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Lillian Smith (author) Quotes

Lillian Eugenia Smith was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known most prominently for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit . A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions virtually guaranteed social ostracism. Wikipedia  

✵ 12. December 1897 – 28. September 1966
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Strange Fruit
Lillian Smith (author)
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Famous Lillian Smith (author) Quotes

“She stood at the gate, waiting; behind her the swamp, in front of her Colored Town, beyond it, all Maxwell. Tall and slim and white in the dusk, the girl stood there, hands on the picket gate.”

Lillian Smith (author) book Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit (1944) First lines

“Segregation is evil; there is no pattern of life which can dehumanize men as can the way of segregation.”

Lillian Smith (author)

Acceptance speech for the Charles S. Johnson Award at Fisk University in 1966

“The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.”

Lillian Smith (author)

Killers of the Dream https://books.google.com/books/about/Killers_of_the_Dream.html?id=fvab8gnFH_kC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=snippet&q=%22There%20is%20a%20return%20journey%20to%20anguish%20that%20few%20of%20us%20are%20released%20from%20making.%22&f=false, Chapter 1: "When I Was a Child", pp 25-26

“We in America – and men across the earth – have trapped ourselves with that word equality, which is inapplicable to the genus man. I wish we would forget it. Stop its use in our country: Let the communists have it. It isn’t fit for men who fling thei…r dreams across the skies. It is fit only for a leveling down of mankind.”

Lillian Smith (author)

"Killers of the Dream" Lillian Smith

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