LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST: This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer. The song 'Strange Fruit' has been recorded by many musicians, but it belongs to Billie Holiday. She made it famous but she did not write it. The man who did did not have a big career as a songwriter but he did have an amazing life story, as NPR's Elizabeth Blair tells us. ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The man is Abel Meeropol and he really has two stories. They both begin at a public high school in the Bronx.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHATTER) BLAIR: Dewitt Clinton is not your average high school. James Baldwin went there.

So did Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon and Ralph Lauren. That's just a handful of the famous people who attended the school. Abel Meeropol - who's not famous - graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921 and then taught there for 17 years. GERARD PELLISON: He taught English and he loved to write poetry. BLAIR: Gerard Pellison also taught at Dewitt Clinton. He wrote a book about the school called 'The Castle on the Parkway.'

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He says Abel Meeropol was an activist. PELLISON: And he was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America.

And seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge. BLAIR: Meeropol once said that photograph haunted him for days. So, he wrote a poem about it that first appeared in a teacher's union publication. He was also an amateur composer, so he set it to music. He played it for a club owner who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.

When she decided to sing 'Strange Fruit,' the song reached millions of people. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, 'STRANGE FRUIT') BILLIE HOLIDAY: (Singing) Southern trees, very strange fruit. BLAIR: The lyrics never mentioned lynching, but the metaphor is painfully clear.

The strange fruit is the lynched body hanging from a tree. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, 'STRANGE FRUIT') HOLIDAY: (Singing) Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

BLAIR: Time magazine named it the Song of the Century in 1999. The Library of Congress put it in the National Recording Registry. It's been recorded dozens of times. Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller did an instrumental version, with Miller playing bass clarinet. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, 'STRANGE FRUIT') BLAIR: Marcus Miller says he was surprised to find out that 'Strange Fruit' was written by a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. Miller says the song took extraordinary courage for both Meeropol and Billie Holiday.

MARCUS MILLER: The '60s hadn't happened yet. Things like that just weren't talked about. They certainly weren't sung about. BLAIR: New York lawmakers didn't like it.

In 1940, Abel Meeropol was called to testify before a committee investigating communism in public schools. They wanted to know whether the Communist Party had paid him to write the song. They had not, but, like many New York teachers in his day, Abel Meeropol was a communist. David Margolick wrote a history of 'Strange Fruit.'

DAVID MARGOLICK: There are a million reasons to disparage communism now, but American communism, one of the points that it had in its favor was that it was concerned about civil rights very early. BLAIR: Abel Meeropol left his teaching job at Dewitt Clinton and eventually he quit the Communist Party. And that brings us to the second part of his story. It begins with the pseudonym he used for his songs and poetry. Lewis Allan was a very personal choice. ROBERT MEEROPOL: Abel Meeropol's pen name, Lewis Allan, were the names of their children who were, you know, were stillborn, who never lived.

BLAIR: That's Robert Meeropol. He and his brother Michael were adopted by Abel and his wife Anne Meeropol after the boys' parents were executed in 1953. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg will die in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison tonight. BLAIR: So, the same man who wrote 'Strange Fruit' is the same man who adopted the orphaned sons of a couple who were executed by the government. In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs had also been communists. Their trial and execution were serious national news, but also had something of a salacious element, given that the Rosenbergs were a married couple.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Four times today atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg appealed their sentence of death, and four times they were unsuccessful. They will be executed tonight, probably within the next half-hour - the first husband and wife to die in the electric chair. BLAIR: The Rosenbergs' sons were six and 10. There are news photographs of the boys wearing suits visiting their parents in prison.

Author David Margolick: MARGOLICK: There is this image that I had in my mind of the two Rosenberg boys at Sing Sing visiting their parents and with Emmanuel Block, the parents' lawyer. And there are these little boys and they're wearing these caps. And they look so young and they look so vulnerable.

And it's really a very, very poignant image. BLAIR: In the months following their parents' execution, Robert Meeropol says it was unclear who would take care of him and his brother. It was the height of McCarthyism. Even family members were fearful of being in any way associated with the Rosenbergs or communism. Then, at a Christmas party at the home of W.E.B.

Du Bois, the boys were introduced to Abel and Anne Meeropol. A few weeks later, they were living with them.

MEEROPOL: One of the most remarkable things was how quickly we adapted. First of all, Abel, what I remember about him as a six-year-old, was that he was a real jokester. He liked to tell silly jokes and play word games. And he would put on these comedy shows that would leave me rolling. BLAIR: They also played around with a tape recorder. This is from the mid-1950s, not long after they'd been adopted. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED TAPE) MEEROPOL: Now, folks, we will have Abel say us a few words.

ABEL MEEROPOL: (Made-up language spoken) MEEROPOL: Thank you, Abel. That was a very nice speech. BLAIR: There is something else about Abel Meeropol that seems to connect the man who wrote 'Strange Fruit' to the man who created a loving family out of a national scandal.

MEEROPOL: He was incredibly soft-hearted. BLAIR: Robert Meeropol says growing up they had an old Japanese maple tree in their backyard that would drop lots of seedlings every year. MEEROPOL: I was the official lawn mower and I was going to mow over them. And he said, oh no, you can't kill the seedlings.

I said what are you going to do with them, dad? There are dozens of them. Well, he dug them up and put them in coffee cans and lined them up along the side of the house - and there were hundreds of them. But he couldn't bring himself to just kill them. Intel Nh82801gb Motherboard Drivers For Windows 7. It's just something he couldn't do. BLAIR: Abel Meeropol died in 1986. His sons Robert and Michael Meeropol both became college professors and they're both involved in social issues.

Robert founded the Rosenberg Fund for Children. He also says he still finds himself unable to kill things in his own garden.

Elizabeth Blair, NPR News. Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website and pages at for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by, an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. A Love Supreme 2 0 Zip Code here.

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Doctor Strange is one of the most powerful sorcerers in existence. Like most sorcerers, he draws his power from three primary sources: the invocation of powerful mystic entities or objects, the manipulation of the universe's ambient magical energy, and his own psychic resources.

Strange's magical repertoire includes energy projection and manipulation, matter transformation, animation of inanimate objects, teleportation, illusion-casting, mesmerism, thought projection, astral projection, dimensional travel, time travel and mental possession, to name a few. The full range of his abilities is unknown. Doctor Strange's powers are sometimes less effective against strictly science-based opponents, although he can overcome this limitation with effort. Born in 1930, Stephen Strange was the eldest child of Eugene and Beverly Strange, then vacationing in Philadelphia.

Two years later, Stephen's sister was born at the family's Nebraska farm. At age eight, Strange was beset by demons controlled by apprentice sorcerer, but was rescued by Mordo's mentor, the, a millennia-old sorcerer who protected the Earth dimension as its Sorcerer Supreme, a role Strange was destined to inherit.

At age eleven, a year or two after his brother 's birth, Strange aided an injured Donna, the experience inspiring him to pursue a medical career. After high school, Strange entered pre-med at a New York college. Later, home on vacation for his nineteenth birthday, Strange went swimming with Donna, who suffered a cramp and drowned. Finding her body after a desperate search, Strange felt a sense of personal failure that eroded his medical idealism. After earning his medical degree in record time, he entered a five-year residency at New York Hospital, where his rapid success made him arrogant. When his mother Beverly died near the end of his residency, a bereaved Strange grew distant from his work. His talent was unaffected, though, and he became a wealthy, celebrated neurosurgeon before he turned thirty.

His egotism made him cold and callous, interested only in high fees. He saved the life of injured United Nations translator, Madeleine Revell; following a romance and proposal, she left him due to his increasingly materialist nature. Two years after Beverly's death, her husband Eugene fell ill; unable to face another family death, Stephen refused to visit his deathbed. A few days later, an outraged Victor berated Stephen for his apparent lack of grief, then rushed from Strange's apartment into the path of an oncoming car. Blaming himself, Strange placed Victor's body in cold storage, half-hoping that future breakthroughs could revive him. Circa 1963, Strange was in a car accident that severely damaged the nerves in his hands, ending his surgical career. Too vain to accept positions as a consultant or assistant, Strange sought a cure and pursued every available treatment, legitimate or not, soon depleting his fortune; in months he was reduced to a derelict, performing shady medical procedures that barely paid his bar tabs.

After hearing rumors of the mystical Ancient One, a desperate Strange pawned his last possessions for a ticket to the East and found the Ancient One's Tibetan palace. At first annoyed when the Ancient One refused to cure him, Strange was later astonished to see the sorcerer attacked by mystic forces. Upon learning that the Ancient One was Earth's magical defender and that the attack on him came from his pupil Mordo, Strange tried to warn him, but Mordo mystically prevented Strange from doing so.

For the sake of the Ancient One and the world, Strange acted unselfishly for the first time in years, vowing to learn magic himself so he could counter Mordo and his ilk. He offered himself as a disciple to the Ancient One, who accepted, having known of Mordo's treachery all along. The Ancient One spent years instructing Strange in the art of sorcery, teaching him how to tap the innate mystic powers of both himself and the world around him, as well as how to invoke the power of awesome entities, or Principalities, who resided in their own realms, most notably the three benign beings known as the. A few years after Strange's arrival, Mordo left to seek greater power, and would often clash with Strange in the future. Strange's guilt over his earlier mistakes weighed heavily upon him over the years, and not all of his early recollections can be trusted. During his years of study and early activity, Strange befriended many sorcerers around the world, including and of Great Britain; and of Italy;,, and of the Middle East; and of Asia; and,, and of America.

Other immortal adventurers, such as and, regarded his ascent with skepticism. Strange also found allies among more earthly heroes, aiding the adventurer in at least two adventures. No later than the 1970s, Strange returned to America, becoming a mystic consultant in New York's Greenwich Village. He was joined by, the descendant of a line that had served the Ancient One for centuries, who became his servant and friend. Strange's earliest foes included the demonic; a nightmarish manifestation of the entity; and the, who preyed upon humanity's dreams and became one of Strange's bitterest enemies. Developing a mysterious reputation like the Ancient One before him, Strange became an occasional consultant to local and even federal authorities.

While the 's debut heralded an upsurge of superhuman activity in recent years, Strange remained aloof from New York's many super heroes at first. The powerful Asgardian god later tricked Strange into covertly attacking Loki's heroic foster brother,; however, Strange soon pierced the deception and united with Thor to drive off Loki. Soon afterward, a clash with Mordo led Strange to encounter the young, who helped Strange rescue several people from a mystic dimension and convinced him to remove their memory of the traumatic experience, even though this caused them to forget Spider-Man's heroism as well. Impressed by Spider-Man's bravery and altruism, Strange came to regard him as a friend, and the two unlikely allies have teamed up many times over the years. Strange soon faced the Dreaded, ruler of the and one of the Ancient One's oldest foes. Sensing the Ancient One's declining power, Dormammu plotted anew to invade the Earth dimension and challenged Strange to a duel in the Dark Dimension. While there, Strange was approached by, a novice mystic and daughter of Dormammu's sister, although few knew her parentage at the time.

Clea sought to prevent the duel, fearful that her home dimension would be devastated by the if its ruler fell, but Strange would not yield. Although Dormammu vastly out powered Strange, their duel drained his energies enough to weaken the barrier which contained the Mindless Ones. Strange, unwilling to endanger the Dark Dimension's denizens, lent Dormammu enough power to restore the barrier. Enraged by his own weakness, Dormammu felt honor-bound to spare Strange, who bargained with him to spare both the Earth dimension and Clea, whom he found very attractive; however, Dormammu swore vengeance and became one of Strange's most implacable enemies. Shortly after this, Strange openly joined several super heroes in battling the powerful mutate. He became a special consultant to prominent super-teams like the Fantastic Four, the and the. Months after attending the wedding of and, Strange was reunited with Clea, who returned his love and came to live with him in New York.

Later, following an extradimensional ordeal, he was forced to change his appearance in order to cross the barrier to Earth; he altered his traditional attire and added a full-face mask, perhaps in imitation of his super-hero allies. Upon his return, Strange retained this appearance to preserve his anonymity but later carelessly revealed his real name to a crowd while fighting Nightmare., the universal embodiment whom Strange was aiding at the time, altered all documents and memories on Earth, changing the name of 'Stephen Strange' to 'Stephen Sanders' to allow Strange a private persona once more. Strange next faced the, a vastly powerful demon race led by the, who had once dominated Earth. During these struggles, Strange manipulated and the monstrous into aiding him. With the Undying Ones defeated, Strange seemingly believed that the Earth dimension was sealed from mystic incursion, and, troubled by his arrogant exploitation of Namor and Hulk, he abandoned his mystic duties and became a medical consultant, performing the selfless duties he had once thought beneath him. Weeks later, Strange returned to action when Baron Mordo tried to kill him.

Aided by the Ancient One, Strange reclaimed his sorcerer role and defeated Mordo, while the Ancient One, for reasons of his own, reversed Eternity's spell, restoring the name 'Stephen Strange' to the world's records and memories. When the Nameless One returned shortly thereafter, Strange resumed his non-masked attire and again recruited Namor and the Hulk to fight alongside him. The three heroes later fought other threats and were soon joined by the alien. This quartet formed the core of the heroic team, becoming friends despite their differences. Strange soon clashed with powerful demon servants of, a vast extradimensional entity who had menaced Earth thousands of years ago and now sought to return via the mind of the Ancient One himself.

At his mentor's prompting, Strange slew the Ancient One, preventing Shuma-Gorath's passage. The Ancient One's physical death made him one with Eternity, and Strange became Sorcerer Supreme, guardian of the entire universe. Heavily burdened by his new responsibilities and seeking the solace of family, Strange tried and failed to revive his brother Victor using spells from the, not realizing he was reading the Vampiric Verses, imbuing Victor with the potential for resurrection as a vampire. Strange continued to share adventures with the Defenders, and over the months the informal team's ranks expanded to include the, the winged millionaire, the happy-go-lucky, and others.

Strange's time with the team forced him to face more non-mystical foes, such as the mutant, the alien, the subversive and the bizarre masterminds called the. Strange's sanctuary often served as Defenders headquarters, and their camaraderie, plus the love of Clea, gave Strange a welcome change from his customary solitude. Manipulated by the trans-temporal sorcerers called the, the Ancient One's spirit offered Strange a chance to become one with the universe, but Strange refused and was stripped of the title and power of Sorcerer Supreme. Shortly afterward, Strange battled the Creators, thwarting their reality-reshaping plans by defeating their ally, the cosmic. With their deception revealed, the Ancient One restored Strange's former status. Although Strange's adventure took mere days from his perspective, weeks apparently passed on Earth; who, if anyone, held the post of Sorcerer Supreme during these weeks is unrevealed. Months later, Strange and the three other senior Defenders parted ways after a cosmic hoax by the mysterious alien convinced them their alliance was destined to cause cosmic tragedy.

Next allied with a band of hunters against, Strange cast the Montesi Formula spell taken from the ancient magic tome the. This spell destroyed virtually all vampires within the Earth dimension; however, unknown to Strange, the spell's energy washed over the forgotten Victor Strange, where its power combined unpredictably with Strange's earlier spell. Meanwhile, Clea had returned to the Dark Dimension to lead the rebellion against its current ruler, Umar, whom she soon learned was her mother. Strange helped Clea ascend to her home universe's throne, but, bound by their respective responsibilities, the couple regretfully separated. Strange next found those very responsibilities challenged by the evil extraterrestrial, who coveted the role of Sorcerer Supreme. A desperate Strange destroyed his own collection of mystic artifacts and tomes to deny Urthona their power; unknown to Strange, his collection was in fact rescued by, one of three Principalities who formed the.

With the removal of Strange's artifacts, various occult threats that had been repelled by their power over the millennia broke free, leaving Strange to face them with reduced power. Accompanied by the extradimensional novice mystic, Strange encountered the Ancient One's old rival, who offered to teach him life-draining black magic as a defense against the returning forces; Strange reluctantly accepted. Strange's black magic ventures culminated in a rematch with Shuma-Gorath, which ended with the demon seemingly destroyed and Strange little better-off, but Strange eventually recovered and returned home. Shortly thereafter, he visited the Dark Dimension and married Clea, who came to live with him on Earth, ruling her kingdom from afar.

Strange took Rintrah as his new apprentice, and a surreal encounter with Agamotto restored his seemingly lost artifacts and tomes. Strange faced a far more unexpected part of his past when his brother Victor revived as the first of a new breed of vampire. Victor fell under the sway of sorceress, who sought to blackmail Strange into reciting the Vampiric Verses, nullifying the effects of the Montesi Formula. Strange instead banished the Vampiric Verses page from the Earth dimension, but Marie LaVeau used Victor as a template to duplicate the spell, making it possible for long-destroyed vampires to reappear. Unable to undo this threat, Strange and Clea were next drawn into a war between Dormammu and Umar for rule of the Dark Dimension; ultimately Umar reclaimed the throne, leaving Clea in exile with Strange.

Strange next allied himself with several super heroes against the mad, who used the near-omnipotent to eradicate half of the universe's population before Earth's heroes defeated him and reversed the effect. As Clea sought allies to regain the Dark Dimension, Strange formed alliances of his own by manipulating the formation of the, a loose-knit group of supernatural heroes, including those who had helped him invoke the Montesi Formula, destined to confront ancient evils. During Clea's absence, he briefly tutored the young sorcerer, who ultimately chose to abandon sorcery. After sharing leadership of Earth's heroes against the during the, Strange teamed with Namor, the Hulk, and the Silver Surfer to battle, the invading Sorcerer Supreme of another dimension (by now, Strange had long since discovered the Tribunals' hoax and knew it was safe for the senior Defenders to reunite). Meanwhile, the Principalities of various mystic realms faced the, a cataclysmic clash with opposing entities that was expected to last five thousand years. Several of them, including the Vishanti, attempted to enlist allies such as Strange, but Strange refused to abandon his earthly duties and, being no match for the godlike Principalities, renounced the use of their mystic energies.

Thus stripped of much of his power, Strange was ill-prepared to face a vastly enhanced Dormammu, who had manipulated Clea's deposal of Umar so that he could again rule the Dark Dimension. Strange recruited the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, and the (Dan Ketch) to aid him in repelling Dormammu, who retained control of the Dark Dimension despite Strange's victory, and Clea remained there to lead the new resistance. Strange sought out Immortalis in hopes of curing Victor, but was refused due to the temporary nature of the cure. Shortly afterward, Rintrah was seemingly slain destroying a dangerous talisman, and Strange, after placing Rintrah's body in stasis pending potential revival, took as a new apprentice, a youth empowered. Strange also began periodically gathering informal teams of heroes as ' to face threats he could not handle alone.