“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt
In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes even to themselves. Take, for example, Lillian Smith, author of the bestselling (and banned) 1944 Strange Fruit, a novel about interracial love. Born into a white Florida family at the turn of the century, Smith dissented against Jim Crow. She was, indeed, An Inconvenient Woman, the title of a new biography about her by today’s guest Keri Leigh Merritt.
So why, I asked Merritt, isn’t Lillian Smith better known? Part of the answer is bound up in Smith’s own uncomfortable critique of white supremacy. She insisted that Jim Crow damaged white people, that its shame and guilt did immense psychological injury to its supposed beneficiaries. So this inconvenient woman pushed better known white southern liberals like Ralph McGill or Hodding Carter leftwards, calling them out for refusing to support integration long after the Brown decision.
Smith had quite a life. She lived openly with her partner Paula Snelling in Clayton, Georgia, ran a girls’ camp for twenty-five years, wrote many books (including what Merritt calls her masterpiece, Killers of the Dream in 1949) and was the first white magazine editor in the South to publish Black writers like Pauli Murray. Her FBI file ran to 143 pages, making her a particular inconvenience to J. Edgar Hoover and his goons.
Most of all, she stayed in rural Georgia. She could have escaped to Greenwich Village or Berkeley like other misfits. Instead she remained a perpetual thorn in the southern conscience. Her brother, who ran the county, had kept her safe until he left office in 1955. After that, one fire burned down her library, destroying decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts with it. And still she stayed. In today’s America, Keri Leigh Merritt concludes, this inconvenient woman offers us a timely reminder of what it takes to be a dissident.
Further Reading:
• An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America by Keri Leigh Merritt (St. Martin’s Press, September 29, 2026), with a foreword by the Rev. Dr. William Barber II.
• Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) by Lillian Smith — the novel that made her famous, and the book Merritt rates highest. Both still in print from the University of Georgia Press, which also publishes A Lillian Smith Reader.
• Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) — Merritt’s first book, winner of the Bennett Wall Award and the President’s Book Award.
• Pseudopodia, later The North Georgia Review and finally South Today — the magazine Smith and Paula Snelling ran, and the first white Southern magazine to publish Black writers. Every issue is online through Piedmont University Library.
• Earlier on Keen On: Andrew Curran on how the Enlightenment invented race, and Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass — both raised in this conversation.
Five Takeaways
• The Bestseller Nobody Remembers. Lillian Smith may be the most successful American author of the twentieth century you have never heard of. Strange Fruit appeared in 1944, told the story of a love affair between a white man and a Black woman, ended in a lynching, sold in the millions, was translated into some thirty languages and became a Broadway play. It was also banned — in Boston, in Detroit, informally by booksellers across the country who simply declined to stock it, and formally in the US mail until Smith asked Eleanor Roosevelt to intervene and Roosevelt got the president to lift it. Merritt’s explanation for the forgetting has three parts. Smith argued that white supremacy psychologically damaged white people, which is not a comfortable thesis for anyone. She refused to spare white liberals, pushing Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter leftwards all her life and naming them for failing to back integration long after Brown. And she was a woman living openly with another woman, which did the rest.
• How She Was Made. Two episodes from childhood, both in the book. Her father Calvin, a devout Methodist who had married into money and lost it when the First World War ruined his turpentine business, once invited an entire chain gang to Christmas dinner — not the guards, the prisoners, murderers and rapists among them — and the Smith children cooked for days. Then there was Julie. A Black family moved to Jasper, Florida, and the town’s white women noticed that one of the children looked white; the girl was removed from her home and placed with the Smiths. Lillian shared a room with her and came to love her as a sister. One day Julie was gone, returned to her own family, because Julie was Black. What that taught Lillian, Merritt says, is that race had no bearing on what a person was. And the culture she grew up in was absolute: the first time Smith ate a meal at a table with Black people she went outside and vomited — not from disgust but from terror at the scale of the taboo she had broken.
• She Stayed. The decision that makes her remarkable. She could have left for Greenwich Village, as the South’s misfits generally did. Instead she stayed in Clayton, in the north-eastern corner of Georgia, in country that was supposed to be the most hostile place imaginable — and built, in that very rural place, something like a gay and lesbian community around her. Her brother Frank effectively ran the county and kept her and Paula safe while he held office; when he left in 1955 the retaliation began. A fire destroyed her library: decades of correspondence, research and manuscripts, gone. More followed, one set at eight separate points of her house on Old Screamer Mountain. She stayed anyway, partly because she loved it and partly because the sadness of the place was, she thought, artistically generative. And she did not believe laws alone could end racism: art — writing, music, painting — was what changed hearts.
• The Network. Smith was not isolated, and the list of her friends is startling. W. E. B. Du Bois from the 1930s. Pauli Murray, whose first paycheck ca...
