'Strange Fruit' in 2026: Why LGBTQ+ people cannot look away from racial terror

In 1937, Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, saw a photograph he could not shake. The image showed Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith hanging from a tree after they had been lynched in Marion, Indiana. Haunted by what he saw, Meeropol wrote "Strange Fruit." Two years later, Billie Holiday transformed it into one of the most devastating protest songs ever recorded. “Southern trees…