Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' lyrics were controversial to some and powerful to others. The song was Holiday's way of protesting the lynching of Black people during the Jim Crow era, and it angered ...

In March 1939, a then-23-year-old Billie Holiday closed out her set at New York's Cafe Society with a song she hadn't performed before: "Strange Fruit." Written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, ...

Black America has a long and winding history of using songs for defiance and consolation. Testimonies from slave ship sailors recall how kidnapped Africans during the Atlantic slave trade sang to send ...

Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of ...

On June 23, David Brooks published an article on The Atlantic website entitled “Bruce Springsteen’s Playlist for the Trump Era.”Brooks introduced the article thusly: “This is a moment of tumult, anger ...

There are often false narratives we tell ourselves so that we can simplify, and beautify, the past and erase aspects of the present that we are uncomfortable with. Take the view that the olden times ...