An Inconvenient Woman: Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. Back in April of this year, we did a show with the cultural political historian Gal Beckerman, works with the New York Times [ed.: Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic], about becoming a dissident. He had a new book out back then. It's done rather well, How to Be a Dissident. He included 10 features in dissidents, including pessimism, humor, recklessness, and immortality. One thing he didn't add in terms of defining what it means to be a dissident is inconvenience. The great dissidents are, of course, profoundly inconvenient. One who comes to mind is the Czech dissident Václav Havel, who was so inconvenient in an odd way, eventually became president of his own country. The book, Beckerman's book, is very much bound up, of course, is what's happening in the United States today. It was a primer in a way, perhaps, of telling Americans, explain to Americans how they can be a dissident in the age of Donald Trump and of MAGA. But America perhaps does have its own history of inconvenient people, of dissidents, including a woman called Lillian Smith, who is the subject of a new book that came out earlier this month, An Inconvenient Woman. It's written by my guest, Keri Leigh Merritt, who is joining us from Valencia in Spain. Lucky lady. Keri, would it be fair to describe the subject of your book, Lillian Smith, as an early example of an American dissident?

00:02:17 Keri Leigh Merritt: Oh, absolutely. 100%. She is really the model for white southerners of being a true dissident.

00:02:25 Andrew Keen: Explain more. Tell us a little bit more about this woman. I don't know much about her, but she's a remarkable figure. I've been doing some research and, of course, looking at your book. She really was profoundly, refreshingly inconvenient, wasn't she?

00:02:42 Keri Leigh Merritt: She was. She was born in 1897. Her parents were actually born during the Civil War. Her mother was raised by enslaved women. So that's how, you know, far away she was from slavery in the Civil War. But, she was probably the best— the most famous best selling author of the twentieth century you've probably never heard about. She— her book Strange Fruit, published in 1944, about— which was an interracial love story between a white man and a black woman that ended, of course, with a major lynching of a black man. That was a best selling book, sold 20 million copies [ed.: Kirkus Reviews puts the novel's sales at some three million copies during Smith's lifetime], was translated into 30 different languages. She went on to write six more books, but she was involved in the civil rights movement from the nineteen thirties, was probably the first white southerner to argue for, integration as early as the nineteen forties in her writing. And she also lived pretty openly with her partner, Paula Snelling.

00:03:37 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a remarkable story. I mean, it's astonishing that this 1944 novel is— you know, Strange Fruit sold, you said, 20 million copies. When we think of Strange Fruit, of course, we think of the Billie Holiday song written from— that was recorded in 1939. The, the Smith book Strange Fruit came out in 1944. So there's obviously a connection. Has she been, in a sense, conveniently forgotten? Why isn't she a household name in the way in which other Americans have become household names?

00:04:15 Keri Leigh Merritt: I think there are several reasons. She was obviously very well known, especially throughout the forties and fifties, and even into the sixties before her death in 1966. But, you know, I think given her the way that she talked about racism and the fact that white supremacy was hurting white people and their own children and really delved into kind of psychoanalysis and how, the psychology of white supremacy profoundly, profoundly injured whites. That is a big reason for, for her to be forgotten. But, also, you know, she did not suffer fools, and she did not suffer even white liberals. And she was constantly pushing the more well known white liberals like Ralph McGill or Hodding Carter, people that have been remembered by history. She was pushing them left in her entire life, calling them out for not supporting integration until, you know, far past, Brown v. Board. So she was always a dissident. And given the fact that she was a woman and a lesbian, I think that also added to her erasure.

00:05:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Although, in another way, she conforms to so much of, what some people would describe as woke culture, others as liberal culture in the twenty twenties. But, I mean, it's great that you've written this book, but I'm surprised that she's not quite the household name that, other Americans have become. She grew up under Jim Crow. Tell us about Jim Crow, Keri. What was it like for a white southerner— upper class white southerner— like Lillian Smith to grow up under Jim Crow?

00:05:59 Keri Leigh Merritt: I mean, this ruled everything in the South, of the Deep South. She was raised in northern Florida. When she was in her late teens, she moved up to the northeast corner of Georgia and Appalachia, a little town called Clayton, Georgia. And in both areas and all throughout the Deep South, obviously, it was a strict culture of segregation. And she described even the first time she actually had a meal with black people that she went outside. She sat at a table with them and then went outside and threw up. And it wasn't because of how she felt about black people at all. It was literally because she was breaking such a huge taboo that she was so afraid of the repercussions of that act, that something bad would happen to her, that somebody would come and try to arrest her, lynch her for just merely sitting down and eating, you know, with black people at a table. So you can't underestimate, the culture that she grew up in, the kind of constant violence that she was exposed to. And, again, the fact that she wrote about a lynching in her first book, well, they were still happening even in 1944 in Georgia.

00:07:02 Andrew Keen: So as you say, she was born in Florida, in Jasper, Florida, the seventh of nine children. She was the daughter and, according at least to Wikipedia, an upper middle class civic and business leader who eventually lost his turpentine mills and was impoverished. Was she always a rebel? Was she just a kid who came out who just was always against— shocked by the world that was around her?

00:07:29 Keri Leigh Merritt: Well, I argue that her father, Calvin Smith, who really was kind of middle class, but married into wealth and then made himself into a great businessman until World War One really ruined his businesses. But he was a devout Methodist, and he taught his children, you know, the kind of the real teachings of Jesus in terms of you treat everyone the way you'd wanna be treated no matter what they've done. Her sixth out of seven books was called Memory of a Large Christmas, and it describes, Christmas in her late teens where Calvin actually invited the entire chain gang, both black and white and not just the, officers and people in charge, but the actual chain gang. So you're talking about murderers, rapists. They all came to the Smith house for Christmas dinner, and the Smith children worked for days on end to cook for these people. And it was a great lesson in humanity and humility. And so she was taught these things. There was another instance in her childhood as well where, a black family moved into the town of Jasper, and the upper class white women noticed that one of their children appeared to be white. And so they literally removed this little girl, Julie, from her home and put her in the Smith home. And Lillian lived in the same room with Julie, you know, thought of her like a sister, learned to really, really love Julie. And then all of a sudden, one day she was gone. She was pulled from the Smith home and put back with her rightful black family because Julie was in fact black. And so that experience really taught Lillian, what a biological construct [as spoken] race was and how it really didn't have a bearing on how you felt about a human being or, you know, what they were at their core.

00:09:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's interesting. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Andrew Curran, a historian, particularly of race. His new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, deals with the Enlightenment roots of, of the idea of race. Was there a kind of implicit or explicit scientific racism in the world that Smith grew up in?

00:09:39 Keri Leigh Merritt: For sure. I mean, race science was a huge deal at the time and, obviously, something she never bought into. And I think that kind of plays into why she really started studying the psychology and then the psychoanalyst, analysis of white supremacy, to examine how it affect— how it affected white people, how the shame and guilt and humiliation of their, you know, decades, if not centuries of oppression and rape and murder of black people really hurt white people in a profound way that we still don't even talk about in a very frank way today.

00:10:19 Andrew Keen: So what kind of dissident was she? As I noted in the introduction, Gal Beckerman has an excellent book, How to Be a Dissident, that talks about the qualities, if that's the right word, of dissidents, including humor, pessimism, and more, immortality. I mean, not every dissident, of course, conforms to his 10 rules. But what kind of dissident was— with Smith? Was she outspoken, humorous, quiet, irreverent?

00:10:50 Keri Leigh Merritt: She was just a, you know, bald-faced truth teller. Right? She put everything on the table. She was unafraid to say things that other people were thinking but were far too afraid to say, and she did pay the price for it. She was met with death threats throughout her entire life. Fortunately, her brother, Frank, was essentially, the CEO of the county that she lived in throughout her entire adult life, and he kinda kept her and part— and her partner Paula safe, while he was in office. But as soon as he left office in 1955, that's when the real violent repercussions against Lillian started happening, and it started with a huge fire that burned down her, you know, entire library— all years and decades of correspondence, research, manuscripts, just a devastating fire. And then a few years later, there were multiple other fires, some set in eight different places on her home in Old Screamer Mountain. And so she definitely believed in if you had power and privilege, you had to use that for good and to use that to help people that didn't have that kind of power and privilege.

00:11:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. One of the striking things to me about Smith's life, the subtitle of your book— The Extraordinary Life of— of the— a Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow— is that she chose to stay in the South. I mean, she could have quite easily just said, okay. I don't wanna live here anymore with all these death threats. They burned down my library. I'll just go and live in New York. I'll go to Greenwich Village, which so many other, if not dissidents, certainly people who didn't quite fit in to the South, whether they're white or black, did in the fifties. Is this one of the reasons why she was so inconvenient because she stayed? It would have been so much easier to have left.

00:12:43 Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. And she loved her home. Clayton was so near and dear to her heart. She actually hated Atlanta. She didn't like going to Atlanta. But, she— what she did in this very, very rural part of America kind of turns everything on our head about what we think about rural areas. Like, she basically had a gay and lesbian community in her, like, little area that they lived in. But, I mean, she was— she often talked about at the end of her life the fact that she did not ever want to leave the South because not only was it home, but it brought a kind of sadness to her that she thought was generative artistically. And I think it's important to point out that she did not believe that racism could just be changed by laws and by, you know, politics and things like that. She really saw art, whether it was in form of writing, music, you know, fine arts. She thought that art would be the key, the generative key to really change people's hearts and minds.

00:13:41 Andrew Keen: Did she see herself as part of a southern tradition? When we think of great southern writers, of course, we think of Faulkner, who wasn't really a dissident or had a more complex narrative. What tradition did she think of herself as a writer and as a political activist?

00:13:59 Keri Leigh Merritt: So as a political activist, she started super early. As early as the nineteen thirties, she was friends with W.E.B. Du Bois. She and Paula were the first people in the little magazine that they ran. They call it a little magazine, but it actually, you know, circulated widely throughout the US. They were the first white magazine to publish black authors, so they published Pauli Murray for the first time. They actually helped Pauli Murray get a Rosenwald fellowship to stay in law school and to become the great lawyer that she became.

00:14:25 Andrew Keen: We did a show on, Pauli Murray a couple of years ago.

00:14:29 Keri Leigh Merritt: Right. So they were fast friends. The first people that ever gave Pauli a paycheck and really, helped her develop her career. So she definitely, you know, put herself within, the other grassroots movements that were being already run by black people. But she thought that her mission was really to talk to other whites and especially other middle class and upper class white people. And she saw herself in the tradition of coming from a whole group of white women who actually helped put an end to lynching in the Deep South by literally going and— when whenever they heard that a lynching was gonna happen, they would go to the town and literally sit with the sheriff until everything had blown over and made sure that, you know, the person stayed in jail or stayed safe and were— was not taken out and actually lynched on the town square.

00:15:17 Andrew Keen: And isn't it worth reminding viewers, listeners, Keri, that lynching wasn't some abstract idea. This was a reality. Maybe not a daily reality, but certainly not an infrequent reality in the South of the nineteen fifties.

00:15:34 Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. I mean, she and Paula ran a camp called Laurel Falls Camp for Girls for years, almost twenty five years. And that was some of the things she would talk with the campers very frankly about, you know, that just 50 miles down the road in 1944, there were four people, two couples, two women lynched, in Georgia [ed.: the Moore's Ford lynching of two Black couples in Walton County, Georgia, took place in July 1946]. And so it was something that she talked about throughout her role as an educator and also her role as a writer and activist.

00:16:02 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And one of the most disturbing elements of the lynching stories, I mean, that it's disturbing in every sense, is the idea, and I'm not sure this was always true, but that lynchings were considered an entertainment and parents would bring their little kids to watch. I mean, what did she make of that?

00:16:22 Keri Leigh Merritt: She was thoroughly disgusted by it, and she saw the camp in education. She was a teacher. She got, a degree in teaching and actually taught in China for three years before she came back and worked at Laurel Falls Camp. And so she really thought that education was the way to combat a lot of this, and she would brag to her friends, one of her friends being Eleanor Roosevelt, about how the most racist families in the Deep South would actually send their daughters to her camp knowing that she was teaching them not just about sex and sexuality, you know, completely taboo stories and topics in a post-Victorianism era. But, they knew what she was teaching about race and racism, and yet they sent their daughters there every single year. And she contended that they thought that they didn't want their daughters to turn out like they did. They did not want their daughters raised to be white supremacists.

00:17:15 Andrew Keen: It's interesting that she was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Of course, some people consider her— we've done many shows on FDR recently— consider her the conscience, the left conscience, the progressive conscience, of her husband. Did she talk much to Eleanor about the southern racist element in FDR's New Deal coalition?

00:17:42 Keri Leigh Merritt: I don't have evidence of that. I don't think she got that level of kind of politically, granular getting into the details, but she and Eleanor had a lifelong friendship. Once Strange Fruit became a Broadway play, Eleanor came out and was one of the biggest proponents of it. Eleanor did play a key role though when Strange Fruit was banned, you know, initially right after it came out. It was banned not only in Boston and Detroit and had kind of a silent ban even though there weren't, you know, legal bans. A lot of booksellers just wouldn't sell it at all throughout the rest of the country. But it was also banned in the US mail, originally. It was censored throughout the mail. And so she had to reach out to Eleanor, and Eleanor got FDR to lift the ban.

00:18:24 Andrew Keen: What are the literary qualities of Strange Fruit? We know the song is still— it's still a song that we hear endlessly. The novel Strange Fruit is less well known. How good a book is it? How good a writer was she?

00:18:39 Keri Leigh Merritt: So I would contend that she was an okay writer in terms of fiction. My favorite writing of hers was actually Killers of the Dream, which comes out in 1949, and that's her first—

00:18:49 Andrew Keen: That's her autobiography, essentially.

00:18:52 Keri Leigh Merritt: Essentially. Yes. And it really go— it plays off of a lot of the things that she and Paula wrote about in the magazine that they ran for so many years. And it's— it is a playbook on how to essentially be a really powerful ally, how to help people who are less fortunate than you, how to fight white supremacy. And she tells, white Americans, not just white southerners, like, actual concrete things they can do to help out the cause, to help out other people. She explains how class and classism works within the white supremacist narrative, how the upper classes are constantly keeping, you know, white and black workers apart through racism so that they don't have to actually deal with classism themselves.

00:19:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And it's still a book in print, and you can even buy the audiobook on Amazon. So, it's interesting. Keri, last month, we did a show, on Frederick Douglass, with another intellectual historian. And we talked about the way in which Douglass changed his position on America, on the Constitution, from believing that it was an immoral enterprise to one that was just. And it's an interesting debate about why and how he changed his mind. What was Lillian Smith's take on the United States, on the self-evident hypocrisy in the Constitution, the history of race, the failure of Reconstruction, the Civil War, slavery? Did she believe that it was reformable? And could one describe her as an American idealist?

00:20:28 Keri Leigh Merritt: I think you probably could describe her as an idealist. She definitely had moments of pessimism and— but I don't think she would have been able to continue her work had she been— you know, let herself devolve into that pessimism. She certainly always thought that there was hope to move forward even during her thirteen-year battle with cancer at the end of her life. She was constantly trying to push the movement forward. By the time SNCC forms, she becomes a really big member, of SNCC and strives to kind of mother the newer, younger activists in the movement, especially the white activists. She and Paula were constantly having them up to Old Screamer Mountain and taking care of them, making sure they had everything they needed in terms of, like, rest, relaxation, a good meal, food, that they're well taken care of spiritually and physically so that they could go out and continue the fight.

00:21:17 Andrew Keen: That's interesting you bring up SNCC. What relations did she have with the civil rights movement as it emerged? I mean, you know that she died in 1966, which, was in the midst of the civil rights struggle. Did she know Martin Luther King? Did she do some of the marches on Washington and Selma? Was she involved in that struggle?

00:21:44 Keri Leigh Merritt: So she was not involved in the marches because by that time, she was so sick and just constantly taking cancer treatments and could barely even move to, you know, walk across the room to write. But she knew Martin Luther King from the early nineteen fifties. She was very good friends with Benjamin Mays, Dr. Benjamin Mays, who was the president of Morehouse, and his wife, Sadie Mays, the first lady of Morehouse. Sadie Mays came to her 1950—

00:22:08 Andrew Keen: —to remind everyone, Morehouse, of course, is— you might describe what Morehouse is.

00:22:13 Keri Leigh Merritt: Yeah. So Morehouse is one of the HBCUs, the historically black colleges and universities, and that is where Martin Luther King went to school, and Benjamin Mays is actually his mentor. And I think that's probably how they originally met, that, correspondence is gone. But she was great friends with the Kings, both Coretta and Martin. And I start the book out actually with a story of how Martin Luther King is arrested, driving her from dinner at their house back to Emory University where she's taking some of her cancer treatments and gets pulled over. And when the officer notices that it's not just a white woman in his car, but it's Lillian Smith, and he knows who Lillian Smith is and says, you know, this is a racial troublemaker. He issues a ticket to King. And because of that ticket, you know, it's part of a domino effect that a few months later, he ends up in the Birmingham jail where he writes the famous letter from [ed.: the traffic stop was in May 1960; the probation from that ticket led to King's October 1960 imprisonment at Reidsville State Prison in Georgia, which prompted Kennedy's call to Coretta Scott King. The "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was written in April 1963]. And, of course, that's what ends up helping, JFK clinch the presidency.

00:23:11 Andrew Keen: I know that the FBI kept a file on, on your inconvenient woman. J. Edgar Hoover, of course, is a man of enormous controversy, the guy who controlled the FBI. What was their take on her? Did she ever get on Hoover's personal radar?

00:23:33 Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. He is in her 143-page FBI files many times. They had originally really started looking at her accusing her of communism, which she absolutely was not a communist. She lived in China from 1921 to '23 [ed.: Smith taught in Huzhou from 1922 to 1925] as China was turning communist, and so she was a lifelong anti-communist. But she was on their radar for that. And as soon as Strange Fruit came out, she, of course, was the topic of much talk among the FBI people, and they followed her again until her death, really.

00:24:08 Andrew Keen: So she never— she was never on Joe McCarthy's radar?

00:24:12 Keri Leigh Merritt: She was not, but, actually, that's how she met, Eleanor Roosevelt to begin with. The thing that came right before McCarthyism was called the Martin Dies Commission [ed.: the Dies Committee, formally the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities]. Martin Dies, out of Texas, and so he was accusing so many people— so many black activists of being communist, including Mary McLeod Bethune, who was the great educator and activist throughout the South. And so Mary knew Lillian, and she said, hey. I wanna, you know, I wanna introduce you to Eleanor because, you know, as two white women doing this kind of work, you know, it's a very lonely time for these women. There's not a whole lot of, other people they can talk to about this, and so Mary McLeod Bethune introduced the two of them.

00:24:54 Andrew Keen: I mentioned that the Beckerman book cast one eye at least when it comes to being a dissident on the current situation in the United States. How much of this book, this project, Keri, you've written a number of other books, was triggered by the current situation in the United States. You no longer live in the country— you live now in Spain. Is history in a sense repeating itself?

00:25:22 Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. I mean, there are definitely cycles where you can pick up patterns. You know, we wouldn't have historians be able to do this if there weren't patterns— clear patterns that emerge. And, unfortunately, you know, out of my lifetime, this is the worst the US has been in terms of politically and racially and anything else. And she, again, she had that hope that things would change, but did not look solely to politics as the answer. And I think that's something that we can really bring back now. And because we do. We have to look outside. We have to look at what can we do in our communities. What can we do with our neighbors? What can we even do within our families to fight this? And to have good happy lives. Right? Because amongst all of it, we have— we're all living. We're all existing together. And so what can you do in the meantime while it feels like the world is falling around you to make life just a little bit better?

00:26:13 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, what do you think Lillian Smith would have made of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, not so far from her home in Florida [ed.: Charlottesville is in Virginia; Smith's adult home was in Clayton, Georgia], in 2017 or January 6 where people storm the Capitol waving Confederate flags, would she have just shook her head and said, not this again? What sense would she have made of it?

00:26:37 Keri Leigh Merritt: I think she would have thought that the people leading those situations had a lot going on psychologically, and there was some kind of deep seated fear and deep seated guilt and shame in those people that they had to turn what they felt badly about within themselves and within their own psyches towards other people. So it's a— it's, you know, it's transference of their own negative feelings onto other people. And at the core of everything, though, is fear. Right? It's fear of change. It's fear of being around people you don't know or don't understand. And so she— the kind of Freudian psychoanalysis that she brings to all of this is still super interesting to me. And, again, something we still don't talk about very much, even in today's discourse about the kind of psychological aspects of what hatred does to people.

00:27:28 Andrew Keen: Yeah. She was born in 1897, so she lived through the experience of fascism in Europe and perhaps in America. We've done a lot of shows on whether or not this current MAGA Trump administration is or isn't fascist. In Smith's mind, in her view, given that she grew up in Florida, do you think she would have described the world she grew up in or what's currently happening as fascist, or are there other words, maybe more nativist American nativist words to describe the race and racism that defines this community and maybe defines America today?

00:28:22 Keri Leigh Merritt: I think she probably would have used the word and— but used it carefully and described exactly what she meant by it. Like I said, she spent time in China. She also spent a lot of time in India as well. And so she had a very well thought out worldly worldview about how things should be done. She was always an anti-imperialist, so that plays into this as well. And she saw imperialism and white supremacy obviously going hand in hand. And so, again, that kind of plays back into what's going on today that it's not, you know, just something that's going on, in America, but also how we treat other people abroad, the kind of genocidal things we're carrying out abroad. Abroad, what are we doing in terms of military—

00:29:02 Andrew Keen: When you say genocidal things, what are you thinking of specifically?

00:29:06 Keri Leigh Merritt: Oh, Palestine. Completely. I mean, what we— the massacre of tens of thousands of people in Gaza, in the Middle East, in multiple different countries in the Middle East and under multiple different presidencies.

00:29:21 Andrew Keen: How would you like Lillian Smith to be remembered? There's a Lillian Smith Book Award now. She's not that well known. I think your new book, An Inconvenient Woman, will remind readers, American readers of her significance. But how— what are you trying to do with this book? Why do you want people to remember her?

00:29:38 Keri Leigh Merritt: So I think for many years now, we've had a lot of really good books about what should white people not do, you know, how not to be racist, what, you know, what you shouldn't do. But there's not enough, I think, of what we should do, and there's not enough heroes and heroines that we can look up to and say, here's an actual plan. Here's somebody's life that we can emulate parts of or take parts of and apply to our own lives. And so I think she's just— she's a great model of what people can do, and they can do, again, as an educator, as a writer, as anybody, that you can do it from your own home. You don't have to be famous. You don't have to have a platform to make actual real change in this world.

00:30:19 Andrew Keen: And if you were to focus on one quality, as I said, Beckerman's book talks about the 10 qualities of being a dissident. What quality of Smith do you think is most memorable and important?

00:30:32 Keri Leigh Merritt: That's a great question. I think probably just the fact that she's a truth teller. Right? She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell these stark naked truth no matter how ugly it is, no matter how bad it is. She's gonna put it out there and put it out there without flowery language, without, you know, making excuses.

00:30:53 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Lillian Smith, [unclear] Cassandra. An Inconvenient Woman by my guest, Keri Leigh Merritt. The book is out. It's an important new book about a subject that I think about a woman that more Americans should know about. Keri, congratulations on the book, and really nice to talk to.

00:31:09 Keri Leigh Merritt: You too. Thank you so much for having me.