1939

Washington, New York

Fruit, Billie Holiday, Lynching, Song, Crime, Café Society, Strange

America’s need for change during the horrific time of lynching is suggested in “Blood at the Root: “Strange Fruit” as Historical Document and Pedagogical Tool” [1]. In 1930, a high school teacher named Abel Meeropol and also known as “Lewis Allen”-his two sons died in infancy- , wrote a poem after seeing a picture of the lynching of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana. To hear...