An Inconvenient Woman: Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

“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 Univ