On our March cover, we demonstrated a remarkable lack of judgment and sensitivity when we matched a photo of a young band hanging from monkey bars with the headline “Strange Fruit.” The combination of the phrase and the hanging image was far too close to the subject of the Billie Holiday song first recorded in 1939—lynching—and we’re profoundly sorry for our mistake.

As one reader pointed out, the song started as a poem by Abel Meeropol, who published it in 1936 as a response to a photo of...