A Southern Woman Against Segregation

...In 1944 Smith published her first novel, Strange Fruit A story of an interracial love affair that ends in tragedy, the book was banned in Boston, but never, strangely enough, in the South Following the war she wrote for various liberal publications and in 1949 she published Killers of the Dream, an autobiographical meditation on race, sex and religion in the South In the '50s and '60s she wrote several other works and denoted tier energies to the cause of u\ it rights, civil serving as a member of the board of lort until that organization tinned to black power in the middle of the decade She died of breast cancer in 1966...

...One of the most provocative essays in this volume, "Man Born of Woman" (written with Paula Snelling), extends the psychoanalytic outlook to the origins of war and aggression The authors locate the roots of war in the tangled relationships between mothers and sons, and in men's lifelong enmity toward, and envy of, women Ultimately reductionist and over simple (a fact Smith and Snelling recognized), this approach nonetheless anticipated recent work emphasizing the crucial role of the pre-Oedipal years in shaping male and female characteristics Smith and Snelling further contended that women had too long cultivated the private realm, they had "grown to love [their] chains " What they had to do instead was bring their experience as women to bear on the great public issues...

...The last item in The Winner Names the Age is an excerpt from a moving and rather plaintive letter that Smith wrote late in life In it she noted that when writers on race or on the South were mentioned, she was not among them And when women authors or the authors of best-sellers were discussed, she was not included "I can," she said, "still laugh it off most of the time, but now and then, I truly wonder Whom, among the mighty, have I so greatly offended'" Perhaps this collection will help rectify that neglect...

...Yet despite these adverse circumstances, the white South produced some women of remarkable courage, grace and tenacity w ho spoke out for Iacial justice in the decades before the 1960s Among them was Lillian Smith...

...Boin in 1897, Smith grew up in north I lorida Her family mined to Clavton, Georgia, when she was in her teens She studied piano in Baltimore and then m the 1920s taught for three years in China Upon her return, she and her lifelong friend Paula Snelling (who contributes the Preface to this volume) founded a girls camp based on advanced psychological and pedagogic principles that they ran for over 20 years In the mid-'30s, Smith and Snelling also founded a periodical, originally called Pseudopodia, then North Georgia Review and finally, South Today The magazine ceased publication in 1945, but not before rendering irreplaceable service to the cause of Southern race relations and liberalism...

...Still, concerned as Smith was with social, psychological and political issues, her ultimate interest transcended them For what she sought to impart as an author and thinker was a belief in the future rather than enslavement to the past She wanted to release new energies rather than block them, to restore faith rather than reinforce modern pessimism...

...A Southern Woman Against Segregation The Winner Names the Age By Lillian Smith Norton 218 pp $10 95 Reviewed by Richard H. King Associate Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College, author, "The Party of Eros" Until very recently, Southern liberals had a difficult time Fellow white Southerners called them traitors, while Northern liberals charged them with excessive timidity No one, in fact, seemed to like them or listen to them What little influence they possessed was effective only behind the scenes or in denouncing the most glaring racial disgraces, like lynching, a frontal assault on segregation was out of the question And Southern liberal women were in an even worse position In a region that honored its white females by patronizing them, women found it difficult to be taken seriously on any issue of great moment...

...For cogency and courage South Today can best be compared with Politics, Dwight Macdonald's short-lived post-World War II journal It reviewed the latest works from and about the South, published an excerpt from W J Cash's The Mind of the South, was one of the few publications to take note of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and ceaselessly attacked the reactionary vision of the Vanderbilt Agrarians and the demagoguery of Dixie politicians In the early '40s it became the first Southern publication to come out squarely for an end to segregation The focus of ST, though, was not restricted to the region Once World War II began, Smith and Snelling supported the anticolonial stirrings around the globe and opened their pages to discussions on the issues of war and peace, feminism, religion, and education...

...To accomplish this difficult task Smith looked, above all, to the writer Interesting here are her harsh comments in an essay on the one undeniably outstanding Southern writer of her day, William Faulkner In the '30s she and Snelling had measured praise for him, but were always uneasy with his grotesque vision of the world In the late '50s, after he had delivered himself of one of his less happy opinions on race, Smith accused him of lacking "critical intelligence only his mythic gift is great but it, alone, does not make great literature " Around the same time she contrasted Faulkner unfavorably with Richard Wright, claiming that Faulkner reduced his characters to the status of "moral pygmies '' It was impossible, she said, to be a Fascist or a nihilist or a segregationist and be a first-rank poet or novelist The test of great art was "how much of the future is in its characters " It must "measure the slow movement of the human spirit evolving ". Far off the mark as her assessment of Faulkner seems, it does testify to the utter seriousness with which Smith approached human existence (Indeed, a sense of humor or irony apparently was not one of her strong points) Given her dedication to the causes she saw as important, one can understand, if not accept, her judgement...

...The Winner Names the Age is a collection of Lillian Smith's speeches and essays, primarily from the '50s and '60s Not all of them are good The public addresses-as is often the case -have traveled less well than the pieces written to be printed Moreover, Smith's major flaw is much in evidence here Her writing, even at its best, suffers from a certain thinness of texture Although she often draws upon her own experience to make a point, one rarely gets the sense of a life fully revealed Nevertheless, those who want an overview of the themes that preoccupied her, or who simply want to read more after Strange Fruit or Killers of the Dream, will find this compilation most welcome...

...To Smith, segregation was both a very specific reality and a metaphor for the forces that separated people from one another and from themselves The estrangement of mind, body and emotion seemed to her endemic in the modern world, "sin, sex and segregation" deprived both blacks and whites of their full humanity Thus, unlike most whites, Smith did not believe that segregation was a "Negro problem"-that eliminating it was a matter of bringing blacks up to the level of whites She felt, rather, that the problem was ethical How could blacks live with whites and whites with themselves In particular, she had harsh words for Southern moderates, the "good people" who disposed over power "Like the rest of us," she wrote in 1944, "they are afraid to do right " In their timidity they failed to ask or expect enough of their fellow Southerners who, Smith was convinced, were less ardent segregationists than was generally thought...

...This Southern lady was not afraid to draw the painful comparisons between her region and authoritarian societies abroad either True, no dictator dominated the South, but it was tyrannized by a "dictating idea"-racial segregation and white superiority Southerners, Smith claimed, underwent a "somewhat totalitarian training" and had to operate within a "one-party system ' Psychologically, the white Southerner lived according to a set of culturally determined defense mechanisms Awareness of the body was repressed and the humanity of blacks denied by projecting fantasies onto them Haunted by "ghosts" from the past, manipulated by demagogues, white Southerners were a "brainwashed people ". Smith's social and cultural thought was informed by two apparently disparate visions As a moralist she was profoundly influenced by her Christian upbringing (and just as profoundly disappointed by the miserable record of Southern churches on race) Later she was particularly taken with Teilhard de Chardin and his notion of the evolution of a common human consciousness This essentially religious vision was combined with a psychoanalytic perspective, if segregation was a sin, it was also a sickness For Smith white Southerners could only become fully human, and hence treat others as human, when they overcame the repressions imposed upon them by Southern culture Therapeutic insight, then, cleared the way for right action...