Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Billie Holiday grew up in grinding Baltimore poverty. Abandoned and neglected, she was sexually assaulted at just eleven years old, only for the authorities to lock her away in a reform school, treating the child victim like the criminal.

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Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia and what you can do to help the 166 million women and girls fighting for constitutional equality.''

In 1959, one of the greatest singers in American history lay dying in a New York hospital ward, handcuffed to her bed and placed under armed guard by federal agents.

She was forty-four years old, her body broken after a lifetime of trauma, addiction, and relentless persecution.

Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Billie Holiday grew up in grinding Baltimore poverty. Abandoned and neglected, she was sexually assaulted at just eleven years old, only for the authorities to lock her away in a reform school, treating the child victim like the criminal.

Out of that horrific childhood, she found her escape in Harlem’s jazz clubs. She didn't have a booming, powerful voice, but she possessed something far rarer: an intimate, aching tone that wrapped every note around her own real pain.

Then in 1939, she performed "Strange Fruit", a harrowing protest song depicting the lynching of Black Americans in the South.

Whenever she sang it, the room went dead silent. But the song made her a target.

The head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics made it his personal mission to ruin her. When Billie boldly refused to stop singing the anthem, federal agents hounded her for years. They put her on trial, sent her to prison, and stripped away her cabaret license, effectively banning her from performing in the very clubs that provided her livelihood.

Even as her liver failed in 1959, narcotics agents raided her hospital room, claimed to find drugs far beyond her reach, and handcuffed the dying icon to her bed, taking her mugshot as she slipped away.

She died with just seventy cents in her bank account, and a small roll of cash taped to her leg to ensure the nurses taking care of her were paid.

They could arrest her, hunt her down, and chain her to a hospital bed, but they could never take away the truth in her voice.

Born Eleanora Fagan in 1915, Billie Holiday grew up in grinding Baltimore poverty. Abandoned and neglected, she was sexually assaulted at just eleven years old, only for the authorities to lock her away in a reform school, treating the child victim like the criminal.

'SO YOU'RE NOT A WHORE? HALF A GRAM SAYS YOU ARE...... BUT THAT'S NONE OF MY BUSINESS.

'SO YOU'RE NOT A WHORE? HALF A GRAM SAYS YOU ARE...... BUT THAT'S NONE OF MY BUSINESS.

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