A Southern Legacy of Strange Fruit.

In 1939, the same year as the release of the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” jazz singer Billie Holiday recorded a gorgeous dirge about prejudice, murder, ugly white-mob justice and the gruesome image of the bodies of black men swinging from trees.

It was called Strange Fruit and it was based on a poem by Abel Meerpol, a Jewish member of the American Communist Party, who was aghast at the putrid spectacle of all those lynchings, the race-based assassinations that in the 1930s had reached their peak across the American South.

Holiday paid a steep price for even recording the song, inviting the steely, destructive attentions of the FBI.

Because America was hiding in the closet.

By even the most conservative estimates, some 4,000 lynchings were perpetrated across the U.S. — incidents of “systematic domestic terrorism” — between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950.

The majority of the public murders took place in Southern states, the victims almost exclusively black, their limp bodies then often burned, further desecrated.

Holiday’s version of the song was dubbed “a declaration of war … the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

Even today, its lyrics are chilling, sickening:

“Southern trees bearing strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

Them big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

Scent of magnolia, clean and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck

For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

Bryan Stevenson remembers hearing that song as a child, shivering over those lyrics.

Stevenson is black, the great-grandson of a slave, who grew up in Delaware.

But racial prejudice lurked there, too.

Later in life, Stevenson decided to do something about it. 

He attended Harvard University law school and soon moved to Montgomery, Ala., where he founded the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative that worked to overturn the railroad justice that still pervades the south, representing mostly-black men sent to death row by all-white juries on scant and often nonexistent evidence.

Then, several years ago, Stevenson envisioned another way to bring about a sense of long-delayed justice, this time for the black victims he could not reach in time, the men and boys lynched before he was even born.

He conceived a plan to erect memorials at the sites of lynchings across the South, at places where people who were never tried were strung from trees and hanged from telephone poles, sometimes at the rate of one per week, for “offenses” that could be as trivial as playing music too loudly or failing to tip a hat to a white man — or for nothing at all. 

And all before leering white audiences, who cheered and picnicked and posed for selfies.

This month brings the release of a new film called “Just Mercy,” which takes its name from Stevenson’s autobiography. Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian, who in 1987 was arrested for a murder he didn’t commit by a racist and incompetent legal system in Alabama.

Stevenson and his nonprofit helped free that man.

I saw the trailer for “Just Mercy” not long ago and it brought me back to  2015, when I saw Stevenson’s book on the shelves of my favorite San Francisco bookstore.

A few weeks later, I landed in Montgomery to do a story on Bryan Stevenson, his quiet, tenacious personality and his just cause.

The trip started out inauspicious enough.

I was stopped for speeding just outside Atlanta and a black Georgia State Trooper approached my rental car.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

So I told him.

I was on my way to interview social justice activist Bryan Stevenson about his campaign to memorialize every lynching in America, to place markers at sites that are now malls and housing tracts, places that hide their past.

He didn’t smile, but almost.

He handed my license back.

“Have a nice day,” he said. “And give my regards to Mr. Stevenson.”

I slowed down after that, especially when I reached the Alabama state line. I confess that I still felt like a Yankee in enemy territory.

I grew up in New York State but have lived out west for most of my life. My wife is a Chinese American. When we began dating, I used to brag to my cronies that I wanted to take a driving vacation from Atlanta to New Orleans, through Alabama and Mississippi, purely on backroads, just to see the look of confusion when some town cop pulled me over and saw two faces from two different races inside the car.

I’d already seen the look in rural Florida, how the jaws dropped when I held her hand in public. I never made the trip and am glad not to have put my wife through that indignity, especially today, in Donald Trump’s racist and emboldened South.

It was a warn Friday afternoon in April when I arrived in Montgomery, the capital city of Alabama, boasting a population of 200,000 residents. Still, the place felt provincial, a lot like Syracuse, N.Y., where I grew up, only with a decided southern twang.

The city is awash in memorials for the events that occurred here. 

Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery. John Lewis led his freedom riders through this town and paid the price, beaten by an angry white mob. Before that, Montgomery was a major stop for the slave trade and auctions that sold people as though they were animals were held here. People were warehoused in kennels.

To contradict the ugliness, and celebrate the bravery of both slaves and protestors, a bronze marker bears the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Bryan Stevenson is working toward that goal. And that makes him a very busy man.

In 35 years, he has argued half a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He’s won new rights for convicted children and the mentally ill and has become a powerful advocate for death row inmates, helping overturn the executions of more than 115 condemned prisoners, including Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian. 

As a young lawyer, he once met Rosa Parks herself, who made a prophetic observation as he described his life mission of racial equality. 

“That’s going to make you tired, tired, tired,” she told him.

Stevenson was still a man on the move, without much time for a relationship outside his work, a driven activist who plays the piano to relax.

That Saturday morning, he was on his way to Birmingham, where he would visit a death row inmate and then give a speech at the city's civil rights museum. We took separate cars, because I wouldn’t be allowed to attend the jailhouse conference.

I drove the 90 miles north along Interstate 65, through the morning gloom. Near a town called Clanton, I saw it there by the roadside, amid stands of loblolly pines and sweet gum trees, flaunted like a prized ruby. 

A mammoth Confederate flag.

It beckoned travelers to visit the Confederate Memorial Park and Museum. When I saw Stevenson again, I asked him about it.

“It’s an insult,” he said. “It evokes memories of how those rebel flags were brought out whenever people started to talk about integration.”

At the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, Stevenson talked about the cause at hand.

“There’s still this presumption of guilt assigned to African Americans from people inherently worried about the dangerousness and criminality of black men,” he said. “It’s a burden. The police have menaced, threatened and followed us all our lives.”

And while Germany used public dialogue to come to terms with its Holocaust legacy, he said, “In America, we do just the opposite…. We don’t want to talk about it; we don’t even want to think about it.”

At a gathering after the speech, I ran into James Knight, who told me how a fellow African American friend was once snatched by white men here in the 1950s and castrated in the woods nearby.

He wants a marker on the spot. 

Said Knight: “I think it’s good to know where we came from.”

Later, at the end of a long day, Stevenson gave me a tour of his offices. Then we went outside his offices on Commerce Street and I took a picture of him near a plaque that marked that type of commerce that was conducted here.

The selling of slaves.

“Enslaved people were marched in chains up the street from the riverfront and railroad station to the slave auction site,” the plaque read. The warehouses advertised slaves for sale, such as a boy “about fourteen, very likely and spritely.”

That was Stevenson — likely and spritely, but growing tired from the burden. He had fought the city for years to place that plague at the site.

Still, there was a vulnerability to this man. As we stood before the plaque documenting the moral crimes that took place here, I did something that surprised even me.

I asked Stevenson if I could hug him.

We embraced and I felt as though I could feel his very spirit, the willpower of this man who walks in the shadows of Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and the activists who risked and gave their lives to right an ugly, terrible, vicious wrong.