Joel Katz's film touches as well on Meeropol's link to another part of 20th-century American history: He and wife Anne adopted the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after the couple were executed in 1953 for espionage.

"My father was most proud of 'Strange Fruit,' of all the things he ever did. He was most proud of that," one of the Rosenberg boys, Michael Meeropol, says in the film.

It is the song and its horrific images of hatred, contained in just a dozen lines, that drive the hourlong documentary:

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South/The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth/Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh/And the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck/For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck/For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop/Here is a strange and bitter crop."