I’ve long appreciated the work of historian Keri Leigh Merritt. She joined me recently to discuss her latest book, An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America. To quote the book publisher, Smith was “a hugely popular, bestselling author in the mid-20th century, but today her name and legacy have been mostly forgotten.” The book offers a powerful new perspective on today’s civil rights struggles, as well as yesterday’s. That makes sense, since at its root it has been the same ongoing struggle for social justice since this country was born.
Smith’s novel Strange Fruit was a 1944 bestseller about an interracial romance. In addition to writing several books, Smith also wrote several pamphlets about racism that were largely directed toward fellow Whites. Smith herself was a white Southerner in a long-term lesbian relationship who co-published a Southern literary magazine with her partner. That magazine broke new ground by publishing the works of both Black and White authors.
Smith was also a longtime civil rights activist, working closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. The book’s introduction was written by Rev. William J. Barber II. “We live in a moment when the demons of America’s darkest past threaten to choke the life out of our experiment in multiethnic democracy,” writed Rev. Barber. “When racist authoritarians controlled both the tools of government and the engines of public life,” he continues, “there was a white woman in Georgia who could see that she had an interest in challenging that abuse of power. When she dared to speak out, she learned she was not alone.”
I was fortunate to discuss some of the many issues raised by the book with Keri Leigh, including: the relationship between Lillian Smith’s then-stigmatized private life and her empathy for the dispossessed and “Other”; the ways in which racism wounds and deforms the oppressor, making its erasure a necessary healing for everyone; the limits of zero-sum, self-flagellating “allyship” and the power of collective healing; and some lessons to be learned about rural America from Smith’s peaceful life in small-town Georgia.
In keeping with my usual practice, below are some selected quotes followed by a lightly-edited transcript.
(photo of Keri Leigh Merritt in video above by Sarah Witherington)
Selected Quotes
Keri Leigh:
“Smith called white supremacy a psychosis.”
“[She said] white supremacy is the reason why there were no great (white) artists in the South.”
“Who are you at your core? That’s something that a lot of us are afraid to touch.”
“We’ve had so many books… telling white Americans what not to do… But everybody needs heroes and heroines.”
“Not all of change in America or anywhere is political.”
“If you make somebody a meal who’s in mourning… that’s what ends up making the world whole.”
Richard:
“It’s a ministry to the soul of the oppressor as well as the oppressed.”
“It is warping you, it is mutating you, it is making you the misshapen fruit on the tree.”
“There’s a woundedness in this Southern white soul.”
“It’s a matter of redeeming and reclaiming yourself and becoming more fully human.”
“Empathy is addictive.”
Transcript
Richard Eskow: Joining me now is a historian and writer I very much admire. Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian. She’s the author or editor of a couple of books, and she has a new book entitled An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America. The book went on sale at the end of September, and it is an excellent read.
Keri Leigh Merritt, welcome back to the program.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Thank you so much. I feel like I’m back with a good old friend. So thank you.
Richard Eskow: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been years, but friendship isn’t measured by wall time.
So let’s start with this. Lillian Smith is likely a figure that people’s parents or grandparents—whoever was around in the mid-20th century, especially if they were involved with literature, books, politics, and so on—might have heard of, but she’s not well known today. Who was Lillian Smith?
Keri Leigh Merritt: I always describe her as probably the bestselling author and civil rights activist who should be known but whom you’ve probably never heard of. She was a white Southerner, born in Jasper, Florida, in 1897, and she spent most of her life in Clayton, Georgia, a tiny town in the northeast corner of Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains.
She was just a dynamo. In 1944, her bestselling novel Strange Fruit was published. That had all sorts of issues around it that we can get into, but she worked her entire life fighting for civil rights and pushing even liberal Southerners and liberal Americans farther to the left on integration and civil rights for Black Americans.
Richard Eskow: One of the interesting things about her to me, and one of my takeaways from your book, Keri Leigh, is this. I tend to think there are people who are progressive, for lack of a better word—who have good values and are fighting for social justice, what have you—but within certain social parameters. And then there are others who have a vision of society as it should be, and they’re uncompromising in that. In pursuit of it, whether through writing, advocacy, or anything else, they will cross barriers and red lines—social, political, and otherwise—that other people won’t.
The sense I got was that Lillian Smith was very much one of those people. She went where she felt she needed to go, and it didn’t matter who wanted to go with her or who wanted to stop her. Is that a fair read?
Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. And honestly, that’s what drew me to her. She’s a rebel, but she doesn’t suffer fools. She doesn’t take anything from anyone. She’s very hardcore in her beliefs, and I really admire that about her. She was totally uncompromising on questions of racial equality, gender equality, and all sorts of major social issues we’re still dealing with today.
She and her life partner, Paula, ran a magazine for years that taught white Southerners how to act properly, be good citizens, and learn to appreciate integration. They also ran a summer camp for girls called Laurel Falls, where they had girls coming from the most racist families throughout the South. They taught them about all of these moral issues, and even had local Black children come over and spend time with them, so there was integration even in the camp.
Richard Eskow: Since you mentioned Paula Snelling, we might jump right into that dimension of her life, because it seems to me to have shaped her approach to other issues as well. She was in a committed lesbian relationship at a time when that was pretty much unthinkable. The phrase of the era was “the love that dare not speak its name,” right?
People just wouldn’t even talk about it, and that was still the case 20 or 30 years later. So here she was in what would then have been considered a highly forbidden relationship. And her bestselling novel, the one that caused a great deal of controversy but really made her name in 1944, was Strange Fruit.
It’s about an interracial romance—another taboo idea in 1944, and surprisingly so even much more recently in American history. First, I wondered to what extent the interracial romance in Strange Fruit might have drawn an image or an emotional tone from her own experience in a lesbian relationship. Second, and more broadly, I wondered whether her role as what other writers of the time might have called a “sexual outlaw” somehow opened her sensibility to greater empathy, compassion, and understanding for other social outcasts of the time. Does that make sense as a question?
Keri Leigh Merritt: You know what? I’ve done so many interviews, and you’re the first person to put it that way. You put it so beautifully, and I think it’s 100% right. I think it’s part of the reason she’s left out of history today. But her sexuality definitely had a major impact on how she viewed the rights of all people.
Right after college, she actually went to teach at a Methodist girls’ school in China and spent three years there. Her first book—one publishers wouldn’t touch, which she couldn’t sell to anybody, prior to Strange Fruit—was actually about lesbian relationships between a group of white teachers and Chinese female students.
I think that was largely based on her experiences there. Unfortunately, the manuscript was ruined in one of the fires she had at her house, one of which, of course, was arson. But she wrote about these sexual themes throughout her work. And the interracial relationship in Strange Fruit is really why it ended up being banned not only in Boston and Detroit, but even in the U.S. mail. She had to reach out to her very good friend Eleanor Roosevelt and ask the president to step in and get the ban lifted.
Richard Eskow: I have to say, when I read the part about Eleanor Roosevelt and her role, it reminded me how much my mother loved Eleanor Roosevelt. My mother was one of the many Americans, especially American women of her generation, who idolized Eleanor much more than her husband. I think Eleanor, too, was ahead of the social curve in her views—remarkably so.
But that may be a slight digression. As for Strange Fruit, the novel that made Lillian Smith’s name, it originally had another title, which you write about. I don’t recall it, but it was changed to the title of a song that, as I understand it, was already popular at the time: the Billie Holiday recording “Strange Fruit,” which is about lynching and the strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
But her book is not about lynching. So what do you think drew her to that title in the end?
Keri Leigh Merritt: She had written about the concept of strange fruit in the magazine she and Paula Snelling ran for so many years, prior to the Billie Holiday song. She conceptualized “strange fruit” as basically white people—what racism and hatred do to white people psychologically, from a psychoanalytic standpoint.
She was big into Freudianism and studied psychoanalysis her entire life, so she wanted the title to concentrate on what racism did to white people. Of course, when her publisher pushed her to adopt the title Strange Fruit, which she didn’t really want to do, he tried to tie it closely to the song. He even introduced her to Billie Holiday, in this kind of famous scene. Billie Holiday later claimed the book was based on the song, but Lillian said, “No, that’s not true. And when I met her, she was honestly so high she didn’t even know what was going on.”
But this was a theme she had been writing about for years, and I think it really needs to be brought back today. We don’t talk about it enough in terms of racism and how it injures white people in many different ways, but especially from a—
Richard Eskow: Well, I’m really glad we opened the door to the psychological aspect, because that was another striking side of Lillian Smith’s work that came out for me in your biography, An Inconvenient Woman. Like a lot of truly transformative, radical political figures, she didn’t think about politics in isolation.
She didn’t even think about civil rights in isolation. And, as you just said, she didn’t think about social justice purely in terms of the people being oppressed by the system. She was one of those figures. I would say Martin Luther King was another, Malcolm X was another, and there are many others we could draw on from history.
I know she was not a religious person, or that was my impression. But my takeaway from your book was that she was, in a sense, ministering to the whole person—particularly when she was addressing white people. Not just saying, you should do this because you’re doing wrong to others, although that’s a deep part of it, and you should stop because it is wrong. But also: it is warping you, it is mutating you, it is making you the misshapen fruit on the tree.
In that sense, it almost seems like a clerical, clergy function. Do you get what I’m trying to say? It’s almost a ministry to the soul of the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic way to put it. Her third book of the seven she published, The Journey, concentrates a lot on her battle with breast cancer, but it’s incredibly spiritual. She calls white supremacy a psychosis, and says white supremacy is the reason there are no great artists in the South—that the South had no great white artists. That it represses people to such an extent that they can’t even create art. So she argues that the next major hurdle white Americans need to tackle is how to live within themselves—how to find new images of themselves, how to create an image of what they are that’s distinct and apart from whiteness and white supremacy.
And to your larger point about her not being particularly religious, I think it’s really important to note that her father, Calvin, was extremely religious—Methodist, but in the good Christian sort of way, not the Christian nationalist way we know now. Her sixth book is called Memory of a Large Christmas, and in it, Calvin Smith invites the entire chain gang—not just the officers, but the entire chain gang, both Black and white—to Christmas dinner with the Smiths.
This is in the late 1910s. So they’re literally having dinner with Black and white prisoners, some of whom are rapists and murderers. And he teaches his children that anybody can mess up; anybody can make mistakes in life. We all do. But you have to have kindness and goodness and treat people as you would want to be treated.
Richard Eskow: That’s fascinating. It makes me think of the Reverend Claude Williams. There’s a great story about him: when everyone was afraid to hold interracial prayer meetings, he threw his curtains open in Alabama and said, “Let them see how the true followers of the Son of Man behave.” It’s a courageous thing to do.
And I’m struck by her comment about there being no great Southern artists, because my initial reaction was, well, there are great Southern writers—but they all seem to write the poetry of great damage. Whether you’re talking about Faulkner or, later, Walker Percy, someone like that. There’s a woundedness in the Southern white soul, and I guess that’s what she was speaking to.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely. She did not like Margaret Mitchell. She thought Margaret Mitchell got the history of the South completely wrong. She didn’t really like Faulkner. She did, however, like some of the white women writers, like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, who, to your point, write about exactly that. And in Lillian’s two novels, when she writes these white men who are struggling with their own racial identities, she makes them physically crippled, handicapped, or sick to represent their emotional handicap.
Richard Eskow: That’s fascinating. So take us through Lillian Smith’s biography a little. She’s born to a well-to-do family in Florida. The family has a financial setback—maybe not as severe as others, but enough that they move to their summer place. They start this camp, which she eventually takes over.
But she is also a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, and her nonfiction books are pretty bold for the time. They’re basically telling white America, “You’re doing this all wrong.” So how did she come to be the public figure she was for a long time—knowing Eleanor Roosevelt and, as you write, Dr. Martin Luther King, both of them advocates for her work? How did that life arc bring her there? We sometimes think of writers, especially Southern writers, as cloistered in their little towns, introspecting all day. But she had a very public life. How did that come about?
Keri Leigh Merritt: Well, she became kind of famous within Georgia and the South just by running her camp, because of how progressive it was. People knew who she was. Then she and Paula started what they called their “little magazine,” which ended up being one of the most famous magazines in the South. They were the first white people in the South to publish Black writers.
The magazine ran for well over 10 years and went through several names. It was mainly known as The South Today. Some of the articles she wrote there—again, about white supremacy and how to combat it, not only in other people but within ourselves—sold hundreds of thousands of copies as pamphlets across America.
So she became known as a writer through the magazine work. But she was also deeply involved in a number of grassroots social clubs and organizations, where she got to know many, many liberals and progressives throughout the South, both Black and white. And she maintained a huge correspondence with some of the best Black intellectuals, activists, and artists of the day, from W.E.B. Du Bois, who was one of the first people they published in the magazine, to Pauli Murray. They were the first to publish Pauli Murray, the first to give her a paycheck, and they even helped her get a Rosenwald Fellowship so she could stay at Howard Law School and become the amazing lawyer she became.
So it was this personal cultivation of relationships, in a way that many of us can’t fathom today.
Richard Eskow: And in a sense, perhaps it was a smaller universe of people. Speaking of small universes, one of the things that struck me about her story is that we think of somebody that radical, in the context of her time, as being a social pariah. But she lived in this little mountain town, and I think people liked her.
Did people just not know what she was up to? Or did they say, “Well, that’s Lillian,” and go about their day? It seems to me she had a pretty nice community there. Am I wrong?
Keri Leigh Merritt: No, you’re absolutely right. And it’s something that those of us who grew up in cities need to reconsider—our preconceived notions about what’s going on in rural America. Because she and Paula lived, I argue, relatively openly. And on Old Screamer Mountain, where they lived, there was a community of gay and lesbian couples who all supported each other.
When Lillian started going bankrupt from paying for her breast cancer treatment in New York, another lesbian couple, Lou and Ulmer, stepped in, helped her pay her bills, and gave her a big loan. The other people of Clayton knew what was going on. They certainly knew there were Black people arriving at the Clayton train station and being taxied up to Old Screamer Mountain, and they just let her live her life.
As long as she wasn’t bothering them, they didn’t care. And she would always hold interracial lunches, ice cream socials, barbecues, and things like that at her house, so they were attendees as well.
Richard Eskow: That fascinates me, frankly, perhaps more than it should. Any time spent in a small town, and any study of rural history—which you know far better than I do—teaches us what city dwellers should have figured out long ago but sometimes don’t. When you’re living that way, you see all of human expression, human experience, and human behavior, probably more so than in a city with its social classes, stratifications, and separate neighborhoods.
People have been around. They know that sometimes women like other women, men like other men, whatever. People have ideas that are unconventional. My theory is that it’s only when external stress is applied that these become fracture points. Otherwise, I think it’s often a matter of live and let live.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Right. She provided jobs. She held social events for them, so they loved her for that, and they could easily turn a blind eye, or use euphemisms, or whatever way they could find to deal with her lesbianism and even some of her more progressive social stances.
Richard Eskow: In addition to her social views and her lesbianism, she was also struggling with health problems and disability for many years of her life—the last 15, maybe. That’s potentially instructive, because she seems to have stayed very productive during that period, working around it. If I recall correctly, there’s one anecdote about her writing a speech but not being able to give it, so someone else gave it. But to the extent she could, she kept working, even with an ultimately fatal illness in breast cancer. I wonder if you had any takeaways about that.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Yes, for sure. Her 13-year struggle with breast cancer really shows how little progress we’ve made in our healthcare system, because it almost bankrupted her. That’s something so many Americans can relate to today. But she and Paula had several Rosenwald fellowships early in the 1930s, and for one of them they traveled around the South, interviewed tons of people with disabilities, and compiled all of this research.
A lot of it, again, got ruined in the fires. But if they had actually published it, it would have been the first study on disability in America. They also traveled to India, met Helen Keller while there, and worked with lots of people with disabilities. I think she just felt such an affinity, especially once she was diagnosed with cancer.
She literally had a number of her arm muscles taken out, in her right arm, which she wrote with. So it was really debilitating for her. And in the last few years of her life, she was on so many experimental drugs and so many steroids that it was making her paranoid and keeping her from thinking clearly.
Those last few years were hard for me to deal with as a biographer and historian, because you don’t really know what she would have been thinking if she hadn’t been on all these drugs. She can’t really keep up with the movement. She’s part of SNCC and loves many of its members. But when people like Stokely Carmichael come in and start advocating Black Power and moving away from nonviolence, she can’t evolve with the movement in that way. So it’s hard to know: Is that really her? Is that the medicine talking? Is it the paranoia? It does make it a little difficult.
Richard Eskow: Yeah. And of course, those last few years of her life were when the movement really rocketed forward. She died in 1966, so she was declining through Birmingham, the March on Washington, Selma, and everything else. It’s hard to avoid those what-ifs, isn’t it?
And I guess she was probably not yet 70 when she died—probably 69 or 70. So she could have had a few more good years in her to really be part of the conversation. Which brings me to my next question for you, Keri Leigh Merritt. So many figures from that time are still remembered and honored today—Black and white, though obviously the Black figures were the leaders of the movement. I don’t want to say she was forgotten, because there have always been people who remember her. But why do you think she slipped into relative obscurity?
Keri Leigh Merritt: Again, I think part of it is her sexuality. Part of it is that she’s a woman. But I think the other part is that what she was talking about is so relevant, and still raises so many questions that modern Americans have not been able to answer or grapple with. I think this is the missing piece.
We’ve had so many great books in the last 10, 15, 20 years telling white Americans what not to do, how not to be racist. But everybody needs heroes and heroines—people to look up to and examples of what to do. And she’s really talking about self-reflection and self-examination, and figuring out your identity apart from being a white person in America with all the privilege and power that brings. Who are you at your core? That’s something a lot of us are afraid to touch. We’re afraid to actually go down that kind of spiritual pathway.
Richard Eskow: I think that’s a great point, and I’m really glad you brought it up. It gets to one of the notes I had for you about the book, which was this whole concept that’s now framed as allyship—what it means to be an ally. And of course it’s important to be an ally.
But this is where I think her perspective, and the perspective of thinkers like you, is so important. If you’re a white American, this is not just a matter of what you do for others. It’s a matter of redeeming and reclaiming yourself and becoming more fully human. The whole notion of allyship seems kind of zero-sum to me—I guess that’s the way I’d put it.
“Oh, I have to give up something to be nice to these people my community has been bad to for all these centuries”—as opposed to, “No, I have something to gain. I have ways I can grow and improve and be a happier, more fulfilled human being if I explore the things in me that reflect what I and those before me have done, and that have warped me on the vine.” I think that is a lesson. But I don’t know why it got lost, unless it’s just too subversive for some people.
Keri Leigh Merritt: I think it really is. I think it’s completely subversive. It takes years and years of self-reflection and study to get to that point. And I will say that’s part of the reason I asked Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign to write the foreword for this book. I can’t believe he did it.
It was like the best day of my life when he agreed. I wanted that spiritual aspect, but something that wasn’t so myopically Christian—something that was—
Richard Eskow: Right.
Keri Leigh Merritt: —broader. We’re all humans, we’re all here together, and we all benefit from this kind of evolution in thinking. Her later books really grappled with this. She got into Jungianism and all sorts of philosophy and tried to weave it together. I don’t think she was always totally successful in writing it, but the ideas were there, and they’re ideas I think we all need to pick back up now.
Richard Eskow: I love that. I was definitely going to mention Dr. Barber’s foreword. I was so happy he did it, because I’ve always found him to be one of those leaders who is redemptive in his approach, if we’re going to use Christian terminology. As opposed to—I have to say—Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, which is more like, you’re born into sin and you must flagellate yourself. As opposed to this vision of growing together that someone like Dr. Barber or Dr. King or so many others offered—and, at the end of his life, Malcolm X too, I would argue.
Lillian Smith definitely offered that too. It’s a move from allyship to growth and collaboration in the human community, I guess you’d say. So with that, I guess our last topic—and I think we’ve largely addressed it already—is: When people read this book, what do you hope they get out of it?
It’s now almost 2027. Lillian has been gone for a while, but she had insights very much worth bringing back. What can this book do for the people who read it? Who would you hope would read it? What’s your aspiration here?
Keri Leigh Merritt: Well, I hope everybody reads it, but specifically white people—specifically people who are looking for something more in life, who don’t feel they’re where they need to be, who don’t feel spiritually whole or fulfilled. And aside from what we’ve already talked about, one thing she was a big proponent of, and that we can all focus on, is that not all change, in America or anywhere, is political.
We don’t have to be so focused on the political, because I think that can be overwhelming to most people. It can seem insurmountable, especially today. But she really saw change through art. She saw that art—whatever form it takes, whether music, fine arts, writing—could actually change and heal society in a very real way.
She used her art to do that herself. But it’s about reminding people that you don’t have to be a big name. You don’t have to have a lot of money. You just start where you are. If you can make somebody’s day better in your community or your family, just start there.
If you make a meal for somebody who’s in mourning, if you can just have a conversation and rekindle that human spirituality between people—that’s what ends up making the world whole. It doesn’t have to be political.
Richard Eskow: Empathy is addictive.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Absolutely.
Richard Eskow: Right. So again, I highly recommend the book An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America. The author, Keri Leigh Merritt, has been my guest. Keri Leigh, thanks for writing this wonderful book, and as always, thanks for coming on the program.
Keri Leigh Merritt: Thank you for the terrific interview. Thank you.
Richard Eskow: We depend on your support here at The Zero Hour, so please give whatever you can at any of the links you see on your screen. Thanks so much.