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Quote by Lillian Smith

“Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.”

Quote by Lillian Smith

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Lillian Smith
Lillian Smith

Lillian Smith was an American writer known for her novels and essays that often addressed racial issues in the American South. Born on December 12, 1897, she spent much of her life in the rural town of Decatur, Georgia. Smith's work, marked by its emotional depth and social commentary, includes the novel 'Strange Fruit' and the essay collection 'On the Road to Jim Crow'. She passed away on September 28, 1966. more

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