‘Strange Fruit’ by Abel Meeropol

A poem and song of outrage

Billie Holliday New York 1947 (Wikimedia)

Sometime in the early 1930s, a young and liberal-thinking schoolteacher Abel Meeropol saw a photograph of a lynching in Omaha, Nebraska, America. The images haunted him for days and he was so upset by what he saw that he wrote a poem about such atrocities,

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,