Trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the…. breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
– Billie Holiday, from poem by Abel Meeropol
New York, N.Y. On August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two young African-American men, were brutally lynched by a mob of thousands. The incident began when they, along with 16-year-old James Cameron, were arrested and charged with robbing and murdering a white factory worker named Claude Deeter and raping his girlfriend, Mary Ball.
As news of the alleged crime spread, a large crowd gathered outside the jail, demanding that the suspects be handed over. The mob broke into the jail using sledgehammers and abducted Shipp, Smith, and Cameron. Shipp and Smith were savagely beaten and then hanged from a tree in the courthouse square. Cameron narrowly escaped the same fate when an unidentified woman and a local sports hero intervened, claiming his innocence.
The lynching was photographed by local studio photographer Lawrence Beitler, and the image became an iconic representation of racial violence in America. Thousands of copies of the photograph were sold as souvenirs, highlighting the disturbing spectacle nature of such events.
This tragic incident exemplifies the history of racial violence and lynchings outside the South, demonstrating that such atrocities were not confined to one region. It inspired Abel Meeropol to write the poem “Strange Fruit,” which was later famously recorded as a song by Billie Holiday, bringing national attention to the horrors of lynching.
Billie Holiday immortalized this gruesome hate crime with her song “Strange Fruit” – Trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swingin’ in the…. breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.
Indiana in 1930, Thomas Shipp, Abram Smith Hung from Tree (July 9, 2014)
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