October 22
On October 22, 1944, Lillian Smith published Strange Fruit, her novel about the love affair between a white man and a Black woman in a small Georgia town, and the violence that follows. It had been banned by the US Post Office under obscenity statutes. It had already sold a million copies in the months since its publication.
Smith was born in 1897 in Jasper, Florida, into a white Southern family. She ran Laurel Falls Camp for Girls in Clayton, Georgia, with her partner Paula Snelling from 1925 to 1949 — they were together for most of Smith's life and published a literary journal called South Today from the camp. The journal published Black writers in the segregated South, which was a form of political statement requiring ongoing courage.
Strange Fruit was banned by the Boston city censor and the US Post Office. Eleanor Roosevelt personally intervened with the Postmaster General. Franklin Roosevelt told the Postmaster General to lift the ban. He did.
Smith's second major work, Killers of the Dream (1949), is a psychoanalytic examination of white Southern racism — what it does to white children, how it is transmitted, what it requires of the people who maintain it. It is among the most penetrating analyses of American racism written by a white Southerner and was largely ignored by white Southern critics.
She died of cancer in 1966. Her work was out of print by the time of her death.
Smith wrote about race in the American South from inside the white Southern community, using psychoanalytic language to describe what racism required of the people practicing it — an analysis that had limited audience because it was too radical for white readers and too outside the civil rights movement's needs to be useful to Black readers. Her relationship with Snelling, which she and Snelling never publicly identified as romantic, is part of the story of what she could and could not say in the climate she worked in.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.