#85: Not Ready to Make Nice
Lillian Smith was the most radical writer you\u2019ve never heard of\u2014a novelist, essayist, civil rights activist, and general bomb thrower, as Tracy Thompson describes her in \u201cSouthern Cassandra,\u201d an essay from our Spring issue. Born in 1897, Smith grew up among what she called \u201cthe best people\u201d\u2014the wealthy, southern aristocracy\u2014but she betrayed every value of her social class until the day she died in 1966. She pushed for immediate desegregation in an era when the notion made most white people balk, drew a straight, damning line between race and sex, and argued that there was no way to untangle the rationale of Jim Crow from the supposed need to protect the purity of white women. Nobody listened to her at the time. But as Thompson argues, maybe if we had we\u2019d be a little better off.
Go beyond the episode:
- Read Tracy Thompson\u2019s essay, \u201cSouthern Cassandra\u201d
- Watch the trailer for Breaking the Silence, a documentary about Smith
- Visit some of Smith\u2019s haunts on the Southern Literary Trail
- Check out Smith\u2019s books: Strange Fruit, Killers of the Dream, How Am I to Be Heard, or for a taste of all three, A Lillian Smith Reader
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