Most people know “Strange Fruit” is about lynching. Fewer know it began as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, who was haunted by a photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. He later set the poem to music, and Billie Holiday turned it into one of the most powerful performances of her career, closing her sets at Café Society with the lights dimmed and no encore. (Holiday’s memoir later claimed she and her accompanist wrote the music, but Meeropol disputed that account, and the record was eventually corrected.) Years later, Meeropol and his wife also adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the couple’s execution.
Source: Britannica | USHMM