One who made the connection real was Billie Holiday, with “Strange Fruit,” her signature song about southern lynching. When she sang that song, in the words of Elijah Wood, “You feel as if you’re at the foot of the tree.” Upon hearing another singer, Josh White, sing “Strange Fruit” in Chicago, Brigitte McCulloch, a German woman who grew up in “war-torn Hamburg, Germany,” did with her imagination what Niebuhr did not do, even though he identified with the Jews there: “On those southern trees, along with black men, hung the murdered Jews,” she said, “hung all the victims of violence. And one
...more
