Strange Fruit — Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' is a haunting musical indictment of racial violence, its stark imagery of 'black bodies swinging in the southern breeze' shocking 1939 America. Columbia Records refused to release the song, fearing a backlash, so Holiday recorded it on the small Commodore label, where it sold 10,000 copies in its first year. The FBI monitored it for two decades, with J. Edgar Hoover considering it a threat to public order. 'Strange Fruit' is more historically consequential than #5 'God Save the Queen' because it targeted systemic lynching, a crime that killed over 3,400 Black Americans between 1882 and 1968. Its power endures as a benchmark for protest art.