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Born in 1897 to a wealthy white family in Jasper Florida (a town near the Georgia border) Lillian Smith was first and foremost a civil rights activist.  As a gifted writer, she devoted her life to the racial justice and equality for women.

Smith began her literary career writing for a journal called Pseudopodia (1936), The North Georgia Review (1937 – 1941) and South Today (1942 – 1945).

In 1944 she became well-known, even notorious for her controversial novel, Strange Fruit, which chronicles the tragic love story between a white man and a black woman.  The story is told through blatant language, sexual undertones and controversial depictions of small southern towns. The novel was banned in Boston for obscenity. Proving that controversy is the best marketing strategy for success, Strange Fruit sold over three million copies and was translated into fourteen languages.

For the next thirty years Lillian Smith wrote about the segregation of blacks and the south’s continual destruction of the black community.  She also continued to write, as she did in Strange Fruit, about the poisonous effects this segregation had on whites.

She was a regular contributor to the Saturday Review, Life, New Republic, Nation, and the New York Times.  In 1968, the Southern Regional Council’s “Lillian Smith Book Awards” was created to honor artistic and scholarly books that contribute to a better understanding of human rights and other social issues.

Lillian Smith died in 1966 in Atlanta, Georgia.

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