A Lillian Smith Reader

by Lillian E. Smith, Lisa Hodgens (Editor)

As a writer and forward-thinking social critic, Lillian Smith (1897–1966) was an astute chronicler of the twentieth-century American South and an early proponent of the civil rights movement. From her home on Old Screamer Mountain overlooking Clayton, Georgia, Smith wrote and spoke openly against racism, segregation, and Jim Crow laws long before the civil rights era.

Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, and excerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers the first comprehensive collection of her work and a compelling introduction to one of the South’s most important writers.

A conservatory-trained music teacher who left the profession to assume charge of her family’s girls’ camp in Rabun County, Georgia, Smith began her literary careerwriting for a journal that she coedited with her lifelong companion, Paula Snelling, successively titled Pseudopodia (1936), the North Georgia Review (1937–41), and South Today (1942–45). Known today for her controversial, best-selling novel, Strange Fruit (1944); her collection of autobiographical essays, Killers of the Dream (1949); and her lyrical documentary, Now Is the Time (1955), Smith was acclaimed and derided in equal measures as a southern white liberal who critiqued her culture’s economic, political, and religious institutions as dehumanizing for white and black, male and female, rich and poor. She was also a frequent and eloquent contributor to periodicals such as the Saturday Review , LIFE , the New Republic , the Nation, and the New York Times.

The influence of Smith’s oeuvre extends far beyond these publications. Her legacy rests on her sense of social justice, her articulation of racial and social inequities, and her challenges to the status quo. In their totality, her works propose a vision of justice and human understanding that we have yet to achieve.

Genres: Memoir

344 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2016

About the author

Lillian Smith was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known best for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (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 and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism.

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born on December 12, 1897 in the America before women's suffrage to a prominent family in Jasper, Florida, the eighth of ten 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 mills. The family was not without resources however, and decided to relocate to their summer residence in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia, 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 in Demorest (1915–1916). She also had two stints at the Peabody Conservatory in 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, (now Wuxing, Zhejiang), China. While she was not a churchgoer and did not consider herself religious, it follows that her youthful Christian principals 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 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, 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 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, and the two 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 grabbed the entire nation's attention with the Montgomery bus 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 Ed

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never read Lillian Smith in any of my Southern literature courses in college or graduate school. I should have. Her writing on desegregation and racial equality as a white woman in Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s is truly inspiring. Much of this reader includes her fiction and nonfiction writing on interracial relationships and the urgent need for civic equality and desegregation. Several pieces included in the reader come from her years running a camp for girls (white daughters of middle and upper-class families in the South) at which she taught gender and racial equality and encouraged the girls to reflect on their experiences and embrace psychological health amidst a culture of suppression. I am adding Strange Fruit to my must-read list based on this reader.

[Nd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lillian Smith's intellect is absolute remarkable. I've just read through another section of her writings from the 1930s and '40s, including some quotes about and excerpts from her book Killers of the Dream. Her intricately worded forward thinking and published stories about racism untangle some of the complications in an intuitive and straightforward way that I wish would be and certainly should be spoken and written today. Approaching 1950, the essay Three Ghost Stories challenge and identify how southern race beliefs became traditional thought as they evolved through generations of southerners. It's quite powerful and should be required reading.

So the synopsis above was written over a period of time during which I read Smith's works in fits and starts. She packs so much into every sentence, paragraph, and essay, that it takes time to absorb before moving on to the next explicative insight. Her social criticism is exceptionally forward-thinking for the time period (1930s to mid-1960s) and, indeed, is extraordinarily on point for this day and time where our country seems to be in some sort of regression on these issues -- again. Also very interesting is the fact that during Smith's comfortable southern early years of growing up she wasn't attuned to prejudice and racism. It took some time viewing it in China for it to penetrate her awareness. -- She certainly made up for lost time.

[Charles Collyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lillian Smith was mentioned by Martin Luther King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail as one of the white writers, "small in quantity, but ... large in quality," who had supported the cause of civil rights from its early days. Smith was certainly ahead of her time, writing eloquent and scathing criticisms of segregation in the south from her position as a privileged white southern woman - an embodiment of the creature that segregationists claimed to be protecting from defilement by blacks. She found segregation hideous and absurd, a horrible debasement of white people as well as a totally unjust, cruel, and nationally embarrassing form of apartheid. She fought against it her whole life, in poetry, essays, fiction, letters, and plays. I found myself in sync with her cognitive and psychodynamic approach to racism. Rather than condemning people who speak and act hatefully, she relentlessly probes the mentality of racism, and the tragic mental bondage it imposes on both black and white. This volume is a selection of Smith's writing, arranged chronologically and designed to showcase her civic and artistic concern for social justice, and the strength and depth of her thought.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s an odd experience to read Lillian Smith in Georgia in 2021. Her writing is so troublingly relevant, particularly at such a watershed moment.

[Bobbie N · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of some of the vast writings of writer and social critic Lillian Smith (1897-1966), a white southern woman who was way ahead of her times in speaking out against segregation; comprised of excerpts from her novels and plays, essays, magazine articles, speeches, book reviews, letters and op eds; combining her vast knowledge of science, religion, history, psychology, and the arts, with a view to healing long-standing cultural wounds.
I only recently learned of Lillian Smith and her 1944 novel Strange Fruit, and expected to find much of this collection dated, but it is not. Racism and bigotry continue, we continue to see the consequences of white supremacy and colonialism around the world, and once again demagoguery has reared its ugly head, making voices such as hers more needed than ever.
Highly recommended.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating woman with an important legacy of writings. This reader is a good introduction to and overview of her life and work.

[Olivia McGahee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am obsessed with this woman!