BOOKS REVIEW: An Inconvenient Woman

Written by SP Editor

An Inconvenient Woman. Review by Mike Miller.

The cover of this Keri Leigh Merritt book describes it as “The extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America.” It is that and more.

Paula Snelling

One of its stories is the long lesbian relationship between Smith and Paula Snelling. They met when Snelling was a camp counselor in the Georgia Appalachian Laurel Falls Camp, and Lillian was its director. They discovered common interests in literature, and became co-editors of South Today, a courageous literary review and anti-segregation publication addressed to a southern audience. As their relationship deepened intellectually and spiritually, they also discovered a sexual dimension—which they kept secret for most of their lifetimes though many observers speculated on it. Snelling described it as a “spiritual and intellectual comradeship…so subtle, deep and beautiful that neither of us likes to talk much about it.”

Merritt sensitively portrays the ups and downs of the relationship. Smith gained the greater recognition. Snelling was the associate, assistant, partner, aide. When Smith become ill with an off-and-on again cancer that, after 10 years, finally, killed her, Snelling was the partner who held things together. At times Smith became angry with her because she seemed more interested in being a support person than expressing her own talent as a writer. Other times, Smith blamed herself and expressed guilt for suppressing Snelling’s gifts and “struck out at you”. Merritt describes it as “recurring, cruel treatment of her partner…Her words often ranged from insensitive to deliberately hurtful, sometimes even bordering on abusive.” But they were “quickly followed by a kind of love-bombing, as Lillian laid thick praise on Paula.”

Merritt captures the intricacies of the relationship and weaves its story into others the book tells. The Lillian and Paula team carried their jointly edited magazine South Today through times when others might have abandoned the enterprise. Despite Smith’s urgings, Snelling remained in a support role in their work on the magazine.

South Today’s demise came in part with the publication of Strange Fruit, the novel that made Smith famous. The dynamic between her and Snelling came into play. Smith sought to convince Snelling to take over full editorship of the magazine. Snelling declined, “allowing her self-doubt to torpedo her chances of sole editorship.”

In writing about the two, Merritt digs deeply into the human psyche. She is at home with Freud and other psychologists.

South Today

Over the roughly 10-year period 1936-1945 of its existence, South Today (it had earlier names as well) took Southern segregation and racism head-on. It developed a loyal readership and national reputation. Describing their work, the two said, “We are not interested in perpetuating that senile fetishism of the Old South which has so long gripped our section. We believe that the saline state which befell Lot’s wife did not come by divine whim. That petrification follows inevitably from looking too exclusively at the past; at past glories no less than at past orgies.”

The magazine’s contributors were both Black and White, and included well-known writers as well as providing an opening for unknowns.

Merritt writes, “Despite placing the original sin of Jim Crow firmly on the shoulders of rich whites, Lillian did not let poor whites off the hook for the current state of race relations.” She quotes Smith: “The poor white put his mind on [Jim Crow]…[which] eased something inside the poor white, eased the feeling he has that he’d lost something, made him almost believe he had found it.”

“The two women had been sent,” Merritt writes, “to pull the wool from the eyes of their own people.” Their continuing relationship weaves in and out of most of the book’s chapters.

Strange Fruit

Lillian Smith is best known for her novel (and later play) Strange Fruit. It took her seven years to write. Merritt tells us, “She described it as ‘a story about human beings and their relationships with each other.’ [B]ut it was about far more than the sociopolitical: it was psychological, examining the lives of children who grow up under white supremacy, 'who are forced to bind their feelings, their love and their fear, their hate and their dreams to this pattern.’ This focus on how segregation emotionally harms white children, too, would continue to be a major theme of Lil’s work throughout her life. Strange Fruit would not only make Lillian Smith famous throughout America; it would also make her infamous.”

The play, though controversial in its production, was powerful as well. One of Smith’s happy memories about it was “Paul Robeson…saying he ‘wished every American could see this moving and prophetic play…’ Writing about Robeson’s deep feelings for the play, she said Robeson broke down in tears, openly weeping. ‘…We were all crying, whites and blacks together, holding each other’s hands, sometimes suddenly putting our arms around the person next to us. It was so beautiful, so real, so genuine, so quietly dramatic.’

Despite a later parting of the ways on politics—Robeson in the Communist left orbit, and Smith joining the Board of the anti-Communist Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), “when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) accused Robeson of being a communist for stating that Black Americans would not fight the Soviet Union in yet another war, Lillian rose to defend him. Stating that she wished the white press would leave the Robeson alone, she gave one of the most empathetic pleas from any white writer of the time, saying, “Communism may not have been the best answer, ‘but we white folks have not yet given Negroes in the South a better one. Until we do, I wish we had the grace to keep our mouths shut.”

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was also deeply moved by the play. She continued as a Smith fan, reading her books, listening to her speeches, and writing positively about both. When Smith needed help from a person of power, Roosevelt was on-call, writing for financial support, to break log-jams in publisher’s offices and otherwise a fan you could count on. The relationship between the two lasted through Mrs. Roosevelt’s life.

Killers of The Dream

Smith’s major non-fiction book was Killers of The Dream. Merritt describes it as “a candid critique of racism and segregation, delving into the psychological and moral contradictions of white identity…[its] themes were the evils and abuses Lillian had been writing about since the 1930s: poverty, ignorance, political bargains struck (between North and South or rich and poor whites), and the timidity of white liberals, especially the white Southerners who remained ‘haunted’ by their own pasts as well as the sins of their forefathers.

In discussing Killers, Merritt digs deeply into what she considers Smith’s positive psychological insights, discussing Southern wealthy white children raised by Black household employees who were not their mothers. This “naturally led to psychological problems in the children. Describing their feelings of rejection, Lillian was describing what psychologists would come to call attachment disorder. In its most severe forms, attachment disorders cause a variety of symptoms: unpredictable behavior, anger and aggression, extreme difficulty in forming emotional connections with others, and lack of trust—all hallmarks of white supremacy. Killers of a Dream proposed that white males were psychologically harmed most by this practice, and their propensity to have relationships with Black women was a Freudian search for their own mothers.

“Killers also connected white repression and hate back to evangelical Christianity, a subject Lil knew very well. In their almost Puritanical upbringing, young Lillian and her siblings were not allowed to enjoy many of life’s earthly pleasures…Killers framed the main sins of the South as ‘three ghost relationships’ human connections at the intersection of ‘race-sex-sin’ that were mired in pain. Revealing how Lillian understood connection and separation, these ghost relationships were rooted in slavery and Jim Crow…, haunting the minds of people (particularly well-to-do white Southerners) psychologically trapped by their own histories.”

Power and Nonviolence

Merritt reports Smith’s deep commitment to nonviolent activism. Smith wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., “I cannot begin to tell you how effective it seems to me…It is the right way. Only through persuasion, love, goodwill, and firm nonviolent resistance can the change take place in our South.” She was excited by the student sit-ins in 1960, and became a supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC/“Snick”), as well as of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).

Merritt shares this commitment to nonviolence, and agrees with Smith’s indictment of “people from outside the South who came to the region only after much of the difficult grassroots work has been successful.”

Both of them place too much hope on what nonviolence can accomplish. Did it speak to the hearts and minds of southerners? Subsequent voting records of Deep South members of Congress don’t indicate that. Nor do local voting patterns except in those places where the Black vote made the difference between who wins and loses elections.

“Instead of a genuine belief in Gandhi nonviolence, these activists (people from outside the South who came to the region only after much of the difficult grassroots work had been successful), used nonviolence as a tactic—a means to an end of coercing the federal government into acquiescence.

“The ‘intruders’ use of violence left the most vulnerable Black southerners to deal with the white rage backlash long after they had fled to the safety of their own homes in far-away places. For nonviolence to work, Lillian believed, whites who had been taught hatred and prejudice since birth needed time to psychologically process new, incremental changes in society. Then civil rights activists could move on to more progressive measures without as much violent aftermath.”

Merritt quotes Smith: “…[T]ime is needed for many to bend physical and mental muscles in new ways. And perhaps we should remember that it takes time to recover from drug addiction; and many whites are addicted to White Supremacy.”

Merritt then confuses me. She quotes a letter Smith wrote to King in 1964 that urged him to try to keep “‘northern do-gooders (sincere and honest as they may be)’ from interfering with the Movement. ‘Tell them…to use some of these methods in their own northern communities’ Lil sagely advised, knowing how dangerous that situation would make things for the CRM [civil rights movement] workers, and how it could potentially undermine their primary goals through bad press and white rage.”

I assume she’s addressing the use of violence, though that is not clear. Who was violent in the Deep South civil rights movement in 1964, or before? It wasn’t southern or northern civil rights workers. It was white southern state governments (police, sheriffs and the whole law enforcement system) and private racists who shot and killed civil rights workers and local people active in The Movement.

In Holmes County, MS, local people—longtime residents, not southern or northern civil rights workers—were armed. In Holmes County, Mississippi, Hartman Turnbow came out of his home shooting when the KKK tried to burn it down.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staff workers who drove out into plantations to talk with day laborers, tenant farmers and sharecroppers carried guns in their cars in self-defense. They never attacked anyone, nor, for that matter, were there occasions where they needed to shoot in self-defense.

The emphasis on the psychology of racism in Lillian Smith’s thinking makes the economic and political interests in maintaining segregation and denying Blacks voting rights and economic justice secondary, even as they are acknowledged. Somehow nonviolence is imagined to achieve conversion in the minds of both white power holders and everyday people. It didn’t. The 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott only accomplished its specific goal of desegregating the city’s buses as a result of a Federal Court order. A year-long nonviolent boycott did not accomplish the task.

Merritt: “By 1965, the CRM was evolving in new directions, often breaking with Gandhi tactics of nonviolence…Lillian believed that nonviolence was the only way to achieve civil rights…But as the Movement changed, and as it became more radical, more socialist, and more militant, it seemed as if Lil could not keep up with its evolution…This abandonment of nonviolence eventually brought her into conflict with the younger generation whom she had always worked so hard to support.”

Why do “radical," “socialist” or “militant” mean “abandonment of nonviolence”?

More “socialist”? I know of no civil rights organization in the south or north that adopted a socialist program. In fact, M.L. King was, guardedly to be sure, favorable to socialist ideas. Snick people, who were, never made a public thing of it. Most CORE people weren’t.

Who abandoned nonviolence? I was on Snick’s staff from 1962 to the end of 1966. During that period, no one I know of advocated violence—i.e. the deliberate use of violent tactics to accomplish Black liberation goals. They did support self-defense, but not in opposition to nonviolence. No one in Snick ever suggested showing up at a voter registrar’s office with a gun; that would have been insane, and its advocates would have been ignored.

The country’s record from 1955 (year of the Montgomery Bus Boycott) to 1965 (year that Congress seated the Mississippi white delegation despite a challenge from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) based on the fact that Blacks in any significant number still couldn’t vote in the State) was, to say the least, not a very good one:

Full employment legislation, one of the two goals of the 1963 March on Washington (the other being a voting rights bill) was quietly shelved to be later revived in legislation that lacked enforcement or significant funding and therefore did little to address the problem of its title.
School desegregation, ordered by the Supreme Court in 1954, led to massive resistance and later abandonment of public schools by whites who could afford to send their children to private “academies”.
It took years to finally get Justice Department enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. But election of Southern Black to Congress was not, and could not have been, a sufficient show of strength for racial and economic justice for The Movement to pack up its suitcases and call it a success.

SNCC, Merritt writes, went “from an unstructured grassroots movement of young people into a political organization run by professional activists.” That’s a confusing way to describe the transformation of SNCC. The sit-in and Freedom Ride students of 1960 and 1961 wondered what it would take to involve adults in The Movement. With a letter of introduction from the highly respected Ella Baker (one of the people admired by Hellman) to her list of contacts in Mississippi, Bob Moses interviewed dozens of local Blacks among that small number who were willing to be public supporters of civil rights. They overwhelmingly told him that voting rights was what would move them from being supportive bystanders (of nonviolent direct action) to active participants. That led to a significant shift in SNCC strategy.

At its 1962 conference, the representatives of the Black college campuses who constituted SNCC’s executive committee voted to support both voting rights/registration and direct action. In the next year, the campus groups largely evaporated. SNCC grew from a handful of staff people to over a hundred, then over 200 at its peak. Direct action activities evaporated.

The organization itself became an organization of voting rights workers, most of whom were former students who dropped out of school to devote full-time to voting rights activity. Merritt calls them “employees”, which is something of a euphemism because the employees were the members of the organization.

SNCC had become an organization of, at its peak strength, 225 professional radicals who elected their own leaders to an executive board and paid themselves $10.00 a week (when the organization had the money to do so) to do full-time voting rights work. It was not “more centralized under a singular leader;” it was quite the opposite: dramatically decentralized. To call these staff people “SNCC’s employees” is, at best, confusing. They employed themselves.

For about four years, I was a “northern staff” person who was responsible for, amongst other things, fundraising to support SNCC’s work in the south. I had counterparts in places like Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and a few other heavily populated metropolitan areas where “Friends of SNCC” raised money for the work in the south.

You Should Read This Book

I’m going to read it again. It has mistakes, and I disagree with the view that nonviolence properly understood and practiced can bring about change in the hearts and minds of the powerful and their grassroots supporters so that social transformation will follow. At the same time, we ignore psychological insights and social questions that our era needs to discuss and debate at our peril. I have many friends who wonder why MAGA people vote “against their interests.” They don’t. They vote for a different set of interests.

At least some of what makes Donald Trump popular, and MAGA hold most of its members despite Trump abandoning many of their interests, is to be found in Merritt’s discussion of Smith’s thinking.

That alone is worth the price of admission.

Mike Miller directs ORGANIZE Training Center.