Killers of the Dream

Author: Lillian Smith
Title: Killers of the Dream
Publication: Norton, 1949

Description:

First edition. Near Fine book in a Near Fine dust jacket. Small price sticker on the back inside cover.

Lillian Smith was an important—and for her time unusually outspoken—white Southern writer, educator, and social critic. She is best known for writing about **racism, segregation, gender, sexuality, and the psychological effects of Jim Crow**.

### Who was she?

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born in **1897 in Jasper, Florida**, and spent much of her adult life in **Clayton, Georgia**, where her family operated Laurel Falls Girls Camp. She directed the camp for roughly 25 years. Rather than being simply a summer camp, she turned it into a place where young people could discuss literature, politics, religion, and social problems.

She also spent time studying music and briefly worked as a Methodist missionary and music teacher in **China** in the 1920s. Her longtime partner was **Paula Snelling**, a school counselor who worked with her at the camp and on her intellectual projects.

### Why is she significant?

What makes Smith particularly remarkable is **when** she was making these arguments.

Beginning in the 1930s, she openly condemned racial segregation and Jim Crow. She argued that segregation wasn't merely an unfair political system—it damaged the psychological and moral development of **both Black and white Southerners**. She was one of the first prominent white Southern writers to make such a forceful argument publicly.

She wasn't a distant observer, either. She traveled throughout the South talking with people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and created a magazine, initially called *Pseudopodia*, that gave Southern writers—including Black writers—a forum.

### Her two most important books

**1. *Strange Fruit* (1944) **

This is probably her most famous work. It's a novel about an **interracial relationship in the segregated South**. At the time, simply depicting interracial love this openly was extraordinarily controversial.

The book became a national bestseller but also provoked fierce condemnation. Its subject matter and language led to bans in some places. Smith consequently became nationally known—and locally reviled by some white Southerners.

**2. *Killers of the Dream* (1949) **

This is arguably the more intellectually important book. It's part memoir, part psychological analysis, and part social criticism.

Smith asks, essentially: **How does a society teach people to accept racism even when racism contradicts their own moral instincts? **

She connects racial segregation with childhood, religion, sexuality, family life, and ideas about gender. Her argument is that racism isn't sustained only through laws and violence; it gets reproduced through the beliefs and emotional habits people learn from childhood.

The book was revised and expanded in 1961 and remains one of her most enduring works.

### Her relationship to the Civil Rights Movement

Smith was an important **pre–Civil Rights Movement** critic of segregation. She corresponded with **Martin Luther King Jr.** and strongly supported his work. After the Supreme Court's 1954 *Brown v. Board of Education* decision, she celebrated the decision and wrote *Now Is the Time* (1955), calling on Southern communities to comply with it.

Interestingly, Smith sometimes criticized even other white Southern liberals for moving too slowly. She believed ending segregation needed to be the central objective, rather than simply making segregation somewhat less harsh.

### A useful way to think about her

If you're encountering Smith in a class or reading *Killers of the Dream*, I'd put her in this intellectual lineage:

**Lillian Smith → James Baldwin → Martin Luther King Jr. → later writers examining the psychological and cultural foundations of racism**

Smith's distinctive contribution was to ask not just **"What is wrong with segregation?"** but **"What does segregation do to the human personality?"**

That's why *Killers of the Dream* can feel surprisingly modern. She understood racism as something embedded in **family structures, childhood education, sexuality, religion, language, and unconscious habits**, rather than merely as a collection of discriminatory laws.

She died in **1966**, at age 68. She was later inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement (1999) and Georgia Writers Hall of Fame (2000).

Seller ID: 86229

Subject: Fiction, Literature, Literature, Fiction