As Mark Albertin and I drove the bumpy track through the woods back down Screamer Mountain, headed for Clayton, we were thinking the same thing: How had we never heard of Lillian Smith?
At her beautifully preserved Laurel Falls Camp for girls, we discovered the history of a Southern white woman whose courage, eloquence and prophetic vision helped end the Jim Crow culture in which she had been raised, freeing Black and white Southerners from a system that had cost Blacks their full humanity and whites their moral integrity.
Born in 1897, Lillian Smith lived the happy life of a Southern girl. She had two good parents who loved her, five brothers and three sisters, good friends to play with, church picnics under thick old oaks, and iced lemonade to drink from a gourd for a dipper. She had swamps to explore, railroad tracks to walk and books to read.
Lillian spent her childhood in Jasper, Fla., just south of the Okefenokee Swamp. Her family was comfortably prosperous, well-educated, deeply Christian, humane — and hopelessly entangled in the customs and mores of the Jim Crow South.
Then word came from an orphanage, and after whispered conversations and meetings with Lillian’s parents, light-skinned Julie was returned to “colored town.” Lillian asked her mother for the reason. “Because,” her mother explained, “Julie is a colored girl.” Lillian didn’t understand. But she is the same little girl she was yesterday, she objected. “Yes, Julie is a nice child, but she is colored. A colored child cannot live in our home … You are too young to understand.”
“Yes, I was too young to understand,” Lillian wrote years later. “But I was not too young to feel the pain of separation from a little friend whom I never saw again, not too young to make an identification with her shame and bewilderment, not too young to begin to doubt my parents and the sincerity of their religion. I knew they had done something that did not fit with their teachings, with what they said they held dear. I could not put this into words. I was too young, too inexperienced with the vocabulary of economic necessities, with the jargon of folkways, mores, slow change, which can dull the imagination so successfully ….”
The incident changed the way young Lillian saw her world. “When people talked of love and Christianity, I knew they did not mean it. This was a hard thing for a child to learn. As I grew older, as more experiences collected around this faithless day, I began to see myself and others like me as crippled people.” In separating the races and seeing one as inferior, both races had been crippled and deformed.
For the full article, pick up a copy of our August/September 2024 issue on stands.
Seen in the August/September 2024 issue of Augusta magazine.
