Lillian Smith grew up near Georgia's Okeefenokee Swamp, studied music at the Peabody Conservatory, worked as a teacher in China, and settled on a northern Georgia mountain called Old Screamer, for many years operating a girls' camp with her partner Paula Snelling. Sensitive and creative from an early age, Smith was deeply struck by "the bleak rituals" of race segregation, and her career in letters focused largely on the psychic roots and effects of racism. From the 1940s she spoke and wrote on behalf of the civil rights movement, addressing not only fellow "intelligent liberals" of the South but casting segregation as "the most conspicuous characteristic of our entire white culture." Reaction to her views ranged from press barbs to the torching (twice) by arsonists of her home and manuscripts. Unfazed, she organized multiracial gatherings of artists and thinkers on Old Screamer, helped cultivate new, progressive black and white voices in her literary magazine South Today, and produced works such as Killers of the Dream (1949), a fascinating analysis of race prejudice.
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