The Southern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a land where time passes slowly. A place where one can sense the  weight of its melancholic history that hovers over the time-worn peaks and settles the verdant valleys below.

This is God's country. A country where the values of the past still govern the countenance of its inhabitants and social change is slow to take root.
 
So I was surprised to learn that over 60 years ago, deep in the “blue hills”, a single piece of progressive literature emerged challenging the social establishment of mid-20th century America.

Through a 1944 novel entitled  “Strange Fruit”, Lillian Eugenia Smith fanned the flames of controversy through a bi-racial love story that served as a subtle, yet powerful indictment of the day's social order, an order rooted in racial inequality and injustice.