"The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making." -- Lillian Smith
Lillian Eugenia Smith (December 12, 1897 — September 28, 1966) 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.
"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.""Faith and doubt both are needed - not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.""Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.""Rich folks always talk hard times.""The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.""To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open.""We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.""When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die."
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 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 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 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. 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 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 Education, 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 from the early 1950s 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 Award at Fisk University in 1966: "Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation."
"The Southern Regional Council has entered into a new partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries. Effective February 2004, the University of Georgia Libraries will be the administrator of the prestigious Lillian Smith Book Awards. This partnership will allow the awards to expand their reach to a wider audience and to more broadly fulfill the mission of enhancing racial awareness through literature.
The Southern Regional Council will continue to participate in the planning of these awards and in assuring continued adherence to the criteria: selecting books that are outstanding creative achievements, worthy of recognition because of their literary merit, moral vision, and honest representation of the South, its people, problems, and promises. By administering the awards, the UGA Libraries will make the call for submissions for the awards, host the awards ceremony on the campus of the University of Georgia, work with the Council to build the young writers workshops and open the awards to the students and literary community around the school."
"After her death, the family of Lillian Smith donated the historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts to the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reaching students and tapping a new segment of the literary community, the Southern Regional Council anticipates that placing these awards in an academic setting will help to shape the future of this award that represents the ideals of a racially just society."
