There were also lynchings in the north

Good morning. It is Wednesday. We’ll learn about a new effort at New York University to document a disturbing part of America’s past. We’ll also look at the city’s uneven recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

One night in 1939, in a Greenwich Village cafe that billed itself as “the wrong place for the right people,” Billie Holiday first sang a disturbing ballad called “Strange Fruit.” “There wasn’t even an applause when I finished,” she said later. “Then a lone person started clapping nervously. Then everyone suddenly clapped.”

The song referred to lynchings in the South. But after the Civil War, there were also lynchings in the North, including one in New York State.

A new website and research project, ‘Lynchings in the North’ examines the lives of victims of racial violence as part of the “Hidden Legacies” Initiative. Led by Rachel Swarns, a former New York Times reporter and professor of journalism at NYU, Swarns works with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to identify lynchings, and her students write obituaries based on archival records and interviews.

“The fact is, we often think of lynchings in the South, and thousands of them occurred in the South,” Swarns said. “But it is striking that Billie Holiday performed that song in New York, because racist violence also occurred in the North and in New York. It is important that Americans know and understand that and take it into account. I was born and raised in New York, and I had no idea.”

She said she had come across – “completely by accident” – a mention of a black man who was lynched in Port Jervis, New York, in 1892. “I thought, how have I never heard of this,” she said.

A map on the website ‘Lynchings in the North’ identified him as Robert Lewis, who was hanged as a crowd watched. Swarns said he worked at a hotel. He was accused of assaulting a white woman, but said he was incited to do so by her white boyfriend, who had blackmailed her.

An article published a few days after the lynching stated that public opinion had shifted from “unconditional approval” to “bringing the leaders of the act to justice.” Several suspects were identified, but no convictions were reached.

Nationwide, Swarns said, more than 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950. There was an anti-lynching protest in Times Square in 1937, the year the poem that became “Strange Fruit” was first published.

The words – and later the music – were the work of a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, Abel Meeropol. The author David Margolick wrote that Meeropol and his wife were “closet communists” who donated a percentage of their earnings to the party. Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, was also a prolific poet and songwriter.

“Strange Fruit” became closely associated with Holiday, but she wasn’t the first to sing it. According to Margolick, the song was “performed regularly in left-wing circles” and, at Madison Square Garden, by a black singer, Laura Duncan.

But that was before “Strange Fruit” became Holiday’s closing song at Café Society, the Sheridan Square establishment that, Margolick said, deliberately “mocked the idle celebrity worship, right-wing politics and racial exclusion of places like the Stork Club’, the fancy nightclub in uptown. Café Society owner Barney Josephson once said he wanted “a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together in the front.”

Josephson said that when he looked at the sheet music for “Strange Fruit,” Meeropol’s lyrics brought tears to his eyes.

“Strange fruit” was not Meeropol’s only footnote in history. He raised the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 after being convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The boys were raised as Michael Meeropol and Robert Meeropol; they wrote in 2015 that they had concluded that their father was guilty of conspiracy, but not of “atomic espionage.” They also wrote that neither of their parents deserved to be executed.

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The latest Metro news

It’s a question New Yorkers have often asked themselves over the past two years: Is the city back?

It is now clear that the city has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic in many meaningful ways. But the recovery is incomplete and uneven. To consider:

But there are also negative factors that could shorten recovery, including these:

• In a new era of hybrid working, the vacancy rate of office buildings is still high. By one measure, based on data from ID cards and key fobs used to access workplaces, office occupancy in New York is just under 50 percent, raising alarms across the commercial real estate industry.

Where does New York go from here? My colleagues Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Jeffery C. Mays write that the coming year will show how sustainable the recovery is — or isn’t — as Adams faces the challenges. Among them: managing the arrival of more than 180,000 migrants and ending generous federal pandemic aid.

And while Adams is optimistic, voters in many parts of New York don’t feel like the city is back on its feet. About 41 percent of voters were “very dissatisfied” with the state of affairs in New York City, one said Quinnipiac University survey released in December — the highest level since the poll started asking voters this question in 1997.

METROPOLITAN diary

In the air

Dear Diary:

I was walking along West End Avenue early one weekend in November.

The fresh morning sunlight reflected off the facades of the apartments and shone on the red leaves of the trees. The sky was a pristine deep blue and even though the air was cold, or perhaps because of it, the day seemed full of energy.

At one point a doorman walked out of a building right in front of me. He seemed to have a spring in his step, humming a light tune to himself as he waltzed to the curb.