Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South: A Biography (review)
Anne C. Loveland's book may well be the biography that Lillian Smith deservesÂ— but it is not, probably, the one she desired. For Smith (1897-1966), author of the controversial novel Strange Fruit (1944), wished passionately to be remembered as a writer and thinker of literary merit, "a creative writer, not a propagandist nor a reformer nor a person primarily interested in public affairs." Loveland, however, in her carefully researched and gracefully articulated volume, records most thoroughly the story of "the nice little lady who did so much to help Negroes." In spite of this biographer's noteworthy resolution, in her opening comments, to avoid perpetuating such a stereotype, she nevertheless approaches it in her conclusion: "Regrettably, [Smith's] philosophical thinking was generally derivative and superficial and her literary effort unexceptional. Her primary significance lies in the role she played in the southern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s." Although the reader of this statement may naturally be pleased that Loveland (unlike some critics of minor writers) has not offered inflated claims about her subject's work, he or she may also wonder, in this case, whether the biographer has listened quite faithfully enough to Smith's assessment of her own accomplishments. Indeed, most often in this biography Loveland is a good, objective observer of Lillian Smith's private and public activities. The book's subtitle refers not only to Smith's struggle to end segregation but also to her considerable disagreements with other white southern liberals such as Ralph McGiIl and Hodding Carter about the means for reaching their goal. Although Loveland approves and emphasizes Smith's very broad definition of segregation ("a psychological mechanism used by men to shut out [any] alien or frightening ideas, people, or events"), the biographer also recognizes that Smith sometimes let "personal animosity"