and he chose to make songwriting his new career. He found success writing for Frank Sinatra and built a new life for himself in Hollywood. Unfortunately, there were things on the horizon that would eclipse the Rapp-Coudert Committee from history: McCarthyism, the Blacklist era, and decades of FBI surveillance. Abel was a target of all the above. But it didn’t have to happen that way. Under different circumstances, Abel Meeropol could have been a household name — the Irving Berlin of his generation. Instead, he was committed to being ahead of his time.
These events are, of course, only one chapter in the life of Abel Meeropol. However, they stand as a reminder today of the great disservice that takes place when politicians hunt for ideological enemies in the teaching profession. Students and communities are worse off for it. Inconvenient truths are omitted from learning. And it begs the question — if educators are your opponents, what does that say about your politics?
