The song was not written by an African American jazz musician, but by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx named Abel Meeropol (writing under the pseudonym Lewis Allan), who saw the photograph Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (L. Beitler, 1930) and thought about the poem Bitter Fruit.
The track is a lyrical masterpiece due to its brutal contrast between the idyllic imagery of pastoral Southern nature and the terror of racial violence. The entire song hinges on a devastating metaphor: the bodies of lynched Black Americans hanging from trees are the “strange fruit” of the South.
It was named “Song of the Century” Time magazine later named it the for its unvarnished, chilling indictment of racism and lynchings in the American South.