The South: Herald of the Dream

God-fearing white folk in Georgia’s Rabun County were scandalized in 1944 when “Miss Lil,” Judge Frank Smith’s middle-aged spinster sister, wrote a harrowing, compassionate novel about a Negro girl who was made pregnant and abandoned by a no-account white man. Lillian Eugenia Smith’s Strange Fruit was unfashionably out of step with its time and place. It ridiculed white supremacy, scathingly described the lynch-burning of a Negro wrongly suspected of murder, and was spattered with words that a Southern lady was not even supposed to know. Its prose won no literary prizes, but the book sold more than 3,000,000 copies in 16 languages — it was duly banned in Boston — and, more closely than any previous American novel, dissected what its author called the “terrifying illness” of race relations in the South.

Save for her piercing blue eyes, Lillian Smith hardly resembled a pioneering crusader for civil rights. Her manner was retiring, her voice soft and small. But her forceful message cut through the Georgia drawl: Jim Crow demeaned and diminished every Southerner, white or black. “Racial segregation has been a strong wall behind which weak egos have hidden for a long time,” she wrote in 1951. She castigated Southern Governors who defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to integrate the schools. As a result, she said, Southern whites “are losing their freedom to do right, to act as their conscience dictates; they are losing the freedom to obey the law.” She warned: “Neither cancer nor segregation will go away while you close your eyes.” Last week, at 68, Miss Lil died in Atlanta of the cancer that had ravaged her body for years.

“Truth & Love.” Lillian Smith was descended from slave-owning Georgia pioneers who fought the Seminoles; she was born and brought up in Jasper, Fla., which could have been Maxwell, the community that she anatomized in Strange Fruit. “We were small-town people who lived in a large, relaxed way,” she recalled. After World War I, her father lost his prosperous mills and turpentine stills, moved back to north Georgia to open the state’s first private summer camp for young ladies on Old Screamer Mountain outside Clayton.

After studying music at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, Lillian Smith taught for three years in a Methodist missionary school in China, returning to take over Laurel Falls Camp when her father died. Southern bluebloods scrambled to send her their daughters, and she used earnings from the camp to launch a magazine on Southern affairs, which had burgeoned to 100 pages with a subscription list of more than 10,000 when she abandoned it in 1946 for full-time writing. She followed Strange Fruit with Killers of the Dream (1949) and The Journey (1954), non-fiction works in which she analyzed the psychology of prejudice and described her own spiritual development.

Lillian Smith carried her advocacy of nonviolence into the political field, joined the fledgling Congress of Racial Equality in 1946 and worked alongside the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “The means,” she insisted, “must be full of truth and love and wisdom.” This summer, sickened by the rise of the black-power movement, she angrily disavowed both organizations, charging that S.N.C.C. had been perverted by “a mixed-up mess of 19th century anarchism and 1930s Communism.”

Cabling her resignation to CORE National Director Floyd McKissick, Lillian Smith warned in one of her last public utterances: “Now we have new killers of the dream.”