Harry Anslinger's Role In Billie Holiday's Death скачать в хорошем качестве

Harry Anslinger's Role In Billie Holiday's Death

[Democracy Now] feb 4, 2015 (Johann Hari: Everything We Know About the Drug War & Addiction is Wrong) In 1939, Billie Holiday sings the song "Strange Fruit," an anti-lynching song in front of a all white audience and this was regarded as really shocking. And that night, according to her biographer, Julia Blackburn, she’s told by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, "Stop singing this song." She refuses. She basically says, "Screw you. I’m an American citizen. I’ll say what I want." She had grown up in segregated Baltimore, and she had promised herself she would never bow her head to any white man. And that’s when Harry Anslinger begins the process of stalking her. He sends to stalk her an agent called Jimmy Fletcher. He busts her. She’s sent to prison. The trial—"The trial was called The United States v. Billie Holiday, when she gets out she can’t get a job. You needed a license to be able to perform anywhere where alcohol was sold, and they wouldn’t give her the license."What’s the cruelest thing you can do to a person is to take away the thing they love." so She sinks back into addiction. When she’s in her early forties, she collapses in New York City, taken to hospital, and she’s convinced the narcotics agents aren’t finished with her. And she was right. She says to one of her friends, "They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them. They’re going to kill me." She was right. In her hospital bed, she’s diagnosed with liver cancer. She’s handcuffed to the bed. They take away her record player and her candies. They don’t let her friends in to see her. One of her friends manages to insist to the doctors they give her methadone, because she had gone into withdrawal. She starts to recover a little bit. Ten days later, they cut off the methadone. She dies.