When I ask Rhodes about that, the tone of our conversation shifts, landing somewhere between exhaustion and frustration. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders in the United States. In the book, Hari tells stories of the casualties of the drug war, from its 20th century origins to profiles of contemporary dealers and users. The Woman Nikole Hannah-Jones Credits With Her Career Success, Everything You Need To Know About 'Mean Girls: The Musical', The 2023 SAG Awards Will Be Streaming-Only For The First Time Ever, Get Even More From Bustle Sign Up For The Newsletter. She told the judge she didnt want any sympathy. In the film's depiction, Holiday's impact with the emotional song made her a target in the eyes of the federal government. Years later, when her autobiography was published, Billie tracked Jimmy Fletcher down and sent him a signed copy. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. I will let you know what day. His advice on drug raids to his men was always simple: Shoot first.. They said she was unlikely to survive for longbut Harry wasnt done with her yet. The singer endured an exhausting legal battle with the FBI over drug usage and her song "Strange Fruit.". He'd heard rumblings that the singer was using heroin and assigned Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), a Black FBI agent, to follow her, journalist Johann Hari Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. You know what I mean? The most recent one was introduced in 2019 by now Vice President Kamala Harris. (It even smells like the South.) That is also what partly drew him in. It was crazy. The United States vs. Billie Holiday depicts the FBI chasing Holiday for her drug use and locking her away on narcotics charges as a roundabout way to suppress her musical activism. But Anslinger was going to be given a break on Billie, one he got nowhere else in the jazz world. 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The Japanese man couldnt breathe. How it might have streaks of color from another stroke. He could do it because he was a bureaucratic geniusbut, even more crucially, because there was a deep strain in American culture that was waiting for a man like him, with a sure and certain answer to their questions about chemicals. But if you cut that off, obviously yes, he says. That's our life. In fact, a timeline on the Library of Congress shows that 106 Black Americans were reportedly lynched in the year 1900 alone. One of the ambulance drivers recognized her, so she ended up in a public ward of New York Citys Metropolitan Hospital. It was the official reason why some police in the South increased the caliber of their guns. On the street outside the hospital, protesters gathered, led by a Harlem pastor named the Reverend Eugene Callender. They don't say, Oh my God, there's a 15-year-old girl here. Theyll remember me, she told a friend, when all this is gone, and theyve finished badgering me. George White did not agree. When she was finally released, she had lost her cabaret license, prohibiting her from performing where alcohol was servedmeaning she couldn't perform at jazz clubs. When she's 15, the police raid the brothel, says Hari. Neither passed. ", Singing "Strange Fruit," Primetimer writes, "drove Harry Anslinger nuts, and made her personal destruction a goal of his. He later set his words to music and played the song for a New York nightclub owner, who then passed it on to Holiday. "She's really haunted by what Jimmy Fletcher did to hereven years later," Hari added. After starring in Moonlight, a 21st century masterpiece, he appeared in a trio of action films then stepped back from the spotlight. The morning he first raided her, Jimmy took Billie to one side and promised to talk to Anslinger personally for her. When he hangs out with her boisterous entourage while they drink and do drugs backstage, hes the quiet outsider looking in. He is a retired FBI agent and best known for his role in the UNABOM investigation, which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Ted Kaczynski. They confiscated her comic books, radio, record player, flowers, chocolates and magazines, handcuffed her to the bed and stationed two policemen at the door. Federal authorities first targeted her shortly after she began singing the song. That's Barry, and Lee is more abrasive, more visceral. In reality, Anslinger had assigned a different agent, one who hadn't "gone soft," to hound Holiday, and Fletcher didn't hear from her again until she sent him a signed copy of her 1956 autobiography, according to Politico. Then we wont be searching around, pulling out your clothes and everything. When journalists asked White about this, he blustered; his reply, they noted, appeared a little defensive.. He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them and instructed: Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. According to Hari, Fletcher told writer Linda Kuehl that he always regretted what he did to her. But meanwhile, decades before the protest songs of the 1960s, Holiday shouldered massive personal risks by performing Strange Fruit. Even though some white audience members left her shows when she performed the song, Holiday wrote it into her contracts that she would sing it each night. The United States vs. Billie Holiday portrays the two as having a romance, but not all is as it seems. Her closest friends are on her payroll, She was the type who would make anyone sympathetic because she was the loving type. The man Anslinger sent to track and bust Billie Holiday had, it seems, fallen in love with her. Still, Anslingers team arrested her on her hospital bed, Hari revealed. ", Trevante Rhodes and the Philosophy of Art, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. However, it was originally written by poet, teacher, and activist Abel Meeropol, from New York. When you look at a Rockwell painting, it's a feeling. There's a depth in my soul and being from the South, man, the soul down here? We come from a different tribe. But what pulled Rhodes attention most was the idea of stepping into the role of Jimmy Fletcher. Here's what's fact and what's fiction in The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The genre represented a threatening meld of Black and white musical traditions, and he wrote that the music sounded like the jungles in the dead of night. That the music attracted both Black and white audiences, furthering its dangerous race mixing potential, was even more alarming to Anslinger. Yes, Jimmy Fletcher was a real person. Magenta is not a naturally occurring color, so much as its an amalgamation of red and violet, which is an amalgamation of red and blue. Knowing he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negros heart, and firedintending to kill him right quick, as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man. Cocaine was, it was widely claimed in the press at this time, turning blacks into superhuman hulks who could take bullets to the heart without flinching. . They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.. She was, her friend Annie Ross told me, as strong as she could be.. And also, she was resisting white supremacy. There were high-profile incidents, such as the 1933 axe murder of the Licata family by their 21-year-old son, Victor. The meeting had been a long time coming. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. But did it really happen that way in real life? You victimize yourself by becoming a junkie.. 1975 to 'Moscato's Dump' by FBI agents in Newark and Jersey City, New Jersey." In real life, Anslinger served as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, from 1930 to 1962. Harry told the public that the increase [in drug addiction] is practically 100 percent among Negro people, which he stressed was terrifying because already the Negro population . Perhaps the most important song Holiday would ever sing was Strange Fruit. Written by communist poet and teacher Abel Meeropol after he saw a photo of lynched Black men, the song describes the bodies of lynching victims hanging from southern trees like the strange fruit of its title. That part of the story is fictionalized, but the agent did speak of her notable affection. Now, after three years, he returns to play Jimmy Fletcher, a Black federal agent tasked by his white superiors with implanting himself in Holidays life to bring her down for drug use. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Laugh? The full sourcing for this article can be found in the books endnotes. He'd heard rumblings that the singer was using heroin and assigned Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), a Black FBI agent, to follow her, journalist Johann Hari revealed in his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, per Politico. Maybe they would have been kinder to me if theyd been nasty; then I wouldnt have trusted them enough to believe what they told me.. There was a distinct question that the interviewer had about their love, and it was just his response that really gifted me a unique answer, he says. The Time Ray Liotta Eviscerated Bradley Cooper. Shes been getting away with too much shit, MacKay said, adding he wanted Holidays ass in the gutter in the East River. That, it seems, was the clincher. Maybe they would have been kinder to me if theyd been nasty; then I wouldnt have trusted them enough to believe what they told me. She was right: Jimmy told the writer Linda Kuehl that he never stopped feeling guilty for what hed done to Lady Day. Some artists got killed for it.. Billie Holiday Was Arrested Due to Jimmy Fletcher - Distractify She didnt want to go through it no more.. To Harry Anslinger, Billie Holiday was like the symbol of everything that America had to be afraid of, Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, said inan interview withWNYC Studios. The face of Moonlight was everywhere. But when the details were looked at later, there seemed to be something odd: a wastepaper basket seems an improbable place to keep a stash, and the kit for shooting heroin was never entered into evidence by the copsthey said they left it at the scene. When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. The film is unnervingly relevant in 2021. Southerners dont do snow. Dont let them. The police threw the friend out. Her biographers Julia Blackburn and Donald Clark studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletchernow lost by the archives handling itand they wrote about what he remembered in detail. She never lost faith in her musics ability to capture and persuade. Some of the nicer ones have feelings enough to hate themselves for what they have to do. Anslinger sent Fletcher, one of the FBIs few Black agents at the time, to follow Holiday, because he knew a white agent tailing her into Jazz clubs would raise Billie paid her debt to society, one of her friends wrote, but society never paid its debt to her.. Set partly in the South, Lee shot the film in Montreal, though Rhodes says its a great replacement. [2] [3] Law enforcement career [ edit] Because in one of the books I read [I found] that's something that he really prided himself on, his ability to really maneuver and be whoever he needed to be in any situation, whether it was with someone who was the ritziest or someone who was in the slums., At times in the movie, Fletcher is our entry point into Holidays world. Then hed send the best ones to Daniels. I dont want you to lose your job, he said. Harry Anslinger (played by Garrett Hedlund), the leading agent hunting Holiday, was a real person; he became the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, according to Politico. Arrest and Convictions. While he knew something special was on the horizon, Rhodes says the experience wasnt incredibly different. WebJames R. Fitzgerald (born June 24, 1953) is an American criminal profiler, forensic linguist, and author. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. In our culture, there's one heroic story we tell about people with addiction problems, which is that sometimes they recover from their addiction, Hari says. Another life. The 1967 film Guess Whos Coming to Dinner starred Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton as a ne, As the open-hearted matriarch Hattie Mae in Tyler Perrys 2022 film A Jazzmans Blues, Amirah Vann demonstrates a great tenderness and fierce love to b, This story includes spoilers for Saint Omer. Thats thats thats sad man. He trails off. Please, she said to the judge, I want the cure., She was sentenced instead to a year in a West Virginia prison, where she was forced to go cold turkey and work during the days in a pigsty, among other places. (This racist belief was behind the removal of the drug from Coca-Cola.) Federal Bureau of Narcotics director Harry Anslinger, Fletcher follows Billie Holiday everywhere. So that's a double negative, you know what I mean? Rhodes explains. Billie Holiday - "Strange Fruit" Live 1959 [Reelin' In The Years Archives], 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday' True Story, 35 Classic Photos from the Academy Awards, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. Anslingers men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch, and whenever one of them was busted, they all chipped in to bail him out. By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. When Sawyer approaches Torres about the concerns he has with a deep cover assignment hes taken, Torrres is pulled into the op, which he initially refused to do for the FBI. As Hari tells NPR, "Jimmy Fletcher's brief was follow Billie Holiday everywhere she goes; befriend her; document her drug use, and get it ready for an indictment. Holiday received her first threat from the bureau in 1939, after performing "Strange Fruit" on the stage in New York. Harry Anslinger did not create these underlying trends. . We dont know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherfucker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him. Holiday has died. She was arrested again in 1949, though this time she was acquitted. And so, when she died on this bed, with police officers at the door to protect the public from her, she lookedas another of her friends told the BBCas if she had been torn from life violently. She had fifteen fifty-dollar bills strapped to her leg. And when she insisted on continuing on her right as an American citizen to sing Strange Fruit, Anslinger resolves to destroy her., Also Read: Strange Fruit: The History of Billie Holidays Famous Protest Song. He wanted to bring the full thump of the federal government down upon that scourge of modern society, his Public Enemy #1: Billie Holiday. They summoned a grand jury to indict her, telling her that unless she disclosed her dealer, they would take her straight to prison. WebJohn Joseph Connolly Jr. (born August 1, 1940) is an American former FBI agent who was convicted of racketeering, obstruction of justice, and murder charges stemming from his "They bust her, and it's pretty clear, I think, from reading the historical documents, that he planted drugs on Billie Holiday that night," Hari told NPR of the raid. That said, its just as easy to view Fletcher as a traitor. Blackburn writes that lynching "was at its most virulent between 1900 and 1920." To me, its really kind of true to life, to the mess that I know life to be. Rhodes believes that Fletcher had to hurt when it came to how he treated Holiday. They fingerprinted Billie on her hospital bed. He believed that the response to being dealt a weak hand should always be to dramatically raise the stakes. 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