It’s a haunting thought that Billie Holiday sang and recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939. It’s 2026, and Strange Fruit still resonates. Strange Fruit is still hanging in southern trees.
In late 2025, there was a media storm in solidarity with Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a 21-year-old student of Delta State University. He was found hanging from a tree on the university campus. The lynching was later ruled a suicide, a ruling Black people globally knew to be a fallacy. There are many ways for Black people to commit suicide, but instinctively, across the diaspora, we knew and believed that choosing to hang from a tree was unlikely.
Unfortunately, Trey Reed was not the first in recent years to be found hanging. In Mississippi, there had been at least eight Black men found hanging since 2000. Around the country, from New York to California, Dominique Alexander to Malcolm Harsch, Black people have been found hanging. Nearly all have been ruled as suicide.
This is an unrealistic outcome, though not a surprising circumstance. Lynchings have long been a weapon of terror in the United States, fueled by hate. It is a weapon the country has long refused to part with or acknowledge. Antilynching campaigns and the first congressional act to pass antilynching bills were established during the Reconstruction era, with notable figures such as Ida B. Wells and House Representative George Henry White. And yet, it wasn’t until March 2022 that the Emmett Till Antilynching Act became law, making lynching a federal hate crime offense. Still, no recorded case has been prosecuted under the act, despite the many incidents of public lynchings of Black people we have witnessed around the world at the hands of white civilians, of police departments, and now ICE.
Over a century later, we are just making headway on anti-lynching policy. Nearing a century, we are still singing of Strange Fruit, swinging–more present events than past memories. And here I am, a descendant of the fruit in Billie’s song, writing another protest poem to honor the fallen, completely haunted.
Re/Sources
- “Strange Fruit.” Billie Holiday, 20 Apr. 1939, billieholiday.com/signaturesong/strange-fruit/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.
- Beveridge, Lici. “Tree Hanging Death at Delta State University Raises Dread of Mississippi’S Past Lynchings.” The Marshall Project, 4 Nov. 2025, http://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/11/04/delta-state-university-mississippi-hanging. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.
- “Black Americans in Congress 1870 – 2022.” History, Art & Archives | United States House of Representatives, 1 Oct. 2023, history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Fifteenth-Amendment/Temporary-Farewell/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2026.
LeChell Rush 