Friday 5/12 – Thursday 5/18
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black body swinging in the southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” sang Billie Holiday in her signature tune. According to writer David Margolick, Holiday’s 1939 performance of the controversial song, which was written by Abel Meeropol–a white, Jewish schoolteacher and communist sympathizer who adopted the orphaned children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg–marked the beginning of the civil rights movement. Tonight Margolick will talk about his new book Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. The free discussion starts at 7 at Borders Books & Music, 830 N. Michigan (312-573-0564).
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For Mother’s Day weekend, the Sweat Girls performance group will resurrect last year’s well-received The Motherlode, in which each group member performs a 15-minute monologue about her mom interwoven with video footage of each mother shot by filmmaker Joe Winston. Performances are Saturday at 8 and today at 3:30 and 7 at the Chicago Shakespeare Studio at Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand (312-595-5600). Tickets are $25.
18 THURSDAY Education professor Bill Ayers is heading up UIC’s new Center for Youth and Society, a research and social action center that’s focused on creating “a new definition of educator, not only as a classroom teacher but as a youth worker, embracing the informal curriculum of street, family and community as the child’s context.” The center is sponsoring tonight’s free discussion and performance event Youth and the Challenge of Social Justice. The guests include activist-poet Luis Rodriguez, author and Columbia University professor emeritus Maxine Greene, performer-poets Mars Gamba-Adisa and Tara Betts, and youth performance group Kuumba Lynx. It’s from 5 to 7:30 in rooms A and B of UIC’s Chicago Illini Union, 820 S. Wolcott. Call 312-355-5190.
