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Lillian Smith (author)
Encyclopedia
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
, known best for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit (novel)
Strange Fruit is a novel by American author Lillian Smith that was published in 1944, about the then-forbidden and controversial theme of interracial romance. It was banned in Boston....
(1944). A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism.
Southern Childhood
Smith was born on December 12, 1897 in the America before women's suffrageWomen's suffrage
Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
to a prominent family in Jasper, Florida
Jasper, Florida
Jasper is a city in Hamilton County, Florida, United States. The population was 1,780 at the 2000 census. As of 2004, the population estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau is 1,848 . It is the county seat of Hamilton County. The United Methodist Church in Jasper, Florida is on the National Register...
, the seventh of nine children. Her life as the daughter of a middle class civic and business leader took an abrupt turn in 1915 when her father lost his turpentine
Turpentine
Turpentine is a fluid obtained by the distillation of resin obtained from trees, mainly pine trees. It is composed of terpenes, mainly the monoterpenes alpha-pinene and beta-pinene...
mills. The family was not without resources however, and decided to relocate to their summer residence in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia
Clayton, Georgia
Clayton is a city in Rabun County, Georgia, United States. The population was 2,019 at the 2000 census. The city is the county seat of Rabun County and is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains.-History:...
, where her father had previously purchased property and operated the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls.
Now a young adult financially on her own, she was free to pursue her love of music and teaching for the next five years. She spent a year studying at Piedmont College
Piedmont College
Piedmont College is a private liberal arts institution founded in 1897 to serve residents of the Appalachian area of northeast Georgia, USA. When the college was first founded, it was established as the J.S. Green Collegiate Institute named after a local banker. In 1899, the name was shortened to...
in Demorest
Demorest
-People:* Ellen Louise Demorest — US fashion arbiter and milliner, wife of William Jennings Demorest* Stephen Demorest — soap opera writer...
(1915–1916). She also had two stints at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
in 1917 and 1919. She returned home and helped her parents manage a hotel and taught in two mountain schools before accepting a position to be director of music at a Methodist school for girls in Huzhou
Huzhou
Huzhou is a prefecture-level city in northern Zhejiang province of Eastern China. Lying south of the Lake Tai, it borders Jiaxing to the east, Hangzhou to the south, and the provinces of Anhui and Jiangsu to the west and north respectively.-Administration:...
, (now Wuxing, Zhejiang
Zhejiang
Zhejiang is an eastern coastal province of the People's Republic of China. The word Zhejiang was the old name of the Qiantang River, which passes through Hangzhou, the provincial capital...
), China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
. While she was not a churchgoer and did not consider herself religious, it follows that her youthful Christian principles were challenged by the oppression and injustice she would witness there, and that this laid the foundation of her later awareness as a social critic.
Her time in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
was limited, however, by problems back home. Her father's health was declining and she was forced to return home to the States in 1925. Back in Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
, she assumed the role of heading the Laurel Falls Camp, a position she would hold for the next twenty three years (1925–1948). Laurel Falls Camp soon became very popular as an innovative educational institution known for its instruction in the arts, music, drama, and modern psychology. Her father died in 1930, and she was left with responsibility for the family business and the care of her ill mother. It was this period of creative control over the camp, her ability to use it as a place to discuss modern social issues, combined with the pressures of caring for her ailing parents that made her turn to writing as an emotional escape.
Lillian Smith soon formed a lifelong relationship with one of the camp's school counselors, Paula Snelling, of Pinehurst, Georgia
Pinehurst, Georgia
Pinehurst is a city in Dooly County, Georgia, United States. The population was 307 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Pinehurst is located at ....
. The two remained closeted as a same-sex couple for the rest of their lives, as their correspondence has shown. The couple began publishing a small, quarterly literary magazine, Pseudopodia, in 1936. The magazine encouraged writers, black or white, to offer honest assessments of modern southern life, to challenge for social and economic reform, and it criticized those who ignored the Old South's poverty and injustices. It quickly gained regional fame as a forum for liberal thought, undergoing two name changes to reflect its expanding scope. In 1937 it became the North Georgia Review, and in 1942 finally settling with South Today.
In 1949, she kept up her personal assault on racism with Killers of the Dream, a collection of essays that attempted to identify, challenge and dismantle the Old South's racist traditions, customs and beliefs, warning that segregation corrupted the soul. She also emphasized the negative implications on the minds of women and children. Written in a confessional and autobiographical style that was highly critical of southern moderates, it met with something of a cruel silence from book critics and the literary community.
In 1955, the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
grabbed the entire nation's attention with the Montgomery bus boycott
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign that started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, USA, intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. Many important figures in the civil rights movement were involved in the boycott,...
. By this time she had been meeting or corresponding with many southern blacks and liberal whites for years and was well aware of blacks' concerns. In response to Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 , was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which...
, the ruling that outlawed segregation in schools, she wrote Now Is the Time (1955), calling for compliance with the new court decision. She called the new ruling "every child's Magna Carta".
Smith battled breast cancer
Breast cancer
Breast cancer is cancer originating from breast tissue, most commonly from the inner lining of milk ducts or the lobules that supply the ducts with milk. Cancers originating from ducts are known as ductal carcinomas; those originating from lobules are known as lobular carcinomas...
from the early 1950s
1950s
The 1950s or The Fifties was the decade that began on January 1, 1950 and ended on December 31, 1959. The decade was the sixth decade of the 20th century...
on and died on September 28, 1966, at the age of 68. Her book The Journey (1954) details some of this battle.
Today Strange Fruit remains her most famous work, translated into fifteen languages, but many of her works, like Killers of the Dream, are being rediscovered and given their due as groundbreaking in both style and substance. She no doubt deserves recognition as one of the first prominent Southern whites to write about and speak out openly against racism and segregation. Her lifelong convictions are summed up in her acceptance speech for the Charles S. Johnson
Charles S. Johnson
Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist, first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all other ethnic minorities...
Award at Fisk University
Fisk University
Fisk University is an historically black university founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. The world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers started as a group of students who performed to earn enough money to save the school at a critical time of financial shortages. They toured to raise funds to...
in 1966: "Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation."
Other works
Killers of the Dream (1949)One Hour (1959), an attack on McCarthyism in the form of a novel
Memory of a Large Christmas (1962)
Our Faces, Our Words (1964), an ode to the non-violent resistance of the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
Collections
The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings (1978)How Am I to be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith (1993)