Uncovering the Body, Discovering Ideology: Segregation and Sexual Anxiety in Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream

The discovery that a person could take control of his body, and in the process think powerfully, in other words with and in that body; that is to say, the discovery that the body was capable of thinking as it realised its full potential really excited me, as I confirmed what I had truly experienced for myself.

In their respect for personal experience, their normative emphasis on individual autonomy, and their quiet faith in human potential, these lines succinctly gloss the personal and political values that inform the mature work of Lillian Smith. Author of seven books and numerous essays during her lifetime, co-founder and -editor of a little review that served for ten years as a vital forum for progressive social thought in the South, and the innovative director for over two decades of the first private summer camp for girls in the state of Georgia, Smith was one of the most important white civil rights figures of her time, virtually alone among white Southern “liberals” in condemning gradualism in all of its forms and in calling for an immediate end to institutionalized segregation in the interest of all Southerners, white as well as black. ¹

Born in 1897 in the north Florida community of Jasper, where her father ran a thriving business in naval stores, Smith was raised to accept the privileges conferred upon prosperous white Southerners by the Jim Crow system. When a wartime ban on American shipping brought the collapse of the family business in 1915, the Smiths relocated to their former summer home on Old Screamer Mountain near the northeast Georgia town of Clayton. Over the next ten years, Smith attended classes at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, taught in nearby mountain schools, studied piano at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and taught music for three years at a Methodist girls’ school in China, before returning to Old Screamer in 1925 to assume the directorship of Laurel Falls Camp for girls, which her father had opened in 1920. During this period Smith came to question and ultimately to renounce the genteel racism of her upbringing; in particular, witnessing firsthand the injustices of European colonialism in China helped awaken her to the enormity and extent of racial injustice in her native region. She also seems to have begun a period of sexual exploration that led through a frustrating series of affairs with older men to the most significant and abiding sexual relationship of her life, a partnership of body and soul with fellow Laurel Falls staffer Paula Snelling that was to last over thirty years.

From the 1930s until her death, Smith campaigned tirelessly and uncompromisingly against segregation on a variety of civic and literary fronts, citing its crippling influence on Americans of all races and advocating not only systematic legal reform but the more delicate readjustment of everyday habits of language, thought, and gesture as well. Her literary career began in earnest when she and Snelling launched the magazine known first as Pseudopodia (1936), then as North Georgia Review (1937–1941), and finally as South Today (1942–1945); contributors over the years included W. J. Cash, James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Raper, Sterling Brown, Pauli Murray, and many other artists and intellectuals interested in contributing to regional dialogue and debate. Smith’s first novel, the controversial interracial romance/thriller Strange Fruit (1944), made her famous; she went on to author another novel, three memoirs, two nonfiction studies of race relations, dozens of articles and speeches, and hundreds of public letters, before succumbing to a thirteen-year battle with cancer in 1966. The title of one of her finest speeches best captures the spirit of her life and work: “The Right Way Is Not a Moderate Way.” ²

My epigraph also highlights what I believe to be the key to Smith’s methodology as a writer and social activist: an explicit commitment to the human body as both object and ground of critical thinking. That the body is capable of thinking, and that precisely for this reason it...