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Holiday sang her heart out about the inhumanity she experienced as an African American
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Billie Holiday Was Born
April 7, 1915
Born Eleanora Fagan, she gave herself the stage name Billie after Billie Dove, an early movie star. While becoming a star, Holiday faced racism. Some laws created separate facilities, public spaces, and seats on buses for blacks, and some restaurants would serve only white people. As a result, Holiday sometimes found herself singing in clubs that refused service to blacks. Her 1939 version of "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching, was described as the most haunting and sad "expression of protest against man's inhumanity to man that has ever been made in the form of vocal jazz."
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