A Lillian Smith Reader


Book Description

Bringing together short stories, lectures, essays, op-ed pieces, interviews, andexcerpts from her longer fiction and nonfiction, A Lillian Smith Reader offers thefirst comprehensive collection of her work.




Strange Fruit


Book Description

Prelude and aftermath of a lynching in Georgia, depicting the South's unsolved racial problem.




Killers Of The Dream


Book Description

Author cites the evils of segregation for both white and colored people and gives the history of race relations from pre-Civil War days.




Strange Fruit


Book Description




Lillian Alling


Book Description

In 1926, Lillian Alling, a European immigrant, set out on a journey home from New York. She had little money and no transportation, but plenty of determination. In the three years that followed, Alling walked all the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing the North American continent on foot. Finally, on a make-shift raft, she sailed alone down the Yukon River from Dawson City all the way to the Bering Sea. Lillian Alling has been the subject of novels, plays, epic poems, an opera and more tall tales than can be remembered, but as legendary as she may be, the true story of Lillian Alling has never been told. Lillian Alling: The Journey Home is a collection of personal documents, first-hand recollections, family tales and archival research that provide tantalizing new clues to Lillians story. Smith-Josephy places Lillian firmly in the context of history and among the cast of unique and colourful characters she met along her journey.




Sites of Southern Memory


Book Description

In southern graveyards through the first decades of the twentieth century, the Confederate South was commemorated by tombstones and memorials, in Confederate flags, and in Memorial Day speeches and burial rituals. Cemeteries spoke the language of southern memory, and identity was displayed in ritualistic form -- inscribed on tombs, in texts, and in bodily memories and messages. Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray wove sites of regional memory, particularly Confederate burial sites, into their autobiographies as a way of emphasizing how segregation divided more than just southern landscapes and people. Darlene O'Dell here considers the southern graveyard as one of three sites of memory -- the other two being the southern body and southern memoir -- upon which the region's catastrophic race relations are inscribed. O'Dell shows how Lumpkin, Smith, and Murray, all witnesses to commemorations of the Confederacy and efforts to maintain the social order of the New South, contended through their autobiographies against Lost Cause versions of southern identity. Sites of Southern Memory elucidates the ways in which these three writers joined in the dialogue on regional memory by placing the dead southern body as a site of memory within their texts. In this unique study of three women whose literary and personal lives were vitally concerned with southern race relations and the struggle for social justice, O'Dell provides a telling portrait of the troubled intellectual, literary, cultural, and social history of the American South.




Fit 'n' Faith


Book Description

FIT 'n' FAITH is about lifestyle change. This is a book that will give you tools to transform your entire life - your body, your soul and your spirit. Packed with stories of hope, encouragement, guidance, baby steps and a plethora of recipes, you will be guided on a path to a healthier and more fulfilling life. In Fit 'n' Faith, Lillian Easterly-Smith and Mike Smith draw the reader toward a lifestyle where every facet of life intersects, and where help, hope & health meet. You will want to keep this book close by and refer to it often.




Now is the Time


Book Description

This impassioned plea for tolerance, desegregation, and civil rights advocacy was written by one of the South's leading activists and writers. Originally it was published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation. Reprinted on the fiftieth anniversary of this case, Now Is the Time addresses issues that continue to resonate in today's world. Lillian Smith's writing is at the same time lyrical and deeply infused with polemics. She was no stranger to controversy, for both her nonfiction and her novels were passionately charged. She freely admitted that she used literature as a means for challenging southern cultural norms, particularly in regard to race. She is the author of Killers of the Dream and of two novels, One Hour and the best-selling Strange Fruit, that are thinly veiled autobiography. In Now Is the Time Smith combines the genres of personal essay, confession, propaganda, and documentary to create a moving defense of the inclusive democratic vision she sees as America's true legacy. While broad and visionary in its themes, her book is practical in its approach and its solutions. With wit, intensity, and moral certitude, she answers twenty-five basic questions about race relations, including "Is not education better than legislation?" and "If God wanted the races to mix, why didn't He make us all the same color?" Her commingling of disparate genres makes Now Is the Time more than simply a tract but a document of a nation under the force of tumultuous change. This new edition, with an afterword by Will Brantley, brings back into print a classic that states America's moral commitment to civil rights. Lillian Smith (1897Ð1966) lived in north Georgia and is the author of numerous essays and seven books including Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream. Will Brantley, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, is the author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir and the editor of Conversations with Pauline Kael, both published by the University Press of Mississippi.




Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith


Book Description

Contributions by Tanya Long Bennett, David Brauer, Cameron Williams Crawford, Emily Pierce Cummins, April Conley Kilinski, Justin Mellette, and Wendy Kurant Rollins As a white woman of means living in segregated Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith (1897–1966) surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on “outsiders,” and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith tracks the evolution of Smith from a young girls’ camp director into a courageous artist who could examine controversial topics frankly and critically while preserving a lifelong connection to the north Georgia mountains and people. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South and refused to obsess on an idealized past. Smith took seriously the artist’s role as she saw it—to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith’s perspective cut straight to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she created compelling stories, using carefully chosen literary techniques in powerful ways. With words as her medium, she drew maps of her fictionalized southern places, revealing literally and metaphorically society’s disfunctions. Through carefully crafted points of view, she offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, this volume explores these fascinating aspects of Smith’s writings in an attempt to fill in the picture of this charismatic figure, whose work not only was influential in her time but also is profoundly relevant to ours.




The Civil Rights Reader


Book Description

This anthology of drama, essays, fiction, and poetry presents a thoughtful, classroom-tested selection of the best literature for learning about the long civil rights movement. Unique in its focus on creative writing, the volume also ranges beyond a familiar 1954-68 chronology to include works from the 1890s to the present. The civil rights movement was a complex, ongoing process of defining national values such as freedom, justice, and equality. In ways that historical documents cannot, these collected writings show how Americans negotiated this process--politically, philosophically, emotionally, spiritually, and creatively. Gathered here are works by some of the most influential writers to engage issues of race and social justice in America, including James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. The volume begins with works from the post-Reconstruction period when racial segregation became legally sanctioned and institutionalized. This section, titled "The Rise of Jim Crow," spans the period from Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In the second section, "The Fall of Jim Crow," Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and a chapter from The Autobiography of Malcolm X appear alongside poems by Robert Hayden, June Jordan, and others who responded to these key figures and to the events of the time. "Reflections and Continuing Struggles," the last section, includes works by such current authors as Rita Dove, Anthony Grooms, and Patricia J. Williams. These diverse perspectives on the struggle for civil rights can promote the kinds of conversations that we, as a nation, still need to initiate.