First performed by Meeropol's wife and their friends in social contexts, his protest song gained a certain success in and around New York. Though Meeropol had asked others (notably Earl Robinson) to set his poems to music, he set 'Strange Fruit' to music himself. Meeropol published the poem under the title 'Bitter Fruit' in January 1937 in The New York Teacher, a union magazine of the Teachers Union. In the poem, Meeropol expressed his horror at lynchings, inspired by Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. 'Strange Fruit' originated as a poem written by the Jewish-American writer, teacher and songwriter Abel Meeropol, under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, as a protest against lynchings. Poem and song Meeropol cited this photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930, as inspiring his poem. In 2002, 'Strange Fruit' was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant'. It was also included in the ' Songs of the Century' list of the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Holiday's version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978. Meeropol set his lyrics to music with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan and performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden. The song has been called 'a declaration' and 'the beginning of the civil rights movement'. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the Southern United States at the turn of the 20th century and the great majority of victims were black. The song protests the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. The lyrics were drawn from a poem by Meeropol published in 1937.

' Strange Fruit' is a song written and composed by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan) and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. For other uses, see Strange Fruit (disambiguation).

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