"How Can America Not Know This Story?": Lee Daniels on the Enduring Relevance of Billie Holiday

"Director Lee Daniels returns with his first film in eight years. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a biopic that delves into the legendary singer’s life, focusing on efforts by the federal government to target Holiday over her civil rights activism. Daniel's film also explores how controversial Holiday's song "Strange Fruit" was at the time, for shining a light on the lynchings of Black Americans by white Southerners. Speaking with  The Takeaway, Daniels said that he was unfamiliar with some of the specifics of Holiday's life before working on the project, and after the first reading, the film's script wondered, "how can America not know this story? And if America doesn’t know this story, how many other stories are out there that we don’t know?"