Keri Leigh Merritt in conversation with Maurice Hobson | An Inconvenient Woman

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.
A Cappella Books and the Auburn Avenue Research Library welcome author and historian Keri Leigh Merritt in honor of her new book, “An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America.” The author will appear in conversation with Maurice J. Hobson, professor and chair of Africana Studies at Georgia State University.
This event is free and open to the public; copies of “An Inconvenient Woman” will be available for purchase.
About the Book
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Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, “An Inconvenient Woman” is the definitive account of a woman who defied all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.