This powerful episode is made more meaningful by the use of a particularly apt closing song. "Strange Fruit" was written by Abel Meeropol as a reaction to a 1930 double lynching in Marion, Indiana which represented one of the last carnival-style lynchings in the US. The text of the song would suggest that this aberrant social behavior only existed in the magnolia-drenched land of Dixie, but as the reality showed, Indiana was hardly the Heart of the Confederacy. This episode shows that Pennsylvania was not Dixie either. While lynching was vigorously performed in the South, we should never forget that no state or territory was immune from blind hatred. This episode escaped perfection only because the producers decided to use the Nina Simone cover rather than the Billie Holiday original.
Review of Strange Fruit
