“Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” These chilling lyrics from Billie Holiday’s 1939 song “Strange Fruit” still serve as an anti-lynching anthem. The recent movie “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” starring Andra Day, tells how the singer was targeted by the FBI for refusing to stop singing these words of provocative truth. I recently learned that “Strange Fruit” was not written by the talented jazz singer herself, but by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol. Haunted by a gruesome, now iconic, photograph of a lynching, Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit” first as a poem than as a song. Thousands of copies of the photograph were printed and sold as keepsakes: the bodies of two young Black men hanging from a tree as a group of nicely dressed White men and women smile and pose for the camera. The father of Black liberation theology, James Cone, writes of the way oppressed people identify more powerfully with Christ’s crucifixion than with his life, teachings and resurrection. “The cross,” Cone writes, “places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned, and tortured.” Cone connects the cross of Christ to the lynching tree — a connection that jumps from the page of this Sunday’s lectionary text. Acts 5:30 reads, “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.” In his influential 2011 book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone criticizes American theologians and preachers for avoiding this obvious correlation. You can find the rest of the commentary on our website. | 
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