The lyrics of “Strange Fruit” were written in the early 1930s by Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen), a white Jewish school teacher from New York City, who later adopted the two sons of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Upon seeing the well-known Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana (1930),[37] Meeropol became so incensed that he wrote a poem to express what he felt. “It . . . haunted me for days,” he recalled later. “I wrote ‘Strange Fruit’ because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate
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