The Poem: Strange Fruit

November 22, 2000
How one teacher wrote the 'best song' of the century; New book tells story behind a chilling poem


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Ask a jazz aficionado about Billie Holiday and you're likely to hear about a great talent with a troubled life. Ask the same person about Abel Meeropol and you're sure to draw a blank stare.

In 1937, Meeropol, an English teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, saw a photograph of a lynching. Haunted by the image, he wrote a poem titled "Strange Fruit."

That poem, and its effect on generations to come, is the subject of a new book, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, by David Margolick. The book is published by Running Press.

Meeropol was a member of The Teachers' Union, a predecessor of the United Federation of Teachers, New York State United Teachers' affiliate representing New York City school employees.

The poem was first published in the union newspaper, New York Teacher, under the title "Bitter Fruit." It was converted into a song performed by Meeropol's wife Anne at union gatherings.

In 1939, the legendary Holiday heard it and began singing it at the Cafe Society, regarded as New York City's "only truly integrated" nightclub outside Harlem, according to Margolick's book.

The song became forever linked with Holiday, who even claimed in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, to have written it. Holiday died in 1959.

The late jazz writer Leonard Feather called Meeropol's "Strange Fruit" the "first significant protest in words and music." Time magazine simply named it the best song of the 20th century.

Teaching at DeWitt Clinton

Besides teaching for more than 25 years at DeWitt Clinton - the school he attended as a boy - Meeropol wrote plays and songs under the name Lewis Allan, including "The House I Live In," popularized by Frank Sinatra. The song, a plea for tolerance, was developed into a movie short that won an Academy Award in 1945.

The DeWitt Clinton Alumni Association has an archive of Meeropol's writings. The prolific teacher-author is most famous, perhaps, for adopting the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and executed in 1953.

Abel and Anne Meeropol were "closet communists," Margolick writes. Abel Meeropol himself was investigated for communist activity during a 1940 state probe of communist "subversion" in New York's public schools; this was an era when government officials often labeled supporters of unionism and civil rights as "communists."

"'Strange Fruit' was his artistic creation he was most proud of," said Meeropol's adopted son, Michael, a professor of economics at Western New England College in Massachu-setts. "It's wonderful that he wrote it and that it resonated."