The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings

by Lillian E. Smith

This volume collects Lillian Smith's speeches and essays, under three headings. In "Addressed to the South," they are a historical record of segregation and the opposition to segregation. In "Words That Chain Us and Words That Set Us Free," they discuss the power of language to change political and social situations, the necessity of respect for people's differences, the groping for meaning that we do, and the political role of the creative person. The speeches and essays in "Of Women, Men, and Autobiography" deal with such topics as the difference in experience of women and men, the power and powerlessness of women, and the complexities of autobiographical truth.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

218 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1978

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

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a reread from decades ago, after reading Strange Fruit. When I moved to Georgia I met a woman who is the grand niece of Paula Snelling, Smith's longtime companion, and we visited her in her nursing home in Rabun County not long before Snelling's death. Snelling told us she worried Smith's work was incomplete and forgotten. This sentiment seemed so remote to us in the 80s, after all wasn't everything different now? Segregation had been in the south's rear view mirror for decades, Atlanta had a Black mayor and a Black middle class, what was Snelling worried about? Now comes 2022 and turns out that while much had changed, much has remained the same - housing issues, police shootings, ugly mobs and other leftovers from Jim Crow. Smith's writing remains clear-eyed, intelligent, and relevant. Smith wrote eloquently about mobs. One of her finest essays "No Easy Way-Now" demands to know where the strength of mobs and demogogues comes from. In "The Mob and the Ghost", writing about the 1961 attack on Charlayne Hunter, she says "A mob always begins inside us: never is it an outside job." Other memorable lines: In the eponymous speech: "the Age of Enlightenment was an age when most Western men could not read or write. The Age of the Rights of Man was a time when a new slavery was sending deep roots into American soil, and a new colonialism was beginning to lay its greedy paws on Asia and Africa." And just one last example, from "Ten Years From Today": "no government can make men good; even God cannot do that. What democracy can and does do is to protect men's right to make themselves as good as they want to be."

[B. Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous collection of writings by Lillian Smith (1897-1966), a writer of extraordinary power and an activist who refused the roles pushed on women of her time. Raised in Florida, she lived the rest of her life, aside from school in Baltimore and three years teaching in China, in rural Georgia. In her novels, essays, and lectures, she dissected her Southern culture and with clarity and passion laid bare the effects of segregation on both black and white. Her most famous novel is Strange Fruit inspired by Billie Holliday’s rendition of that song. It raised a storm of protest on both sides of the issue and inspired future Civil Rights workers.

http://bmorrison.com/blog/361/the-win...