Billie Holiday.

Legendary jazz singer and songwriter Billie Holiday was born in Philadelphia on April 7, 1915.

Note that today is also the birthday of gay liberation activist Harry Hay (1912) and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (1931).

On the 100th anniversary of her birth, Robert Meeropol wrote the article below about Holiday, the song “Strange Fruit,” and Ethel Rosenberg.

Meeropol examines the convergence between the lives of Holiday and of his mother, Ethel Rosenberg, who also would have turned 100 in 2015. As Meeropol writes, “You might conclude that Billie and Ethel had similar talents and defied similar enemies.”

Strange Convergence:
Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg at 100

by Robert Meeropol

If Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg were alive, they’d both celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. At first glance they may seem an unlikely couple, but a closer look reveals surprising parallels.

They were each born into poverty six months and a hundred miles apart. Billie in April 1915 in Philadelphia, and Ethel in September in lower Manhattan. Both had extraordinary singing voices, although Billie’s vocal genius eclipsed Ethel’s. Still, Ethel’s teachers considered her voice so special that they called her out of class to sing the national anthem at assemblies.

Both girls were precocious. Ethel graduated high school at 15 and tried to pursue a singing and acting career. At the height of The Great Depression, she could only find work as a clerk-typist in New York’s garment district. There she helped organize and lead a strike at 19. Billie was singing in clubs in Harlem at 17, and made her mark as a recording artist before she was 20.

Both got in trouble with the law. Billie first ran afoul of powerful forces for singing “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching anthem. Her performances generated threats, even riots. Josh White also sang the song and was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy period. He bowed to their demands that he stop. Billie defiantly refused and continued singing “Strange Fruit.” Many believe that her resistance led law enforcement to hound and arrest her in 1947 for drug possession. She served almost a year in prison, and her conviction disrupted her career for the rest of her life.

In 1950 Ethel was arrested with her husband Julius and charged with Conspiracy to Commit Espionage; they were convicted and sentenced to death. The government knew she had not committed espionage, but they held her as a hostage to coerce her husband into cooperating with the authorities. She refused to confess to something she did not do and backed her husband’s refusal to implicate others. The FBI files never claimed she was guilty, but consistently described her as “cognizant and recalcitrant.”

You might conclude that Billie and Ethel had similar talents and defied similar enemies.

Both died prematurely, victimized by law enforcement. Ethel was executed in 1953 at age 37, and Billie died in a hospital bed at age 44, while awaiting arraignment after another drug arrest.

Billie and Ethel followed different paths in life and probably never met, but they converged in death. High school English teacher, poet, and songwriter Abel Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photograph of a lynching. He played it for Billie Holiday in 1939, when she was performing at Cafe Society and she subsequently began performing it.

Fourteen years later, Abel helped carry Ethel Rosenberg’s coffin to her grave site. Within a year, Abel and his wife Anne had adopted Ethel and Julius’ sons. The man who abhorred lynching and wrote one of the most iconic songs in Billie Holiday’s repertoire, adopted Ethel’s orphans, my brother Michael and me.

In 2015, the centennial year of both of their births, we remember Billie Holiday for singing about lynching, and we remember Ethel Rosenberg for being legally lynched.

Robert Meeropol is the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and founder of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a foundation he started in his parent’s honor to help the children of today’s targeted activists.

Reprinted from the Rosenburg Fund for Children blog.

The post April 7, 1915: Billie Holiday Born appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Cover of audio album featuring World Turned Upside Down. Click on image to see YouTube video of Leon Rosselson singing The World Turned Upside Down

Covered by Billy Bragg, Dick Gaughan, and many others, “The World Turned Upside Down” is the tale of the diggers (people who cultivated common land) and the repression they faced hundreds of years ago.

The World Turned Upside Down

In 1649

To St. George’s Hill,

A ragged band they called the Diggers

Came to show the people’s will

They defied the landlords

They defied the laws

They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs

Read all the lyrics at Diggers.org website.

In the film clip below, you can see rare concert footage of The World Turned Upside Down songwriter Leon Rosselson, recorded in Edinburgh in October 2007. He provides some history of the events described in the song.

The post The World Turned Upside Down appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joe Strummer, and Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Guthrie as an influence. Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the “Dust Bowl Troubadour.”

Website with info about centennial events.

Guthrie died from complications of Huntington’s disease. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan. Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997. [Description from Wikipedia.]

Poster by Ricardo Levins-Morales.

Portrait of Woody Guthrie by Robert Shetterly.

The post Woody Guthrie: Official Website appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Call them rebel songs, slave songs, songs of freedom, work songs, songs of dissent, songs of struggle, protest songs, liberation songs, labor songs, workers’ songs, industrial folk songs, environmental songs, songs of equality, peace songs.

For over two centuries working people across the world have built trade unions. This site documents the songs and poems that they made in the process, union songs. It includes songs and poems that are being written today, as the process of union building continues all around the world.

Such songs are the work of famous poets as well as men and women whose names have been forgotten. They stretch back to ancient times and are being created today. [Description from unionsong.com website.]

The post Union Songs appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

So writes Milton Meltzer about the Irish-American soldiers who formed the San Patricio Battalion in the opening to the chapter, “Traitors — Or Martyrs” in Bound for the Rio Grande: The Mexican Struggle, 1845-1850 (Knopf, 1974).

The chapter provides one of the few descriptions of this history for middle and high school readers. Bound for the Rio Grande is out of print, but thanks to the permission of Milton Meltzer’s publishing agent, the Zinn Education Project is able to make this chapter available for educators. (See In Memory of Milton Meltzer.)

Chapter made available by permission of Harold Ober Associates.

“Saint Patrick’s Battalion” by singer and songwriter David Rovics

David Rovics writes about this history in his liner notes:

It is often said that people mainly do things out of self-interest. Yet history demonstrates time and time again that on so many occasions people are willing to suffer terrible hardship and even risk or lose their lives in the defense of people other than themselves. As the U.S. Army killed, raped and burned their way deeper into Mexico thousands of soldiers deserted. The mainly Irish group of soldiers who came to be known as the San Patricios could have done the same, and, as many did, could have lived out their natural lives without being caught. But these 202 deserters took things a significant step further — they joined the Mexican Army.

With their own green flags and uniforms the San Patricios engaged the U.S. Army in five major battles, and most of them died fighting. Most of those who were captured after the last of the five battles were hanged for treason. Those that managed to escape lived out the rest of their lives in Mexico, marrying and having families, and some places in Mexico are said to have a greater number of red-haired residents as a result today. If you visit the beautiful San Jalisco neighborhood of Mexico City you will find a small plaque dedicated to the memory of the San Patricios, on one of the walls of the Catholic Church in which many of these men lived when they made it to the capital city.

Download the lyrics and MP3 for “Saint Patrick’s Battalion.” (Donations for the song are appreciated.) For more songs like this, check out David Rovics’ “Troubador: People’s History in Song.”

The post Bound for the Rio Grande: Traitors — Or Martyrs appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

David Rovics website is full of “songs of social significance,” http://davidrovics.com.

David Rovics wrote “Union Makes Us Strong” to communicate “the most fundamental message I and others like me are trying to communicate — in union we can achieve anything.”

Lyrics

Back in the Depression farmers held the line
When the bank came for an auction together they’d combine
They knew that when divided they could never win
But they stood shoulder to shoulder and didn’t let the bankers in
They stood shoulder to shoulder, that’s how they kept their farms
If one of them was threatened it was for all to be alarmed
They said this was their land and they’d help each other stay
That’s how they kept their farms, that’s why the bankers went away
‘Cause the union makes us strong (2x)

Back in the Depression there was not enough to eat
But the Union of the Unemployed was in the driver’s seat
If the cops did an eviction, took the bed and put it out
The neighbors would carry it in, sing a song and shout

(Chorus)

I can hear him talking, you’ve got to look at the long view
Back in the Depression almost everybody knew
If competition was so great why don’t they do it with themselves
Instead of buying off the Congress and ruling by cartel

(Chorus)

During the Depression people fought and won back then
Now the battle’s global and it was must be won again
They will try to divide us but even on the darkest day
While I listen closely I hear a billion people say

(Chorus)

The audio online and MP3 download for “Union Makes Us Strong” can be found here. (Don’t forget to make a donation to the artist if you download the song.) For more songs like this, check out David Rovics’ Troubador: People’s History in Song.

Copyright David Rovics 2010, all rights reserved.

The post Union Makes Us Strong appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The post Which Side Are You On?: The Story of a Song appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

In the Academy Award-nominated Union Maids, the women’s own lively stories are combined with rare newsreel footage and music of the time. This is a valuable film for students to feel the vitality of labor organizing in the 1930s.

Through the film and activity, students will see some of the conditions that gave rise to the growth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s; examine the reasons why some people choose to dedicate their lives to organizing other workers; and question why labor unions were so strenuously opposed by some employers and governmental agencies in the 1930s.

Film

Union Maids was directed and produced by James Klein, Miles Mogulescu, and Julia Reichert.

Features the oral histories of three women labor activists involved in the workers’ movements in the early 1930s: Kate Hyndman, Stella Nowicki, and Sylvia Woods.

Nominated for an Oscar in 1978 for best feature documentary, and winner in 1978 of the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics’ “Critics Award” for Best Short.

The Power In Our Hands — Available for Download

Purchase Book

This is one of the 16 lessons available from The Power In Our Hands. Other lessons available for individual download are:

Opening

• Acknowledgments, Notes to the Teacher, and Introduction

Unit I: Basic Understandings

• Organic Goodie Simulation
• Who Makes History?
• What Rights Do We Have?

Unit II: Changes in the Workplace/”Scientific Management”

• Paper Airplane Simulation
• Free to Think, Talk, Listen, or Sing
• Modern Times
• “Taylorizing” Burgers: A Fantasy

Unit III: Defeats, Victories, Challenges

• The Homestead Strike
• Birth of a Rank-and-File Organizer
• Lawrence, 1912: The Singing Strike

Unit IV: Our Own Recent Past

• It’s a Mystery—White Workers Against Black Workers
• Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union: Black and White Unite?
• 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike
• Union Maids

Unit V: Continuing Struggle

• Shutdown!—Confronting Plant Closures
• Labor Songs

Order the book online from Monthly Review.

The post Union Maids appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Mixed media portrait of Nicolás Guillén. © Erin Currier.

Nicolás Guillén, Cuban poet of social protest and a leader of the Afro-Cuban movement in the late 1920s and ’30s, was born on July 10, 1902.

In 1929, Guillén interviewed Langston Hughes in Havana and they became lifelong friends. In 1930, Guillén created an international stir with the publication of Motivios de Son, eight short poems inspired by the son, a popular Afro-Cuban musical form, and the daily living conditions of Cuban blacks. Composed in Afro-Cuban vernacular, the collection separated itself from the Spanish literary canon and established Black culture as a legitimate focus of Cuban literature.

Carmen Gomez Garcia wrote about Guillén’s poetry on race. She explained,

Guillén did not write in generalities when he wrote of racism but focused on specific indignities with which each human spirit could identify. The “Elegía a Jesús Menéndez,” in addition to stanzas that allude to the horrors of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and lynching, also refers to the Martinsville Seven in a fragment of beautiful and poetic prose. The Martinsville (Virginia) Seven were seven young black men who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman. After a very public trial, they were convicted and sentenced to death. Unlike the Scottsboro case, these young men were indeed executed in the first week of February 1951.

Siete voces negras en Martinsville llaman siete veces a Jesús por su nombre y le piden en siete gritos de rabia, como siete lanzas, le piden en Martinsville, en siete golpes de azufre, come siete piedras volcánicas, le piden siete veces venganza.

Seven black voices in Martinsville call seven times to Jesus by name and they ask him in seven cries of rage, like seven lances, they ask in Martinsville, in seven strikes of sulphur, like seven volcanic rocks, they ask seven times for revenge.

Our thanks to artist Erin Currier for permission to post the mixed media portrait of Nicolas Guillen.

The post July 10, 1902: Nicolás Guillén Born appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

With its dramatic stories and memorable quotes, We Shall Overcome: A Song That Changed the World offers a saga of a famous piece of music in a unique way of looking at social history. [Publisher’s description.]

Foreword by Pete Seeger. Illustrations by Terrance Cummings.

ALA Notable Children’s Book for 2011.

ISBN: 9780547182100 | Clarion Books

The post We Shall Overcome: A Song That Changed the World appeared first on Zinn Education Project.