The biography of a song, a portrait of "Lady Day," and an overview of racism in the United States from 1939 to 1956.

Greenwich Village, New York, one evening in March 1939: a bohemian crowd gathers in the basement of the new jazz club Café Society. The place is one of a kind: they play good music and everyone is welcome here, Black or white... Tonight, they have come to listen to the star of New York jazz: Billie Holiday. In 1956, backstage at a small, seedy jazz club in Harlem, Abel Meeropol, a poet and political activist hunted by the McCarthyists, meets jazz singer Billie Holiday, for whom he had written the song "Strange Fruit."