> It’s the place where a young Black artist named Billie Holiday put on a controversial performance of “Strange Fruit” in 1959 America,

I was going to say she was dead by then, but it turns out there IS a recording from 1959, the year she died:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DGY9HvChXk

I still think he probably meant 1939 when she actually was young.