An Inconvenient Woman: Keri Leigh Merritt in conversation with Joe Crespino

Join the Georgia Center for the Book to celebrate the release of An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America, by Keri Leigh Merritt. Keri will be in conversation with Joe Crespino.

This event will be in the Auditorium of Decatur Library, on the Ground Floor. Due to our security protocols, guests must enter the building through the upper level, rear doors, and then take the elevator to "G." Elevators open at 6:30. Please arrive early to ensure extra time for security.

About the Book: 

A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history. Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and then a magazine, devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence. Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966. Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality.

About the Author:

Keri Leigh Merritt, Ph.D. is a historian and writer. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, won both the Bennett Wall Award from the Southern Historical Association as well as the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association. She has co-edited several other books, including After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, and her articles have appeared in outlets from Smithsonian and Aeon to The Hill and CNN.

About the Conversation Partner:

Joseph Crespino is the Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the twentieth century United States, and of the history of the American South since Reconstruction. His research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education. In 2014, he served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tubingen, and he has been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Crespino has published three books, has co-edited a collection of essays, and has written for academic journals as well as for popular forums such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal. His most recent book, Atticus Finch: The Biography—Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon, was published in 2018 by Basic Books. Among his current book projects, Crespino is writing the chapters covering United States history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for the textbook America: A Narrative History, co-written with David Emory Shi, Daina Ramey Berry, and Amy Murrell Taylor, published by W.W. Norton.