(Author's first novel which brought her notoriety for its ...)
Author's first novel which brought her notoriety for its candid language and controversial themes of a love affair between a white man a black woman as well as issues of homoeroticism and homophobia. Fueled by attempts to suppress it, and unofficial attempts to have it banned, it quickly became a bestseller. Smith is noted for her political activism decrying sexual and racial segregation and her work with the ACLU. Controversial.
Lillian Eugenia Smith was an American writer, editor, and civil rights advocate. She became the most prominent white southerner ihn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Background
She was born on December 12, 1897 in Jasper, Florida, United States, the daughter of Calvin Warren Smith, a prosperous businessman, and Anne Hester Simpson. Smith's early years in Jasper influenced her later writing. She witnessed racial segregation and class division, in one instance being forced to separate from a childhood playmate when her parents discovered the girl was a mulatto. From her parents she received the advantages of social class, an appreciation of literature and music, respect for manners, and a strong evangelical Methodism.
Education
In 1917, Smith entered Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory to study piano, but she left in 1918 to join the Student Nursing Corps. In the fall of 1919 she resumed her musical studies at the Peabody Conservatory.
Career
After the Armistice she served as both principal and teacher of a rural school in Tiger, Georgia. In 1922, Smith accepted a position as music director at the Virginia School, an American Methodist mission school for Chinese girls in Huchow, China. She spent three years in China and was transformed by the experience. Western imperialism shocked her, and she immediately drew comparisons to racism and segregation in the American South. Like so many others who became southern "liberals" by living outside the South for a time, Smith's experiences in China and even earlier in Baltimore had given her new critical perspectives on the South's social system.
In 1925 the failing health of Smith's parents called her back to Clayton. She assumed management of Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, the family's major source of income and Smith's passion for the next twenty-four years. With the assistance of Paula Snelling, who would remain her lifelong partner, Smith converted the exclusive girls' camp into a nationally renowned educational institution. Smith and Snelling introduced programs in the arts and in exercise to encourage the campers, who were almost wholly drawn from the white South's prominent and wealthy families, to deal forthrightly with the problems of growing up and becoming socially and emotionally responsible.
With the death of her father in 1930, Smith assumed care of her invalid mother, which, along with other responsibilities for family members, tied her to Clayton. In 1928 she went to New York to study at Columbia Teachers College and taught music to blacks, Jews, and Italians in Harlem.
In 1938, after her mother's death, Smith traveled to Brazil. There she observed a pattern of race relations more open than that of the South, and she completed much of the work on a novel, later published as Strange Fruit (1944). In late 1935 she and Paula Snelling launched a little magazine devoted to southern issues. The magazine appeared in spring 1936 as Pseudopodia but was renamed The North Georgia Review in 1937 and The South Today in 1942. The magazine, which reflected Smith's evangelical conception of the artist as social critic, used literary, cultural, and psychological criticism to indict caste and class in the South. In her magazine Smith also regularly published the work of black artists and scholars and encouraged women writers, all in an effort to stimulate creative writing about the South. Even though it acquired a reputation as an important journal of interdisciplinary thought and commanded a circulation of 10, 000, The South Today ceased publication in 1945.
Smith had sought help from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to expand the magazine's scope and frequency of publication. The Rosenwald Fund declined to underwrite the magazine but did award Smith fellowships in 1939 and 1940 to pursue her own writing. Smith's writing eventually freed her from dependence on the girls' camp for income and the magazine for a voice. In 1944 her novel Strange Fruit finally appeared (it had been completed since 1941).
Between 1944 and 1947, Smith enlarged her audience by writing for national magazines and by joining the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1946 she traveled to India (to which she would return with Paula Snelling in 1955), where she observed the arrogance of caste in a new setting and became imbued with the spirit of Gandhism.
In America she continued to chide southern liberals for being cautious in attacking segregation. From October 1948 to September 1949 she wrote a regular column for the Chicago Defender, in which she called for world peace, pressed for the abolition of segregation, and revealed her own increasingly mystical religious beliefs. Smith's book, Killers of the Dream (1949), blends autobiography, history, and psychology to denounce segregation and to label racists as morally and psychologically unbalanced.
The controversies surrounding Killers of the Dream, in combination with her ill health and financial losses, led to the closing of her camp in 1949. The constant demands of lecturing and contributing to magazines compensated somewhat, but she felt her life and work were being "smothered" by hostile critics. In 1953, after Smith underwent surgery for breast cancer, she completed The Journey (1954), the companion volume to Killers of the Dream. In 1955 a fire set by young whites destroyed much of her private correspondence and papers, several manuscripts, and notes for books (including two autobiographical novellas).
In 1962 she brought out a family reminiscence, Memory of a Large Christmas. Her last book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964), is a pictorial essay on the nonviolent civil rights movement. She did support such agencies as the Southern Regional Council, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and CORE but resigned from the executive board of CORE in 1966 when it adopted a militant black-power stance.
She embraced Chinese concepts of respect for common humanity and human dignity, and she preferred to read in subjects that interest her - psychology (especially Freudian literature), racism, pacifism, and children.
She sought to understand the separation of humans - black and white, male and female, old and young, rich and poor - from one another. Smith urged the South to accept the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, in part to demonstrate to emerging nations that America opposed racial discrimination.
Quotations:
"Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation. "
Connections
In Baltimore she fell in love with a fellow musician but decided against marriage because she was reluctant to make promises that extended too far into the future. She never married.