Lillian Smith: The Winner Names the Age

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 11-13

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith. Edited by Michelle Cliff. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1978.

Lillian Smith was a conscious regionalist. From 1936 to 1945 in her home in north Georgia’ she and her friend Paula Snelling co-edited the most liberal journal in the South. (The name of the magazine changed from Pseudopodia to North Georgia Review and finally to South Today.) During that time Smith traveled extensively in the South and began to speak about the profound evil of segregation as a way of life and how it injured the quality of Southern culture. After the publica-

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tion of her bestseller Strange Fruit (1944), she received thousands of invitations to speak all over the country. She continued to be a very popular speaker, especially on college campuses, even though after Killers of the Dream (1949) she and her books were rarely mentioned in the press.

The publication of this new collection of her essays and speeches should mark the beginning of a much needed reassessment of the significance of Lillian Smith’s life and her contribution to the study of human values in American culture. Paula Snelling’s Preface provides the biographical context within which Smith worked as a social critic and as an artist. Michelle Cliff’s arrangement of the essays thematically and chronologically illustrates the evolution of Smith’s ideas over some thirty years as a published writer. To those who do not know Lillian Smith the volume as a whole provides an excellent introduction to her life and work. For those who are already familiar with, any or all of her seven published books, The Winner Names the Age will provide a new perspective from which to appreciate her total impact as a writer and a spokesperson for our age.

In the title essay, which was the commencement address at Atlanta University, June 3, 1957, Lillian Smith said: “An age is named for its triumphs, for the big ideas that add stature to the human being …. We cannot name our age, the winner will do that. What we can do is pick the winner.” For Smith, the process of picking the winner meant giving support to the ideas which encourage human growth and freedom. Her conscious struggle with the forces of dehumanization in the South led her, in the best of regionalism, to create a larger vision and to encourage the ideas which in the distant future would cause our century to be named “the age of human relationships.

As a Southerner and a woman Lillian Smith struggled with limitations- and hostilities which everywhere seemed to separate individuals from each other and from knowledge of the world around them. Refusing to be defined by the circumstances of her time and place, she dared to break the silence which her culture for so long imposed on the subjects of race and sex. Lillian Smith viewed segregation in any form as symbolic and symptomatic of a fundamental split which had to be bridged if human beings were to realize themselves fully. In her words:

We as human beings are broken and fragmented and it is our nature to be so: upon being born we are torn from certainties, separated from so much we long to unite with …. But it is also at the essence of the human condition that we relate ourselves to what we are broken away from. We cannot merge, we cannot mingle, but we can relate. And it is by

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means of this relating, this bridging of chasms that we become new beings and learn to create a new life.

Seeking to convey this larger dimension of her views on race and sex, she said: “I have written of people split off from their future and sometimes from their own childhood. I have written of broken relationships, of torn integrities, of invisible walls against which we destroy ourselves.”

As school systems throughout the country continue to struggle in the courts and in the classrooms with the effects of a racially segregated society, Smith’s advice in 1944 remains useful:

Although segregation has made human relationships most difficult, nothing but human relationships can break down segregation …. The two processes of’ breaking down segregation and building up human relations must go on simultaneously. Neither has priority over the other.

Smith’s emphasis on human relationships as the key to effecting social change grew out of her earliest questions as a child in a small Southern town at the beginning of the twentieth century. She wanted to know why she was forbidden to show love for her Black nurse or to play with a friend whom adults said was a Negro. The whys of her childhood grew to encompass the far reaching questions of her adulthood: Why do we live ‘in a segregated society? Why do we have wars? What is the meaning of human life on this planet? Thus, in many of her speeches and essays, the subject of racial segregation became a point of departure for discussion of a wide range of other issues. Smith saw the failure of American society to do away with racism as a symptom of a grave illness suffered by the whole of Western culture: the loss of a sense of human relatedness. That loss of human purpose, in her view, also could be seen in modern society’s “over esteem of technology and our pathetic craving for proof.” Writing in 1960 during the height of. the bomb shelter scare, Smith asserted that nuclear war was not humanity’s number one enemy, but rather “the terminal symptom” of “the creeping, persisting, ever widening dehumanization of man.”

In a 1941 essay “Man Born of Woman,” Smith proposed that the search for an understanding of the causes of war in human society must consider the significance of the nature of male/female relationships, specifically the place of women in men’s eyes. She wrote:

If man dared to thrust into the open his unending secret enmity against women, there might be less of nation warring with nation; less need for him to merge his longing for superiority into a great mass-lust for power, less need for him to find outlet for his hate-drives which so complicate the more simple and rational needs of people.

Yet, to alter the effect on society of the ancient enmity between the sexes, Smith seemed to suggest that women would have to do most of the changing. In both “Man Born of Woman” and the 1963 speech “Woman Born of Man” she called upon women to resist the limitations of “man’s valuation” of themselves and to assert their own life affirming qualities to create a new society; but she concluded, “man’s dreams of himself will never change.”

The profound significance of women’s lack of self-definition was developed further in the speech “Autobiography as Dialogue between King and Corpse” in which Smith declared the writing of autobiographies to be essential to the modern age. She felt the models of individual lives could offset the forces of mass technology by reminding us of the significance of individuals and that “differences are to be cherished for they are important to the individual and the self.” Yet, she observed, women have not written great autobiographies because they have lacked awareness of themselves as persons and “they dare not tell the truth about themselves for it might radically change male psychology.”

Throughout her life Lillian Smith personally confronted the obstacles that stand in the way of women seeking to realize themselves. She also knew that those barriers affect both men and women. In the words of Paula Snelling’s Preface, “She knew the sharp two edgedness of swords that separate, she had seen that men no less than women, Whites no less than Blacks are deformed and stunted by arbitrary exclusions of the other from full human status.”

The presence of The Winner Names The Age should mark an end to the critical silence surrounding Lillian Smith. The effect of this new collection of her writing is the creation of a new awareness, not only of the life and work of the author, but more importantly, of the larger vision of her regional consciousness: a perspective which continues to challenge the values of American culture as a whole.

Rose Gladney is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.

The Color Purple. Alice Walker. Harcourt, Brace, 1982.

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 23-24

Speaking at the University of Florida in 1962, Lillian Smith observed that women were only beginning “to break the million year silence about themselves.” “Women rarely tell the truth,” she said, “even in their diaries, about their sex experiences, or their most intimate relationships; nor do they spend much time asking the unanswerable questions about the meaning of human life since they have never been sure they were human.” Smith linked in one sentence the necessity of women speaking the truth about themselves with their asking the unanswerable questions. In the same speech, she suggested that for women to tell the truth “might radically change male psychology.”

Although her own writing often challenged her culture’s rigid concepts of gender, Lillian Smith did not live to enjoy the literary flowering of the most recent phase of the women’s movement in America. For some fifteen years Alice Walker’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been-a major part of that flowering. In The Color Purple she has reached a new pinacle. You can rest easier now, Lil, the truth about women is being spoken.

Walker’s novel takes the form of letters between two sisters: Nettie, who is a missionary to Africa, and Celie, who is trapped in a brutally oppressive marriage in a Southern black farming community. Their correspondence spans the thirty year period ending in World War II.

A major theme in all of Walker’s writing has been the struggle of black women to create lives in the face of racism, sexism, and the inevitable self-doubt which accompanies generations of patriarchal oppression. In The Color Purple the struggle achieves fruition, but not through a gradual evolution over centuries or even decades, and not through mass organization of the oppressed against the oppressor. Furthermore, although the presence of white racism is quite evident throughout both sisters’ narratives, it is not the central theme. Of primary importance is the effort of black women to create their own lives with and without black men. The power to do so comes through the love and support of women for each other, expressed in a variety of ways.

Walker’s choice of form, letters between two sisters, allows each sister’s perspective to mirror and reinforce the other’s. Nettie’s description of life among the Olinka tribe echoes Celie’s accounts of her own life in rural Georgia. In both societies the “traditional” ideas regarding sexual division of labor and personal relationships between men and women insist on male dominance. Nettie writes:

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face ” as they say. To “look in a man’s face ” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees. And what can I say to this? Again, it is our own behavior around Pa.

In both societies the real strength of the community can be found in women’s friendship with each other. Even as Nettie’s letters tell of the friendship among Olinka wives of the same husband, so Celie finds her greatest love and support from her husband’s lover, Shug Avery. The quality of the relationship between Celie and Shug is the key to Celie’s liberation from her role as “mule of the world.”

For Celie to free herself she must find her own voice, speak her own thoughts. Most importantly, she must replace the ideas of male dominance, the ultimate symbol of which is the image of God as male, with a new understanding of power. Shug is able to help because she understands the real power within every individual, part of the spirit of life itself. The turning point in Celie’s journey comes in her conversation with Shug about the nature of God:

Here’s the thing, says Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you rooking fort Trouble do it for most forks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.

It? I ast.

Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It.

But what do it look like? I ast.

Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture

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show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will he. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.

Echoing Shug’s understanding of God as key to liberation, Nettie writes:

God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone–a roofleaf or Christ–but we don’t. And riot being tied to what God looks like frees us.

Freed from her old concept of God, Celie begins to view all of life differently:

Well, us talk and talk about God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that.?) not the color purple (where it come from.?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.

Now that my eyes opening, If eels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr.______’s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall.

For Alice Walker, the power of sisterhood leads not to a separatist female community, but to a fuller life for both men and women. Under patriarchy men have feared women’s creative power and have sought to suppress it. In doing so, they have denied much that is creative in themselves as well. When women have managed to resist patriarchal definitions of themselves, the fruits of their love and support for each other have transformed the lives of both sexes.

As Celie begins to “chase the old white man from her head,” she is no longer subject to her husband’s abuse.

With Shug’s help, she finds the means to support herself. After Celie and Shug leave him, Albert begins to change his ways. Later, freed from former definitions of power, Celie and Albert come to know each other as friends, to work together, even to discuss the differences between men and women and ask the unanswerable questions:

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don’t mean nothing if you don’t ast why you here, period.

So what you think? I ast.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.

And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.

They do, he say, surprise.

Alice Walker’s writings pay tribute to a heritage of black sisters and foremothers: artists all, whether named or anonymous, a great host of witnesses from the rural American South to Africa, from the unlettered and unsung, to famous poets, story-tellers, healers and musicians. A major source of Walker’s power comes from her faithfulness to the richness of women’s spirituality. In her fiction, varied African and American Indian religious traditions sometimes merge and sometimes conflict with the concepts and beliefs of Christianity, but spiritual power remains fundamental. The Color Purple contains Walker’s best writing on the nature of God. It is also one of our finest testimonies to the power of sisterhood.

Rose Gladney is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South. By Anne Loveland. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. $22.50).

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 13-14

Before she died in 1966 Lillian Smith was contacted and sometimes interviewed by several prospective biographers. Because she knew her worth, Smith cooperated and compiled a rather extensive collection of autobiographical notes, chronologies, and lists of significant friends and references. After Smith’s death Paula Snelling, as executrix of her literary estate, continued the process by preparing and selecting Smith’s correspondence and other papers for deposit in the University of Georgia Libraries. Students and friends of Smith have waited twenty years for a serious, thoroughly researched biography. Anne Loveland is to be congratulated for being the first to master the sheer volume of material in the Lillian Smith papers and for placing Smith’s life in the mainstream of twentieth century American social and intellectual history.

Because she wee publicly praised and honored for her work with the civil rights movement during her lifetime, Smith knew she would be remembered for her early and continued call for a complete end to racial segregation. However, what Smith most wanted was to be valued as a creative writer and thinker. Accordingly, Loveland chose as the informing theme of her biography what Smith had called the struggle to relate the “Mary” and “Martha” aspects of her life, the conflicting impulses between her writing career and her work for social reform. While the use of this theme in her analysis provides important insights into some of Smith’s works, Loveland fails to establish her own aesthetic criteria for evaluating Smith’s writing. Instead, after offering little more than reports of the critical views of Smith’s contemporaries and noting Smith’s own acknowledged appreciation of other philosophers and theologians such as Tillich and Teilard de Chardin, Loveland concludes: “Regrettably, her philosophical thinking was generally derivative and superficial and her literary effort unexceptional. Her primary significance lies in the role she played in the Southern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.”

Although Smith’s contribution to the Southern civil rights movement should not be underestimated, the value and significance of that contribution cannot really be separated from the quality of her writing and thinking. Behind Loveland’s assessment of Smith’s literary and philosophical capabilities lies a seemingly unexamined acceptance of the necessity of separating creative writing and social activism. This failure to examine the implications of Smith’s choice of self-definition is one indication of the absence of an essential ingredient in Loveland’s analysis: a consciousness of the power of gender in shaping a life and in influencing one’s perception of life in general.

Without that awareness, Loveland fails to see the tension between the “Mary” and “Martha” aspects of her character as a function of gender and the frustration in Smith’s life as a product of seeking affirmation and validation from the very forces she rebelled against–the patriarchal structure which perpetuates a racist and sexist society.

Additional evidence of Loveland’s lack of feminist consciousness pervades her discussion of Smith’s analysis of the roles of Southern women. Although Loveland notes Smith’s “comprehensive challenge against sexual convention,” she seems to accept uncritically Smith’s rather limited definition of feminism. While observing that Smith “thought of herself as specially qualified to help break the long silence about women,” and that her challenge to white supremacy and racial segregation “inevitably threatened two major supports of sacred womanhood,” Loveland maintains that “[Smith] was clearly not a feminist writer, for lesbianism was only a minor theme in her novels and none of her works was written to promote women’s rights or liberation.” I question the logic of so

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limited a definition of feminist writing.

Loveland’s lack of feminist consciousness is further demonstrated in her analysis of Smith’s personal relationships. While acknowledging that Smith’s closest friends were women, and that the strongest support and appreciation of her work came from women, Loveland devalues the significance of that support by implying that those female friends praised Smith’s work because they “recognized how much Lillian desired approval and praise.” Downplaying the effects of thirteen years of battling cancer, the 1955 fire which destroyed her home and most of her unpublished manuscripts, and the reality of patriarchal biases in treatment from male critics and friends, Loveland concludes the chapter on relationships: “She seemed to expect ill treatment from people, especially men, and purposely looked for indications of it to confirm her suspicions. At least some of the frustration and disappointment marking her life and career was of her own making and the result of an inability to take satisfaction in anything less than unconditional praise or loyalty.”

Although Smith’s tendency to resist identification as a feminist may be at least partially attributed to the absence of a well-developed, supportive feminist movement during her lifetime, it is not so easy to excuse Loveland’s adherence to an anti-feminist interpretation in light of the influence of feminist theory on recent historical scholarship. Whether or not Smith can be called a feminist writer, her biographer should recognize the power of patriarchal values in shaping Smith’s life. Smith knew that her sex made an important difference in her experience, perception, and treatment as a writer. She even associated the “Mary” or creative side of herself with her knowledge of women. Yet she wanted to be valued as though sex did not matter. The illusion that such approval can be “objective” is in itself a product of patriarchal thinking. Ironically, we finally learn from Smith’s life what neither she-nor Loveland could fully see–the power and the cost of self-creation and the necessity for self-validation in a woman’s life.

Loveland’s biography values in Smith what was acknowledged by the ruling males of her day and ours: Smith’s contribution to the civil rights movement. Correspondingly, the biography undervalues the importance of Smith’s life and work with other women. If Smith’s life is to be re-created so that its richness and complexity may be fully appreciated, her biographer must push the boundaries of patriarchal thinking even further than Smith did.

This carefully researched example of traditional scholarship has reported the facts of Smith’s life, but a full recreation and appreciation of her character remains to be written.

Rose Gladney is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 32-33

As writer, intellectual, and social critic of 20th century Southern and American life, Lillian Smith corresponded with a variety of notables about subjects of major historical, political, and cultural interest. The following selection from her correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt (copied from the original in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York) provides a glimpse of the extent, variety, and timeliness of the interests and concerns that underlay Smith’s goals and achievements as a writer. It is from the first volume of Selected Letters of Lillian Smith, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

Prior to the publication of her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944), Smith supported herself by directing Laurel Falls Camp for Girls near Clayton, Georgia. However, her public writing career began in 1936 when she and her assistant camp director Paula Snelling decided to co-edit a magazine, first called Pseudopodia, then North Georgia Review, and finally South Today. Designed to encourage fresh critical views of Southern literature and culture, it quickly became the region’s most liberal literary voice, publishing and reviewing the works of blacks and whites, males and females, and calling for an immediate end to all forms of racial segregation.

In 1937 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which had since 1928 focused primarily on developing black education, established a fellowship program open to Southern whites as well as to blacks in order to broaden its efforts to improve race relations. Because of the related interests and focus of their magazine, Smith and Snelling applied for and received joint Rosenwald Fellowships in 1939 and 1940, enabling them to travel widely throughout the South studying economic, political and cultural conditions.

In 1942, ’43, and ’44, they were again employed by the Rosenwald Fund to travel throughout the South in search of potential fellowship recipients among the region’s college students. Eleanor Roosevelt was also involved with the Rosenwald Fund; indeed, her response to this particular letter indicated that she would be unable to meet Smith because she would be “in Hampton attending a Rosenwald meeting.”

As the following account indicates, Smith’s impressions of Southern college students and her assessment of major issues facing the region in 1942 sound eerily familiar some forty-five years later. Likewise, as in Smith’s correspondence as a whole, this letter reveals the mind and spirit of a woman keenly observant of the world around her, especially conscious of the importance of all aspects of human relationships, and clearly aware of her role in shaping and interpreting the age in which she lived.

April 7, 1942

Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt,

The White House,

Washington, D.C.

My dear Mrs. Roosevelt:

Paula Snelling and I have this past week completed a trip through the South during which we have interviewed for the Rosenwald Fund the young Negro and White college seniors who have applied for Rosenwald scholarship-aid grants.

We have found these interviews profoundly stirring and want in some way, to share our findings with you. Some of our talks with the young Negroes were very disturbing, some most heartening, nearly all sincere and realistic. We found in the young whites–though there were exceptions–a shocking ignorance of their South, a concern primarily with their personal affairs, a restlessness about the future,

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little awareness of the international picture and our place in it. We found few educated whites who had ever met an educated Negro; few young Negroes who had met a racially unprejudiced white. We interviewed only the “cream” of the senior classes in 22 colleges.

Throughout the South, as we expected, we found many liberals giving up their liberalism “for the duration.” Especially did this seem to be true of those who are labeled “friends of the Negro.” The Negroes feel this too and are depressed and disheartened by the knowledge that many of their white friends disappear when crises arise.

Down in the Delta we found reaction rising like a great wave. Cotton is 26 cents in the Delta now and the general attitude among the planters is that neither Mr. Roosevelt nor God Himself is going to keep them from making some money while the making is good. There is a childish desperation in their attitude that would be awfully funny were they not so powerful. (Among my various activities is that of being a director of a summer camp for little rich girls. Some of these planters send their children to me in spite of my “liberalism.” But this spring I find them on the defensive, very antagonistic to all liberal movements, growing suspicious of what I am teaching their children in my camp; so suspicious and antagonistic that I dared not tell them that I was on Rosenwald Fund business for their hospitality would not have been equal to such a strain being put upon it!)

There is something heartbreakingly valiant about the young of the Negro race, so eager to prove to white America their willingness to die for a country which has given them only the scraps from the white folks’ democracy. There is resentment also; a quiet, strong resentment, running like a deep stream through their minds and hearts; something I think few white Americans are aware of, or want to face.

I shall be in Washington Friday, April 10th, at the Hay Adams House. I shall call Miss Thompson Friday morning and shall be honored to talk with you if you wish me to do so. I know you are a very busy person and I do not want to burden you further by a talk with me unless you think it will be useful to you to have in more detail this recent skimming of southern opinion.

Should you let me talk with you I would like to discuss with you also the possibilities for making this new venture of the Rosenwald Fund a more creative and vital youth project. Some of us think–and Dr. Embree shares this opinion–that the project should be more than a mere selection of young whites and blacks for graduate study. Could they feel themselves a part of some big and creative effort, something that had to do directly with their South, that had adventure in it, it would become a significant experience for them, rather than merely one more year of university study. They need somehow to be brought together, to have actual experience with each other, though heaven only knows how we can work it out in a South where such an idea can be mentioned now only in whispers. But how can the South ever work out its bi-racial problems when its intelligent and educated young whites and Negroes have never met an educated member of the other race?

I believe Miss Lucy Mason recently wrote you about Paula Snelling and me and our magazine The North Georgia Review which has now changed its name to South Today. I merely mention this kindness to us so that it will help you identify us.

There are many of us who are deeply grateful to you for your unwavering stand for the democratic decencies.

Most sincerely yours,

Lillian E. Smith

Rose Gladney is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 11-12

The following is the second of a series of letters selected from the correspondence of Lillian Smith to appear in Southern Changes. This issue’s selection is from one of her letters to Glenn Rainey, retired English professor at Georgia Tech, and was copied from the original in the Glenn Rainey Collection at Emory University. Mr. Rainey and his wife Dorothy were close friends of Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling. He was one of the initial sponsors of and a frequent contributor to their magazine.

Despite the often conflicting demands Smith faced as camp director, magazine editor, and novelist, correspondence from the late 1930s and early ’40s indicates a great deal of creative interaction between these seemingly different interests in her life. Her Laurel Falls Camp was an extraordinarily creative educational institution, known for its instruction in the arts, music, dramatics, and modern psychology. Through conversation and creative play, Smith helped campers and counselors question the world they lived in and begin to envision the possibility of change in that world The camp was also a laboratory for many of the ideas informing her analysis of political and cultural events in her published writing. It is not surprising that camp activities often reflected concerns similar to those expressed in her magazine. For example, one of the plays, “Behind the Drums,” written by Smith for her campers, explored 300 years of Afro-American history through music and dance and was published in the 1939 fall issue of North Georgia Review.

The following account of another camp play in the summer of 1940 demonstrates even more explicitly how current political events, specifically the anticipation of war, affected the creative activities of the camp and Smith’s perspective on her work as writer as well as camp director. She knew then that war, like other forms of human segregation, is most destructive to our minds and hearts.

September 19, 1940

We had a good summer, smooth as far as the mechanics of camp were concerned. Less encouraging to me as I watched War creep into our midst and twist feeling and thought. Our girls talked more about God, about hell, about believing every word of the Bible than in all my camp experience I have heard before. They were less tolerant of the Negro this summer (some holding bravely to their decency but others wavering) more inclined to defend the

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South…America…to hate Hitler and Germans…Even so, we had good talks, good evenings together…until I wrote a little play called 1940, A Play for a Young Girl. They wrote that play, not I,–I only put it down on paper. It came out of evenings when together we did not discuss war and peace, regimentation and death, but acted it out in singing and dance and impromptu chanting. Gathered together as we have done before in the library we spent several evenings doing this…first playing on the drums then beginning to talk about today, this year, what it meant to us,–election year–child refugees-Finland-propaganda– regimentation–then suddenly some one would get up and chant their feelings or dance them out. You would have felt the same thrill that I did, I believe, in seeing them express through their bodies, their feelings. And then one night, some girl spoke of conscription, of regimented youth camps and to my astonishment their feelings of fear and panic poured out. Then I wrote the play. We were to give it–the girls were thrilled–we went to its first reading and rough “walking through” of the scenes. And suddenly my counselors turned against me. The play was unpatriotic they told me. Furthermore, it was not the kind of thing young girls should hear about. A first-year callow young counselor told me that “it wasn’t good for children to hear about such things…they were too young.” In all of my experience I have never felt so much resentment against me, such a refusal to work with me on a project. I bowed my head to the storm and stopped work on the play. Not because I was afraid to give that play but because I was afraid of seeing all the other values of summer destroyed by dissension and suspicion. But I gathered my children up one night and we went to the library and Esther read it to them. [Esther Smith, Lillian Smith’s younger sister, taught dramatic arts at Western Maryland College, and was in charge of the camp’s theatrical productions for many summers.] In all her life she must not have read so beautifully and so movingly. The children were deeply touched and profoundly impressed. A few counselors had straggled in–I had invited none of them–and some told me afterward that they regretted that we had given up the idea of producing the play…But that was Esther’s magic, and they did not really believe what they said.

Well… I confess that I was awed by the incident. It has always been so simple and easy to hold the group in the “hollow of one’s hand,” so to speak, to win them over to almost any kind of project. But War’s beat me. I had no more influence during that brief dissension when my loyal staff turned into a war mob than if I had been the cook.

But…I quickly got our minds on fun again–on the banquet and the barbecue and the children’s surprise for the counselors–and so the summer ended in peace. I suppose you’d call it my appeasement policy. The children went home saying it was their happiest and best summer; the counselors went home saying the same. And believing it. But the director saw them all off feeling sadder than ever in her life she had felt about a summer…

Sometimes I feel so distressed, so perturbed about what is ahead of us that it is difficult to hold on to those values one cherishes. It is not the physical part of war that sickens me as it is what is happening to our minds and feelings.

Rose Gladney is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 2, 1988, pp. 27-28

The following is the third in a series of letters selected from the correspondence of Lillian Smith This issue’s selection (from a carbon copy in the Lillian Smith Papers at Emory University) is from a letter to the Board of Directors of the Committee from Georgia, which was a state affiliate of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW).

Organized in 1938 as a coalition of Southern liberals representing farmers, labor, politicians, educators, youth, journalists and other professionals, SCHW advocated wide ranging reforms from improved labor conditions and expansion of Farm Security Administration Programs to uniform federal and state voter registration procedures and federal aid to education. Today it is remembered primarily for its work to abolish the poll tax. As a delegate to SCHW’s 1940 annual convention, Lillian Smith expressed high hopes for the organization whose racially integrated membership she saw as symbolic of a changing South. She served as a member of its executive committee from 1942 to 1945. Described as the Conference’s “strongest gadfly, ” Smith consistently pushed for it to be more inclusive in its membership, more democratic in its practices, more responsive to the needs of rural people and more outspoken against racial segregation. With regret she resigned from her position on the executive committee in May 1945 because she felt the organization had grown narrowly political and controlled by a small faction of ideologues. However, she continued to support the goals of the Conference and served on the board of directors of its Georgia affiliate in 1946 and 1947.

The Committee for Georgia was one of the most active of the state-wide organizations of SCHW. In his study of SCHW (And Promises to Keep, Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), Thomas Krueger noted that the Committee for Georgia “sponsored two test suits challenging the constitutionality of the state’s county unity system, helped secure an equitable proportion of a school bond issue for Negro schools (increasing the Negro schools’ share from $1 million to $4 million), and worked quietly against Eugene Talmadge during the gubernatorial race of 1946.” Both test-quits failed, and, because of the county unit system (despite a popular vote lead of 9,661) James V. Carmichael lost the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to Eugene Talmadge. With a record breaking count of 100,000Negro votes in that election, Talmadge promised: “No Negro will vote in Georgia for the next four years.” Furthermore, although Eugene Talmadge died in December 1946 before his inauguration, the Talmadge forces put his son Herman in the state house and refused to relinquish their position until the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Lt. Governor elect, Melvin E. Thompson.

Primarily because of financial difficulties, both SCHW and the Committee for Georgia folded after 1947. However, Lillian Smith continued to advocate her psychocultural critique in political campaigns from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson. Always her political involvement included not only working for a specific candidate but, more importantly, trying to educate both the candidate and the public to a more holistic and long-range view of political issues. Her intense interest in child psychology and psychoanalysis informed not only her understanding of racism but her entire political analysis. Significantly, she repeatedly appealed to women, church leaders and journalists to exercise their power as moulders of public opinion; she always could translate her long-range philosophical perspective into concrete practices.

As with so many of her letters, this one seems uncomfortably timely to contemporary readers.

June 3, 1946

Dear Fellow Members:

I have been asked to go to India on the American Famine Mission at the invitation and expense of the Government of India. We leave by plane on June 1 7th. Until then I am so rushed that I cannot come to our board meeting. I am disappointed. But perhaps you will let me say a few things that are on my mind:

I am haunted these days by a little theme that says itself again and again in my mind: The campaign may be more important to Georgia than the election. Politics is a game over which we get excited and this is a race calculated to raise anybody’s blood pressure. With Talmadge smearing poison wherever his voice can be heard, we take sides, and should. Most of you here will agree that Carmichael will make us a better governor than either of the others. Most of us are going to work for his election. Nevertheless, it may be that the campaign will be far more important in its effect upon our state than the man who is elected. After all, though we live in Georgia, we also live in the United States. No matter who our Governor is, we shall still have a certain protection.

But even the Constitution of the United States cannot protect us and our children from the hate microbes that Talmadge is scattering now from end to end of our state.

Lately, I have been thinking of children. Of white and colored children, sitting at radios hearing his words, reading them in the paper, listening to their elders talk. White children swelling with arrogance over having a white skin; colored children shamed to the bone over being “colored.” White children overhearing “nigger” jokes…colored children overhearing bitter reactions from their folks. It is not a good thing to think about.

We know also that 10 percent of our population are mentally ill or on the fringe of illness. They are people unable to cope adequately with their fears and guilts. Talmadge’s words open a window within their sick hearts, giving a direction in which they may turn their hats–and without consciences hurting. We know too, that a lot of hate that once released itself on Germany and Japan is now back home again. Free-floating hate, just waiting for somewhere

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to turn; somebody to attach itself to.

Our state which we all love so much is fertile soil for Talmadge’s words. And he knows it. He knows the loneliness of farms. . . the emptiness of the small town. . . the bitterness and lack of love in so many homes, and he is capitalizing on our weaknesses. He has appraised our spiritual and cultural and economic deficits and is exploiting them for his and his gang’s advantage.

And we are letting him do it. We sit here and let him go up and down the state spreading germs of hate everywhere. Scattering bacteria over radio. If a mad man scattered germs by plane, he would be imprisoned. But Talmadge is free. I am not saying that he should have his civil liberties taken from him though I think the day will come when men will not be free to spread hate. I think the day will come when their madness will be recognized and they will be put into hospitals–not prisons–for treatment.

But today, what can we do? I think we can do plenty. I think we can inoculate against these germs. I think we can use vaccines to counteract this poison. Maybe Mr. Carmichael has to talk about leaning on Southern Tradition. We don’t have to. And we mustn’t. We are making Southern Tradition, not leaning on it. And folks who make things have to get busy and work. We should get in touch with Negro citizens throughout the state and let them know that white Georgians, hundreds of white Georgians, thousands of white Georgians are working with them for human decency, for the chance of Georgia children to grow. We must let them know that we want for all Georgia children the same things that we want for white children. No more, no less.

I wonder how many of us who are white have any idea what Talmadge’s talk does to Negro nerves. There is no way we can measure the hopelessness it creates, the desperation it breeds. A “white” imagination cannot embrace so much pain.

But it does as bad things to white folks. And this is what we must find the way to tell the people of Georgia. We must let them know…we must make them understand how arrogance cripples a white child, just as shame cripples a colored child. We must persuade them to understand that when we discriminate against any human being, we discriminate against all human beings. We want white children to be human to Negroes, to all people. These things we must find a way of saying. One way is through the Georgia press, in the letter columns. A hundred well-known women could write such letters to the Georgia papers. Though it is not customary for Southern women to write letters to the press, I believe they would do it, if they realized the good they might do.

The harm now is in silence.

I think every minister in the state of Georgia should be approached, not politically, but from the point of view of the harm this kind of talk does to growing children, how it promotes delinquency and lawlessness, how it spreads hate and unrest among white and colored. I think we might persuade a group of church women to take over this project of writing to all ministers and appealing to them to stem the tide of hate and fear and arrogance. I think a man like Bishop Arthur Moore might be chairman of such a group, with ministers from other denominations working with him. But would he?

I think we could get nursery school teachers and social workers to help on this. For delinquency is tied up so closely with the hate talk and with racial arrogance and racial shame. If we could convince the people of Georgia that Talmadge is waging warfare against the emotional growth of children, we could get new allies on our side. Most white people do not think they and their children are harmed by racial discrimination. They think if they work for racial democracy, that they are working for Negroes. Our job is to convince them that they are working for themselves and their children’s future.

I hope that we shall work in Georgia not only on political and economic levels but I hope that we shall make of the Georgia Committee a strong cultural force in our state. I want us to plow deeply…Not all our misery in Georgia is caused by poverty and unemployment; not all of it is caused by having the wrong men in office. Not all of it is even caused by poor health. Our ideas of child- guidance, of rearing children, our attitudes toward sex, toward scientific knowledge of human relations have such a profound effect upon people and upon the security of the whole earth today. The haters will always find someone to hate, whether hater be rich or hater be poor. We must reduce the need to hate; and learn “sanitary ways” of using our hate–what children in my camp call “emotional toilet habits.” Some of the poor and ignorant have great understanding and wisdom; and we all know Ph.D.’s as immature as children. So education isn’t the answer either unless our emotions are educated. Facts are fine tools to use; but emotions are the driving force behind those tools. That is why I am so anxious for us to work on our mental hospitals, and to establish mental hygiene clinics throughout the state. This more indirect, but fundamental approach to our racial and economic and political problems may in the end prove to be the best and most efficient way to work. I know we cannot do much with this until after election.

Sincerely yours, Lillian Smith

Rose Gladney is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 3, 1988, pp. 16-17

The letter below, written to the editors of the ATLANTA CONSTITUTION though it was never published there, is the fourth in a series from the correspondence of Lillian Smith. The letter did appear in the NEW YORK TIMES, June 6, 1954.

Smith’s strong position against racial segregation had been clearly established for more than a decade prior to the Supreme Court’s historic 1954 ruling. What is significant about her stand against segregation, however, is not only her timing–that she spoke out as early as she did–but her perspective and depth of understanding. Because she saw racial segregation as symbolic and symptomatic of many other aspects of human nature and society, it is not surprising that her first public response to the BROWN decision would contain broad and far-reaching interpretations of the new law.

Her passing reference to the ruling as a “powerful political instrument against communism” was not a new argument for Smith or for many others who for years had

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pointed to the hypocrisy of America’s willingness to defend freedom abroad while blatantly denying the rights of citizenship to black Americans. At the same time, her use of anti-communist language reveals a certain blindness in Smith’s otherwise clear vision of the relationship between means and ends in any struggle for social change. Although she clearly intended to defuse the red-baiting tactics of those who called “communists” the Supreme Court and all others who worked to end racial segregation, her willingness to use the anti-communist rhetoric–even against itself–leaves her vulnerable to charges of feeding the very red-baiting she would otherwise deplore.

In the remainder of the letter, Smith’s strategy was brilliant. To call the Brown decision “every child’s Magna Carta” was at once to move the subject out of the realm of black versus white or federal government versus state and local school boards and to place it in the tradition of freedom for the individual that even the most staunchly Celtic descendant would have to revere. Simultaneously, she pushed beyond the stereotype of race by renaming skin color an “artificial disability” compared to “real disabilities” of physically or mentally disabled children.

Smith’s knowledge of the legal, social, and educational plight of differently abled Americans was grounded in extensive research. At the time of this letter, she and Paula Snelling were compiling materials for an anthology on the subject. Although never completed, the proposed book as outlined in correspondence with her publisher included autobiographical experiences of a number of differently abled people, a bibliography of resources, and a list of relevant state and federal laws.

Her perception that the BROWN decision would affect differently abled children as well as children of color was truly prophetic. Few, if any, of its defendants or opponents were even considering such far-reaching implications in 1954, yet educational historians now look to that decision as a major precedent for the extension of educational access to all children, culminating in the 1975 enactment of Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.

Smith’s confidence that “millions of other southerners” would “wholeheartedly” accept the challenge of the Brown decision reflected her basic educational strategy for social change. She believed that people would rise to the vision of their leaders; and she herself always tried to embody the vision she held for the South. She would develop this appeal and outline specific creative responses to court-ordered desegregation in her 1955 book NOW IS THE TIME.

Unfortunately, voices like Lillian Smith’s did not receive the media coverage given those who dissented loudly or even moderately, as did William Faulkner when he pleaded for the white South to be given a little more time. If in hindsight we wonder at Smith’s optimism in 1954, we must also acknowledge that her vision is being realized, that her prophecy came true.

To the Editors,*

The Atlanta Constitution

Atlanta, Georgia

Dear Sirs:

May 31, 1954

I have read, again, the recent decision of the Supreme Court. It bears rereading. For it is a great historic document–not only because its timing turns it into the most powerful political instrument against communism that the United States has, as yet, devised, but because of its profound meaning for children.

It is every child’s Magna Carta. All are protected by the magnificent statement that no artificial barriers, such as laws, can be set up in our land against a child’s right to learn and to mature as a human being.

There are, perhaps, 5 million children in the U.S.A. who are colored. There are close to 5 million other children who would be directly affected by this decision. I am not speaking, now, of “white children”-many of whom have undoubtedly been injured spiritually by the philosophy of segregation. I am speaking of disabled children:

Children who are “different,” not because of color but because of blindness, deafness; because they are crippled, or have cerebral palsy; because they have speech defects, or epilepsy, or are what we call “retarded.” These children we have also segregated.

There are more than 40 states with laws forbidding a child with epilepsy to attend public school–even though most children’s convulsions can now be controlled with modern drugs. Little blind children are segregated in schools from sighted children; our deaf from the hearing. Many cerebral palsy children are kept out of school not because they are unable to attend but because there are teachers who do not want to teach them. And yet, a basic principle of rehabilitation is that acceptance and a natural relationship with his human world is necessary for the disabled child, if he is to make a good life for himself.

All these children–some with real disabilities, others with the artificial disability of color–are affected by this great decision. Then why are so few politicians protesting so angrily? Perhaps because they feel THEY will now be handicapped if the old crutch of “race” is snatched away from them.

It is true: this decision may shackle a few politicians. But it frees so many of our children. I, for one, am glad. And I believe millions of other southerners are glad, also; and will accept wholeheartedly the challenge of making a harmonious, tactful change-over from one kind of school to another. It will be an ordeal only if our attitude makes it so; there are creative, practical ways of bringing about this change. And in the doing of it, we adults may grow, too, in wisdom and gentleness.

Sincerely yours,

Lillian Smith

*From a carbon copy in the Lillian Smith Papers, Special Collections, University of Georgia Libraries

Rose Gladney is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 17, 19

Lillian Smith’s friendship with Carson McCullers and her husband Reeves may be dated to the late 1940s. After the Broad way production of Strange Fruit closed in 1946, Lillian kept an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, dividing her time between New York and Clayton, Georgia, and maintained a number of friendships in New York’s literary circles until the spring of 1953 when she discovered she had breast cancer and returned permanently to her mountain home. Still recuperating from a radical mastectomy, she had just completed her second work of nonfiction, The Journey, when Carson came to visit her November 17, 1953. Having recently left Reeves in Paris because of his alcoholism, Carson was working on an article about Georgia for Holiday magazine. Her visit with Lillian ended tragically only hours after it had begun when Carson’s sister called to say that Reeves had killed himself.

The following letter differs in tone from some of the more public letters selected for this series of Lillian Smith’s correspondence. Yet, it is equally important to our understanding of Smith’s life and work. Her attention to physical detail and personal feeling reveals what is most powerful about her writing. Furthermore, Smith makes the mundane occasion of writing a thank-you note the opportunity to express not only solace for a friend’s grief but also profound wisdom for living.

Her advice to Carson about heeding her inner knowledge concerning the reality of her relationship with Reeves, letting go what had ended in order to create something new, reflects the spirit and style of The Journey. Because of her fight with cancer, from 1953 until 1966 Lillian Smith would write very consciously under a death sentence. At her best, she would do so by using her past to speak and write about the future–the future of the South, of the world, of humanity itself.

Undated {January 1954)

A new year has begun. I hope it will be good, very good for you.

Dear Carson:

It is cold and bright like glass, today. Winds have stripped the trees clean and pale winy smoke color is drifting down on the mountain.

The kind of day when my tongue says “beautiful” and my heart mourns. Always those winds blow harder on my memory than on the mountain and I am driven back to an empty house and empty rooms that greedily spread over my whole life, sometimes; refusing to budge. Just taking over as if they have a right to stay. What happened on windy days long ago, I have no faint idea; but when such a day comes, I have to go back, like a ghost, to my childhood and wander it. Without map; without destination.

So, I write you from Clayton but really from a lonely corner somewhere in the past, to say hello and thank yow and wish you well. It would be nice to talk. I have never talked to you. Always we begin and there are–interruptions. Small ones, most of them; and the one big one which I pray you have somehow made your peace with. A hard six weeks you have had. I know this. I know there have been terrors and regrets, and sudden revelations, and grief, and a sadness that has no name. Always, if we could name the sadness, if we could find the word, we feel the sadness would lift. It is like stumbling across an old grave stone with no name and no date. Sorrow is like that. One cannot name it. If one only could…name it and find a little date in time for it. Then we could drop a small flower, a tear, and compose our life around it.

All of this you have felt, I know. And more. And I have been glad that you were compelled to work hard; to write “about Georgia”; to meet a deadline; to “make a little money.” It is harsh and right, this having to do the practical things when the deep breaks come. It glues us together; it drives us and pinches us back into some kind of shape. And while we are hardening ourselves, finding order in the chaos, we are at the same time growing within us new possibilities for life.

But it has been very hard. And I know this. I have thought of you, often. Paula has. We have talked about it with a profound dense of the pity of it, the sadness but, also, knowing a time comes when a relationship has ended. Death did not end it. You told me that, before you knew. It had ended before Reeves’ death. You felt this; saw it with a clarity; felt it in the honest regions of your self; and I hope that you have not forgotten. For no circumstance, even so hard a one as the event that occurred, can break what was already broken. To forgive another and one’s self; to accept all in another that one can and hold on to that. I feel you have done this; will do it; will cherish the bright moments; the gay, absurd, ridiculous and warm days; the tragic, too; and out of it all you will weave a new pattern, something real and Reeves will be a pert of your words; and all this will hold that common past close and make you glad of those years. I feel that you are wise enough to be grateful for those years; and not to regret them.

The flowers were lovely. And there is a funny quirk to it which will amuse you, I hope. The florist called from Toccoa, misery loading down her voice. She had an order from New York for an old fashioned bouquet for me. But she did not really have the right flowers for an old fashioned bouquet, she said. And how on earth could she get an old fashioned bouquet to me in Clayton! Could I perhaps come over for it? The voice was troubled. Was I going to wear it Christmas day? No, I said. There was no special occasion. Then, she sighed in relief, would it be all right to send me simply cut flowers? Yes, I assured her. But how could she get them to Clayton? She thought over long distance, too miserable to count her dimes. Finally she said while I held the silent phone, Oh yes; the paper truck came through Toccoa and went from there to Clayton. She’d just put those flowers on

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the paper truck and he would leave them at the drugstore. Would that do? Yes, of course, I assured her. So the flowers came bouncing in on the paper truck Saturday; the drugstore call e d to say “Miss Lil, we have some flowers for you;” Paula went to town for them and that night beautiful red carnations and blue irises were all over my dining room and looked very gay and very Christmasy too. Thank you for thinking of me in such a very nice way.

Please give my love to your dear mother, to that very nice sister Rita, and my warm affectionate wishes for the New Year.

My love, dear, Lillian

NOTE: This letter was copied from the original in the Carson McCullers collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Rose Gladney is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith

Edited by Rose Gladney

Vol. 10, No. 5, 1988, pp. 22-23

This is the final letter in a series published over the last year by Southern Changes exploring the correspondence of Lillian Smith. The selection for this issue was written in the fall of 1955 after Smith had spent a month as writer-in-residence at Vassar College. While there she learned that her book The Journey had been selected by the Georgia Writers’ Association to receive an award for the best book of nonfiction with the most literary value written by a Georgian in 1954 In late November, shortly before her time at Vassar was scheduled to end, she also learned that her home in Clayton had been burglarized by two young boys and that a fire, resulting from their activities, had destroyed her bedroom and study. Almost all of her personal belongings, unpublished manuscripts, notes, and thousands of letters were lost.

The following paragraphs are taken from a thank-you letter to Helen Lockwood, who was head of the English Department at Vassar and responsible for Smith’s visit there. The selected passages reveal much that epitomizes Smith’s response to the circumstances which shaped her life and, in many cases, determined her perceived status as a writer. Lockwood and Smith had become good friends during their month of working together, and Lockwood knew of the Georgia Writers’ award as well as the terrible shock of the fire. With such a friend Smith shared the sense of humor and awareness of life’s absurdities that fueled Smith’s profound critiques of Southern culture.

This sixth and final selection in the Series of Lillian Smith letters was taken from a carbon copy of the original in the Lillian Smith Collection at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens.

Clayton, Ga.

Dec. 2, 1955

Dear Helen:

The award was an absurd occasion–full of the grotesque, the stupid, the sweet, the good in other words: it was “the South” giving Lillian Smith an award with a trembling hand. I laughed until I was weak; I wanted to cry and didn’t; and I suddenly felt proud, proud that these people had found somewhere the courage to do it. I did not attend the first day of the conference but came in the second day and attended the luncheon where Flannery O’Conner spoke; also attended a fantastic round-table discussion of booksellers who were telling writers “what the public wanted.” It was so bizarre that it was unbelievable, this talk. The high point was reached when the booksellers agreed most gravely that what the public really wanted was a book about “how to meet sorrow.” “A big book or a little book?” some one asked. They conferred about this, then the chairman said she believed that what the public wanted was “a dollar book on how to meet sorrow.” Paula was in the back of the audience; I was midway in the crowd; but I could not restrain myself from turning and looking at her. It was altogether wonderful. I wouldn’t have missed it.

The night I received the award there was a big crowd at the dinner. I had not been asked to speak; they feared I might drop a bomb of some kind, I suppose. I don’t know. Anyway, I had not been asked. Hyman (No Time for Sergeants) who is a Georgia boy had been asked to speak. But when they met me Thursday morning they said to each other and even to me “Oh, she’s nice; such a lady, isn’t she? Oh my, and dressed like Park Avenue; let’s ask her to speak; she must speak to us.” Well, I must admit I had on my Sunday beat and my Paris hat (the only one not burned) and my mother’s manners. Well, I spoke (without preparation) and I melted most of them down. Not all, by any means; but MOST. Fully two-thirds of them came up after the dinner and shook hands with me. A Baptist minister said he was going to use some of my talk for his Sunday sermon…. A young doctor said he had never read one thing I had written but now he was going to read everything. An old lady said I was so sweet and well bred, she knew I had the beat intentions in the world, no matter what I said in my books. It went on and on. Afterward, I went to a friend’s house (I don’t have but two or three houses in Atlanta now that I am welcome in, but I went to one of them) sank into a chair and weakly asked for the biggest drink she could get in one glass. It was truly a whale of an experience. Flannery’s talk was one of the funniest things I ever listened to. Do you know–I don’t believe she had the vaguest notion how she shocked the crowd. She told em off; told Georgia off; told the South off; told would-be writers off. She is a little on the grim side in personality and not personally very attractive but she gave a hell of a good speech. There were about thirty of us there–they might not feel I should be so cozy as to include myself in the number–who enjoyed every word of it. But the stuffed shirts and the would-be writer (the place was full of them) began listening and smilingly because they had heard she was “literary” and “talented” and nothing she wrote threatened anybody, certainly not on the conscious levels of their life. But after about two paragraphs they realized that a nice little snake was sinking her fangs deep into their little complacency and they began to look at each other and shake their coiffeured heads and whisper, “Well….what do you know….”

Next morning, Friday, the WSB-TV actually asked me to be on the noon news spot. I dashed down and did it. First time, since Strange Fruit that my presence in Atlanta has ever been acknowledged. Everybody said everywhere, “Why, you nice person, have you kept yourself hidden away all these years, making us miss knowing you?” Honest to God, they said it.

I smiled and said nothing during the first twenty times it was said to me (a new myth in this myth-making South is being created and that is that nobody knows me in the South because I have deliberately kept people away from me) but the twenty-first time it was said, I said “I’ll tell you why. It is because you have never invited me before. And Ill tell you why you have never invited me: it was because I write highly controversial books and you feared to do so. But now that you have, let’s forget why and enjoy each other.” The South cannot bear the truth–not even a teeny-weepy

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truth, if there is any lie, any fantasy, any myth they can grab hold of instead. When I said the truth, in a very soft voice, the person’s eyes bugged out. She was as shocked as if I had said two dozen four letter words.

Well, it was fun. And I must admit it helped me get over the shock of the fire.

Affectionately,

Lillian

Rose Gladney is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.

A Letter from Lillian Smith: “Old Seeds Bearing a Heavy Crop.” With an introduction by Rose Gladney

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 4-5

As contemporary debates concerning the National Endowment for the Arts remind us that censorship, like patriotism (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson), too often becomes the last refuge of scoundrels, the words Lillian Smith prepared for the 1944 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union again raise timely end probing questions. What fears are aroused in those who would censor art? What in our culture continues to produce a Jesse Helms?

In the spring of 1944 Lillian Smith found her own work the subject of a censorship debate. Her novel Strange Fruit had been declared a “big best-seller” even before publication date, Feb. 29. Within a month, March 20, it was labeled obscene and banned by the Boston police. Two weeks later, with the advice of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and the cooperation of the novel’s publishers, Reynal and Hitchcock, Harper’s Magazine columnist Bernard de Voto initiated a test case of the ban by purchasing a copy of the book from Abraham Isenstadt, owner of University Law Book Exchange in Cambridge. Joseph Welch, later made famous in U.S. Army v. McCarthy, defended Strange Fruit, but on April 26 District Court Judge Arthur P. Stone found the novel “obscene, tending to corrupt the morals of youth.” A subsequent appeal did not overturn his decision, and the novel remains, technically at least, banned in Boston.

Efforts to ban the book in Detroit were successfully defeated by combined efforts of the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Public Library. The other successful banning of Strange Fruit occurred in mid-May when the U.S. Post Office ordered newspapers and magazines not to advertise the novel. The ban lasted only three days, however, because publisher Curtice Hitchcock sought and obtained the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Because Lillian Smith sent a copy of the following statement with a note to Curtice Hitchcock, it was preserved with her correspondence in the files of her subsequent publishers, Harcourt, Brace, & Jovonavich. It is reproduced here with the permission of the Lillian Smith estate.

From: Lillian Smith
Clayton, Ga.
(May 26, 1944)

Statement to Civil Liberties Union of Mass.
For Annual Meeting

There are many people who can not bear to face a truth that hurts. There are some who have dosed doors so firmly on their own emotional past that they go into a panic of fear when a book revives old memories. There are others who, because of early childhood training, have learned to look upon all frankness–however serious, however necessary to mature understanding of human experience–as something unclean and contaminating.

These are our immature, emotionally undeveloped people; frozen on a level of infantile experience, completely cut off from the possibility of growth and change.

Our culture, our values, our family experiences, the Puritanic strains in our religion–all tend to produce such people in numbers larger than we care to admit.

These people fear a book like Strange Fruit with a profound dread; and will seize on any pretext, however silly, to keep others and themselves, from having access to it.

But there are many others who fear the effect of Strange Fruit on the racial status quo; and, I think, within this group we shall find Boston’s major reason for banning the book. These people believe it is to their political and economic advantage to keep the Negro and the Jew and labor where they are today. They fear all change. They know when racial segregation begins to weaken, that other forms of segregation and exploitation will crumble with it. They fear the book because it has the effect of stirring imagination and reawakening guilt feelings.

To these people, segregation in all its forms: racial, economic, religious, psychological, must be maintained at however great a cost to civil liberties and intellectual freedom.

It is only by realizing that the charge of obscenity is a clumsy attempt to destroy the book’s power and prestige,

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that we, who believe in civil rights, can defend these rights in terms of this book. One can argue until doomsday about good taste without arriving at a just and true decision. Good taste is innate kindness and sensitiveness, tactfully genuflecting to contemporary taboos–a subtle and delicate blend of social good-will and hypocrisy that is too delightfully elusive to be caught and thumb-printed. For instance, what was good taste in men’s bathing suits twenty years ago would not be worn today, for a fortune, by one of the Watch and Ward gentlemen. Although by their own inexorable logic they should be compelled to wear such a garment while they go about plucking strange fruit! Yet, however elusive it is, good taste plays a necessary role in the rituals of everyday life and social affairs and always will.

But a book is not a social situation. A book is a serious examination of life. Truth cannot be adjusted to this year’s drawing-room manners, as can our behavior at a tea party. It is completely irrelevant, therefore, to attempt to use taste as a criterion for artistic truth–just as it would be to offer it as a valid reason for refusing to operate on a sick man. Truth, science and human need have never conformed to Watch and Ward manners or to postal regulations, and never will.

To suggest anything else is so contrary to common sense and sanity that one is compelled to brush such excuses aside and look for the hidden reasons. Why is a serious book with one plain word in it being fought across the country by post-office and watch and ward socieities [sic] and police?

The answer to this question will lead us to the roots of our culture–roots we must be willing to look at closely. For there is rising rapidly, now, to the surface of our American life, forces of hate and fear end ruthlessness that do not often show themselves so plainly. These evils in our culture have been here for a long time. They are old seeds that are now bearing a strange and heavy crop of trouble. We, in fighting for the right of this book to be read, are not fighting a little battle over one small word but a war against a way of life that threatens to destroy all that we value in human goodness and freedom and intelligence.