![]() ![]() Smith was a bomb thrower-a writer, an educator, a social activist, and a native southerner who came from “the best people”-a phrase she used a lot-but who betrayed every value of her social class. Even international fame, it seems, is ephemeral. The book sold three million copies worldwide and was made into a major Broadway play. We are nearly three-quarters of a century past Strange Fruit, her 1944 novel about a doomed interracial love affair in a small south Georgia town. It’s understandable she’s ancient history. Who is Lillian Smith? Unless you’re an academic or a women’s studies major, you’ve probably never heard of her. That is, the corporeal Lillian Smith may have died in 1966, but her words refuse to go away-words that described white privilege before that was a phrase, words that seem newly relevant in an era when cell-phone videos of police brutality perpetrated on black people are impossible to unsee. Like all truly aggravating people, Lillian Smith refuses to go away. Lillian Smith described a culture that turned its sons into mama's boys and taught its daughters to sublimate their sexual hunger with coconut cakes and banana puddings. ![]()
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