“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt
In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes even to themselves. Take, for example, Lillian Smith, author of the bestselling (and banned) 1944 Strange Fruit, a novel about interracial love. Born into a white Florida family at the turn of the century, Smith dissented against Jim Crow. She was, indeed, An Inconvenient Woman, the title of a new biography about her by today’s guest Keri Leigh Merritt.
So why, I asked Merritt, isn’t Lillian Smith better known? Part of the answer is bound up in Smith’s own uncomfortable critique of white supremacy. She insisted that Jim Crow damaged white people, that its shame and guilt did immense psychological injury to its supposed beneficiaries. So this inconvenient woman pushed better known white southern liberals like Ralph McGill or Hodding Carter leftwards, calling them out for refusing to support integration long after the Brown decision.
Smith had quite a life. She lived openly with her partner Paula Snelling in Clayton, Georgia, ran a girls’ camp for twenty-five years, wrote many books (including what Merritt calls her masterpiece, Killers of the Dream in 1949) and was the first white magazine editor in the South to publish Black writers like Pauli Murray. Her FBI file ran to 143 pages, making her a particular inconvenience to J. Edgar Hoover and his goons.
Most of all, she stayed in rural Georgia. She could have escaped to Greenwich Village or Berkeley like other misfits. Instead she remained a perpetual thorn in the southern conscience. Her brother, who ran the county, had kept her safe until he left office in 1955. After that, one fire burned down her library, destroying decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts with it. And still she stayed. In today’s America, Keri Leigh Merritt concludes, this inconvenient woman offers us a timely reminder of what it takes to be a dissident.
Five Takeaways
• The Bestseller Nobody Remembers. Strange Fruit sold in the millions in 1944, was banned in Boston, Detroit and the US mail — until Eleanor Roosevelt got the president to lift it.
• How She Was Made. Her father invited a chain gang to Christmas dinner. A Black child was taken from her family and placed in the Smith house, then taken back — which taught Lillian what race was worth.
• She Stayed. She could have gone to Greenwich Village. Instead she stayed in rural Georgia while her library burned — decades of letters and manuscripts — and more fires followed.
• The Network. Du Bois, Pauli Murray’s first paycheck, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Kings. And a 143-page FBI file on a woman who was a lifelong anti-communist.
• What She Said to Do. Killers of the Dream is a handbook, not a lament. And the most racist families in the Deep South sent their daughters to her camp anyway.
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Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: the dissident quality Beckerman left out
00:02:17 Lillian Smith, model dissident
00:02:42 Strange Fruit, and a life in brief
00:04:15 Why has she been forgotten?
00:05:16 Growing up under Jim Crow
00:07:29 Her father, the chain gang and Christmas dinner
00:08:00 Julie, and what race turned out to be worth
00:09:09 Race science and the psychology of white supremacy
00:10:19 What kind of dissident was she?
00:10:50 The fires on Old Screamer Mountain
00:11:58 Why she stayed in the South
00:13:41 Du Bois, Pauli Murray and the magazine
00:15:17 Lynching was not an abstraction
00:16:22 Laurel Falls Camp, and the daughters of racists
00:17:15 Eleanor Roosevelt, and the ban on Strange Fruit
00:18:24 How good a writer was she?
00:18:49 Killers of the Dream as a handbook
00:19:32 Was she an American idealist?
00:21:17 SNCC, Benjamin Mays and the Kings
00:22:08 The traffic stop that changed an election
00:23:11 The 143-page FBI file
00:24:08 Martin Dies, and meeting Eleanor
00:24:54 Is history repeating itself?
00:26:13 What she would have made of Charlottesville
00:27:28 Was the world she grew up in fascist?
00:29:21 How she should be remembered
00:30:19 Cassandra