Sex & Love A Forgotten Voice
Written by Christopher McCaa
The Southern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains is a land where time passes slowly. A place where one can sense the weight of its melancholic history that hovers over the time-worn peaks and settles the verdant valleys below.
This is God's country. A country where the values of the past still govern the countenance of its inhabitants and social change is slow to take root.
So I was surprised to learn that over 60 years ago, deep in the “blue hills”, a single piece of progressive literature emerged challenging the social establishment of mid-20th century America.
Through a 1944 novel entitled “Strange Fruit”, Lillian Eugenia Smith fanned the flames of controversy through a bi-racial love story that served as a subtle, yet powerful indictment of the day's social order, an order rooted in racial inequality and injustice.
In the novel, which would become a best-seller, a young white man returns from World War I to the fictitious small town of Maxwell, Ga.
It is there where the young man, named Tracy Deen, fueled by a rebellious spirit, falls in love with an attractive, light-skinned black woman.
The book's taboo subject matter caused a firestorm of controversy. It was deemed “obscene” and banned in Massachusetts, and for a brief period the U.S. Postal Service placed a moratorium on its advertisement in newspapers and magazines. But that was quickly reversed by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
These efforts to silence Smith's message of tolerance and equality proved futile. Millions of Americans read the tale of inter-racial love, and it sparked a much-needed dialogue in the American South during the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.
Smith was born in 1897 into a relatively affluent family in Florida. Following business woes, her father relocated the family to the small mountain town of Clayton, Ga..
It was there he owned property on which he maintained the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls. Smith would later operate the camp and use it as a vehicle to espouse her progressive social views, but it was not until a trip to China that these beliefs would take hold.
Smith accepted an opportunity to direct the music program at a Methodist school for girls in Huzhou, China and while there, witnessed countless injustices. It was through this experience Smith's social conscience was awakened and became the driving force behind her life and work.
Upon her return to the United States, Smith turned her newly-found conviction into action against the pervasive racial injustice and oppression synonymous with the South at that time.
After her father's death, she took the helm at the Laurel Falls Camp, turning the camp's focus towards socially progressive thought and education.
Along with camp counselor Paula Snelling, Smith published a magazine called Pseudopodia in 1936. The quarterly wasted no time in breaking new ground by publishing writers of all races, giving a voice to the voiceless fighting the uphill battle for racial and social equality.
A collection of Smith's essays confronting racism in the South, “Killers of the Dream”, was published in 1949. Initially, it was received coolly by critics, but it has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, recognized as an influential literary work in both style and substance.
Although the heavy hand of time was tightening its grip on the aging Smith, she continued to champion her ideals, meeting with influential black leaders in the mid-1950s. By this time, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, harnessing the momentum of those like Smith who championed the cause before the cause was even a reality.
Two of her last works before her death in 1966, “The Journey”and “Now is the Time”, chronicled some of the events surrounding the ruling of Brown v. the Board of Education, which ended segregation in the nation's schools.
Today, her groundbreaking novel “Strange Fruit” is published in 15 languages, carrying on Smith's message of tolerance and justice throughout the world.
A message reminding all of the long road to social equality and the toll paid in blood, toil and tears by all those who paved it.
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