Lillian Eugenia Smith was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known most prominently for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944).
Background
Born December 12, 1897, in the small, racially-divided north Florida town of Jasper, Lillian Smith was the seventh of nine children. Her father, Calvin Warren Smith, was a successful local businessman and civic leader, while her mother, Anne Hester Simpson, was a descendant of wealthy rice planters. Her parents introduced her to music and literature, but she also was exposed to the accepted views of white supremacy.
Education
Smith graduated from high school in 1915 and spent several years studying, running a hotel her father operated, joining the Student Nursing Corps, and teaching at a rural high school in Georgia.
Career
The Southern writer Lillian Eugenia Smith was recognized as a passionate critic of white supremacy and segregation. Her main concern was that the traditional pattern of race relations, which she knew intimately from her own experience growing up in Florida and Georgia, was harmful to the humanity of both whites and African Americans. In 1919 she resumed her piano studies at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Beginning in 1922, Smith spent three crucial years as the music director of an American Methodist school for Chinese girls in Huchow, China. The experience introduced her to Chinese philosophy and the impact of Western imperialism. It also revealed a new perspective on social relations in the South. Smith, who never married, returned in 1925 to take care of her ailing parents and to help run the Lauren Falls Camp for Girls in Clayton, Georgia. Purchased as a summer home in 1912, the family had moved there permanently in 1915 when the father's business had failed. Under her direction, the camp, which she operated until 1949, became nationally acclaimed for its creative and educational approach. When the camp was not in session she returned to writing. After producing several manuscripts about her family and her experience in China that went unpublished, in 1935 she and her friend Paula Snelling launched a magazine devoted to Southern politics and culture. It first appeared in the spring of 1936 as Pseudopedia (later renamed The North Georgia Review and then The South Today) with 200 subscribers, and reached a circulation of 10, 000 by the time it ceased publication in 1945. The magazine, which printed the work of African Americans and women, was also a forum for Smith, who criticized racism by appealing to the self-interest of middle-and upper-class whites. She had spent winters in 1927 and 1928 studying psychology at Columbia Teachers College, and her interest in Freud and such other writers as Karl Menninger was evident in her writing. She was interested primarily in the psychological harm of segregation on whites. Her ideas found wider expression in the controversial and best-selling novel Strange Fruit, published in 1944, which was a story about an ill-fated love affair between a young white man from a respected family and a college-educated African American woman working as a housekeeper. It was set in a small town based on her native Jasper. Banned in Boston as obscene, it eventually sold over three million copies and was translated into 16 languages. The success of the novel gave her financial independence and established her reputation as a critic of segregation. She lectured, wrote for national magazines, and contributed a column for the Black newspaper The Defender (Chicago). Her second major book, Killers of the Dream (1949), was nonfiction, blending autobiography and psychology to analyze her upbringing and the pathology of a Southern culture based on white supremacy and segregation. In her view the sickness of the Southern way of life transcended race relations and symbolized the human experience. Shortly after being treated for breast cancer for the first time, she wrote The Journey (1954), which was based on her travels and interviews in the South and investigated the idea of human dignity. The book focused on suffering and pain in the lives of many individuals in the South and expressed her discovery of a religious outlook that replaced the early evangelical Christianity she had rejected in her youth. After the 1954 historic Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (which outlawed segregation in schools), Smith wrote Now Is the Time (1955), which urged the South to accept the decision. She published another novel, One Hour (1959), which focused on the hysteria of the McCarthy era. In the changing climate of the early 19606, Smith gained a wider audience, publishing a revised version of Killers of the Dream as well as writing for such mass circulation magazines as Life, McCalls, and Redbook, and such major newspapers as the New York Times and Atlanta Constitution.
Her final book was a pictorial essay on the civil rights efforts, Our Faces, Our Words (1964). Yet from the mid-19306 until her death on September 28, 1966, she was a respected, uncompromising, and influential advocate of desegregation in the South.
Views
She later rebelled against the prejudices of her culture, era, and region, and as a writer became recognized as one of the most outspoken opponents of segregation in the South.
In 1944, she published the bestselling novel Strange Fruit, which dealt with the then-forbidden and controversial theme of interracial romance. The title was originally Jordan is so Chilly, with Smith later changing the title to Strange Fruit. In her autobiography, singer Billie Holiday wrote that Smith chose to name the book after her song "Strange Fruit", which was about the lynching and racism against African-Americans, although Smith maintained that the book's title referred to the "damaged, twisted people (both black and white) who are the products or results of our racist culture. " After the book's release, the book was banned in Boston and Detroit for "lewdness" and crude language. Strange Fruit was also banned from being mailed through the U. S. Postal Service, with the ban against the book being lifted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt after his wife Eleanor Roosevelt requested it of him.
In 1949, Smith 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.
According to "The Language of Sexuality and Silence in Lillian Smith's 'Strange Fruit'", her work examines many different perspectives of American consciousness and is a great source to better understand Southern history post-Civil War through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's. She could also be used as a reliable patron for gay and lesbian research based on her relationship with Snelling.
Membership
She had been an early member of such African American organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Personality
Throughout her career Smith was one of the most outspoken white Southerners on race issues, and she criticized the timidity of moderates and liberals. She had always preferred appeals to white self-interest and personal change, but beginning in the mid-19506 she supported the nonviolent civil rights movement and the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. By the mid-1966 she became critical of the increasingly militant tone of some African American groups. As a writer Smith never felt appreciated as a creative artist. She was bitter that critics judged her work in terms of social problems rather than viewing it as a metaphor for the alienation of the human condition.
During her time at the family camp, Lillian Smith soon formed a lifelong relationship with one of the camp's school counselors, Paula Snelling, of Pinehurst, Georgia. The two remained closeted as a same-sex couple for the rest of their lives, as their correspondence has shown. In the South, gender roles were binarily distinct and Smith never addressed her sexuality openly. However, some of her literature's characters were lesbian. At that time, homosexuality was more of a taboo in Southern Society than desegregation. Lillian and Paula 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.