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In April 2021, a fascinating segment on the CBS This Morning show, as well as a widely shared tweet, highlighted the rich history behind the song Strange Fruit — an anti-racist anthem made famous by Billie Holiday with her 1939 recording and subsequent live performances. In an April 25 tweet, Mary Rambaran-Olm, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, wrote: Let me blow your minds. The writer of Strange Fruit (Abel Meeropol), was James Baldwin's high school teacher. He later adopted two boys after their parents (the Rosenbergs) were executed for being commies. He met the boys at a Christmas party hosted by W.E.B. Du Bois. Rambaran-Olm was commenting on a This Morning segment that aired the day before and featured an interview with Michael and Robert Meeropol about the origins and history of the song. The claim that Meeropol wrote Strange Fruit and also happened to teach James Baldwin was accurate, and we are issuing a rating of True. In 1953, as Rambaran-Olm noted in her tweet, Michael and Robert's biological parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed after being convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Abel and Anne Meeropol adopted the two boys. Meeropol was a high school teacher in the Bronx, New York, as well as a poet, songwriter, and left-wing, anti-racist activist. According to one prominent account, he was horrified by seeing a photograph of a lynching in the early 1930s, probably the infamous August 1930 lynching of Black teenagers Tom Shipp and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana. The incident haunted Meeropol, but it also inspired him to write a poem originally entitled Bitter Fruit, which he first published under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in 1937. Years later, he reflected: I wrote 'Strange Fruit' because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it. Meeropol is closely associated with DeWitt Clinton High School, a renowned public school in the Bronx whose notable alumni include Meeropol himself, the actor Burt Lancaster, the playwright Neil Simon, the comic book writer Stan Lee, and perhaps most notably, the writer and activist James Baldwin. Meeropol taught English at DeWitt Clinton for several years, including the period during which Baldwin was a student there. The notion that Baldwin — perhaps the most prominent Black American writer of the 20th century — was taught English literature by a white, Jewish teacher who also happened to write the most prominent anti-racist anthem of the 20th century, is an alluring piece of historical happenstance. It is also true. Official records of Baldwin's time at the school have been lost. Gerard Pelisson, a former DeWitt Clinton social studies teacher, and the co-author of a history of the school and some of its most notable alumni, told Snopes that Baldwin graduated in January 1942, and Meeropol left in 1945, but that the school's records on Baldwin were later stored for safe-keeping and subsequently lost. School records corroborating the direct link between Meeropol and Baldwin were therefore not available. However, confirmation came in a brief but touching exchange of letters between the two men, years later. The letters are housed in the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Meeropol's letter to Baldwin, dated Sep. 5, 1974, was uncovered by Bill Mullen, a professor of English and American Studies at Purdue University and the author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire. It can be read in full here. In it, Meeropol recalled a specific memory of Baldwin as a young boy, showing an early glimpse of his literary gifts during a classroom exercise: Mullen quoted Baldwin's reply in his book. Baldwin wrote that Meeropol's letter confirmed his own sense that he had once been his teacher and suggested a shared (albeit much vaguer) recollection of the blackboard composition exercise: Meeropol died in Massachusetts in October 1986 at the age of 83. Baldwin died at his home in the south of France in December 1987 at the age of 63. In 2002, the Library of Congress added Holiday's 1939 recording of Strange Fruit to the National Recording Registry, a list of songs deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
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