An Inconvenient Woman: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America with Keri Leigh Merritt (St. Martin's Press, 2026)

So, um, I told you before we got on, on this, on the microphone that I really enjoyed this book.

I learned a lot about Lillian Smith, someone who I thought I knew, thought, well, thought I didn't know.

But there were some instances, and we'll, we'll probably bring, I'll probably bring that up in a little later, um, some instances where I realized I may have heard of her before, but just didn't make the connection.

But I want you to start off by, um, letting us know who was she, and how did she defy Jim Crow America?

So Lillian Smith is a white Southerner who was born in 1897, and I argue that she is probably, um, the most, uh, well-known, best-selling author of the 20th century that you've never heard of.

She, uh, her first books, uh, Strange Fruit, sold over two million copies, was translated into almost 30 different languages.

She wrote seven books total and literally, you know, fought for civil rights her entire life.

From beginning in the 1930s, she was calling for desegregation and integration.

And so, you know, she lived a whole bunch of different lives as a educator, uh, as an artist, as a writer, um, and as an activist, really, who, who worked with a lot of prominent Black Americans.

When did you first learn about her?

So I, like you, had not really heard of her, and I made it all the way through graduate school, and of course, I study, I'm a historian who studies primarily the US South, and so I thought I had read all of the Southern writers, especially the women Southern writers, and I got to, you know, my final years of grad school, and I was reading a book, I think I was actually reading a book by my advisor, James Cobb, and came across her name and realized I had never read any of her work.

And I started dabbling in it then.

Of course, I was, you know, finishing other books, but she was always in the back of my mind as like, "This woman deserves to be known." And really what she was saying about racism and white supremacy, um, it was so radical, and she really combined a lot of psychology and psychoanalysis to show how racism actually hurts white people, too, you know, at the psychological level, um, how it really damages, uh, white people's psyches.

And, and, you know, that's something we still don't even talk about today in our discussions of white supremacy usually.

And I think it's a really, really important thing to remind people that, yeah, white supremacy doesn't just hurt, you know, minorities or Black Americans.

It hurts white people, too.

And we have to discuss that in order to hopefully change some people's hearts and minds and, and, you know, bring, bring the nation closer together, bring people closer together.