Lillian Smith - (1920-1966)
|
By Melanie CoxI. Biography and Literary Works Lillian Eugenia Smith was born on December 12, 1920s in Jasper, Florida.
In addition, Smith moved to Georgia in 1912 at the age of fifteen. In the early 1920s, Smith taught at a mission school in China. She later taught at the Laurel Falls Camp for girls in Clayton, Georgia from 1925 to 1949. While working at Laurel Falls Smith helped edit a magazine, which was eventually called South Today (1936-1945). She also wrote her best-known work Strange Fruit is about the
tragic outcome of an interracial love affair in the Deep South. Strange Fruit raided controversy and even got banned in Boston as indecent. Some of her other works included the non – fiction books
Killers of the Dream (1949; revised in 1961) The Journey (1954), Our faces, Our Words (1964), and Now Is The Time (1955). She also wrote Memory of a Large Christmas (1962), One Hour (1959),
The Winner Names the Age: A Collection Of Writings (1978) and How Am I to be Heard? : Letters of Lillian Smith (1993). Lillian Smith was not only a writer but also an activist. She was the first white woman in the
south to speak openly against racism and segregation. She wrote and lectured widely on civil rights and race relations. In a 1956 letter to Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. she wrote
"My warmest greetings to you and your congregation and to your people, who are my people, too; for we are all one big human family. I pray that we shall soon in the south
begin to act like one." This statement gives a glimpse of her views on racism and her longing to see all people united as one. Lillian Smith died in Atlanta, Georgia on September 28, 1966. She was sixty-nine years old.
That same year she received the Charles S. Johnson Award, which was given by Fisk University. Thirty-three years after her death in 1966 she became the eighth member of the
Georgia Women of Achievement. The induction ceremony was held in Rome, Georgia on March 27,1999. II. Smith on the Web "Smith, Lillian". Encyclopedia Americana. v.25. Copyright 1993 "Smith, Lillian".
This essay was submitted by a student of Debbie Wooten, a teacher at Bacon County High School in Alma, Georgia.