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The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America
by Keri Leigh Merritt
A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history.
Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and then a magazine, devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn't support segregation―Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence. Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966.
Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith's complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality.
"An Inconvenient Woman restores Lillian Smith as a radical thinker, a queer Southerner, and a key civil rights figure―a diagnostician of fear and repression in American life. This vital book at once recovers a life and makes plain how much we still have to learn from it." ―Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
"At once a startling new history of the civil rights movement and a long overdue rescuing of a personal story of an unsung heroine that too few know, Inconvenient Woman is a beautiful must read. With deft care, a critical eye, and an oh-so-rare appreciation for the true complexity of what brought people into the Black freedom struggle, this close study of Lillian Smith's life and activism gives us all hope is this current moment of brutal hatred and intolerance." ―Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
This information about An Inconvenient Woman was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D. is a historian and writer. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association as well as the President's Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She has co-edited several other books, including After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, and her articles have appeared in outlets from Smithsonian and Aeon to The Hill and CNN.
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