
          The 1982 Lillian Smith Book Awards
          By StaffStaff
          Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 7-10
          
          The Southern Regional Council's annual Lillian Smith Awards
Luncheon was held in Atlanta in November as a part of the SRC's annual
meeting. The awards recognize the year's best fiction and non-fiction
books about the South. The 1982 winners were John Ehle for The
Winter People (New York: Harper and Row) and Harry Ashmore for
Hearts and Minds: A History of Racism from Roosevelt to
Reagan (New York: McGraw-Hill). Following are excerpts from
remarks at the luncheon.
          
            Mary Frances Deriner
          
          Lillian Smith, Georgia thinker, activist, author and Southern
Regional Council Life Member, died September 28, 1966, concluding a
career of a Southerner who said that she never wanted to write about
race, just about people. The Southern Regional Council created the
Lillian Smith Awards shortly after Miss Smith's death to honor her
life, her work, and her commitment, and to recognize in her name those
who, like her, have contributed to our understanding of or given us
new insights into the Southern region, its people, its strengths, its
problems and its weaknesses.
          The Lillian Smith Awards are given annually. Five judges receive
from fifty to seventy-five entries and judge them seeking a certain
quality which is something like the Supreme Court's definition of
pornography--you can't define it, but you know it when you've seen
it. The committee receives many good, even fine, works each year. This
is a heartening sign to those of us interested in the Southern
arts. But only a few of them every year have that undefinable quality
which makes them Lillian Smith Award winners. Both of this year's
winners struck us immediately as having that quality, that relevance
and humanity in abundance. This is a quality which brings to mind and
keeps alive the life and work of Lillian Smith.
          Lillian Smith's fame came with her first novel, Strange
Fruit, a small town story of a tragic black-white love
affair. It sold three million copies and was translated into fifteen
languages. It made her a spokesperson to the world on Southern sins of
race. Her Killers of the Dream, a psychological
analysis of the Southern system of separation became a classic of
sectional understanding and a ringing demand for the liberation of
Southerners, black and white, male and female, rich and poor from the
bonds of segregation and sexism. Although Lillian Smith wrote many
more books, I think that Killers of the Dream is her
best, the one which spells out most specifically and clearly what I
call Lillian Smith's "whole ball of wax" theory: the theory that the
Southern system, dominated as it is, and was when she was writing, by
wealthy white males, invariably discriminates against those who are
black or female or poor or a combination of the above. And the system,
said Miss Smith, would work only so long as those wealthy white males
could keep women and blacks and poor folks from joining forces with
one another.
          
            Tony Dunbar
          
          John Ehle couldn't be with us today. Last year's Lillian Smith book
award winner for fiction was Pat Conroy, who was out of the
country. John Ehle, his publisher tells us, is in the country and it's
reassuring to know that there are still places in the South so far
back that even someone as persistent as Mary Francis Derfner can't dig
them out.
          Those of you from North Carolina may know the man. He has been a
writer of merit for twenty-five years and a champion of the arts in a
state best known for tobacco and its residue: the politics of Jesse
Helms.
          The book we're honoring today is called The Winter
People. It's unquestionably his finest work. In a better world
ruled less by literary fashions and megabucks, this book would be a
popular classic. Maybe today we can help it along in that
direction.
          The Winter People is set in the North Carolina mountains during the
Depression. It is a story of love and violence, two human capacities
frequently associated with mountain life. But the book is something
more than that. It shows us an Appalachia before there was coal,
before there were social programs, before the world outside meant very
much. The forces at work in Ehle's mountains are Scottish and Irish
clans who measure their power in the quantity of children and the
number of timbered acres they possess. The pageantry of warlords in
homespun clothes reminds us of tales from across the water like
Lancelot, but these people in John Ehle's work appear real to us, not
mythical. Their devotion to family is overriding and it takes no great
leap of imagination to see the body and soul of today's mountain
people in Ehle's wonderful prose. In giving us this first glimpse, I
think, in fiction, of the people who pioneered our Southern highlands,
Ehle has given us the year's most original work of Southern
fiction.
          
            Harry Ashmore
          
          A few weeks ago I encountered one of your former executive
directors, Leslie Dunbar, and was pleased to find that he had read
Hearts and Minds--or at least 

had checked the index to
see wherein he might be mentioned. Since no account of racism from
Roosevelt to Reagan would be complete without numerous references to
the Southern Regional Council and its battle-scarred principals, Les
had come upon a passage in which I referred to him as a "certified
idealist." He was somewhat taken aback, he said, since he thought
"certified" was applied only to lunatics and recidivist criminals. I
reminded him that it also designated public accountants, but this did
nothing to placate him since, like all budget-ridden foundation
executives, he regards those who draw up balance sheets as natural
enemies.
          The chapter in which I certified Les begins with an anecdote I hope
bears repeating here today. I tell of returning to Atlanta to address
the chief state school officers of the old Confederacy twenty-five
years after Harold Fleming, John Griffin and I had arranged a
gathering of their predecessors to consider the findings we were about
to publish in a book with the incendiary title, The Negro and
the Schools. The Brown decision was then
pending, and the learned gentlemen responded to the invitation of our
sponsor, the Ford Foundation, only on condition that we hide out in
the suburbs and not only keep the meeting secret but make it, as they
say in diplomatic circles, deniable--that is, that in the event of a
leak to the press we would claim that no such assemblage had ever
taken place, and even if it had the dread possibility of school
desegregation had never been mentioned. There were, as I recall,
several apparent cardiac arrests when a rumor spread that young
William Emerson of Newsweek had been seen skulking in
the shrubbery.
          Now, a quarter century later, I again faced the chief state school
officers, but this time each was accompanied by a black deputy and the
pepper-and-salt audience was assembled at the Atlanta Biltmore under
the glare of television lights. It was, I noted, a far cry from the
days when we were working with black colleagues on the school project
and the closest we could get to the Biltmore at mealtime was the
Southern Education Foundation a block away, where we pulled down the
shades and shared catered barbecue sandwiches--which, I must say, did
represent an improvement over the cuisine available in a hotel
ballroom, then or now.
          My citation of the transformation that had, in that brief span,
made Atlanta perhaps the most thoroughly desegregated major city in
the nation prompted a question from one of the black participants. He
agreed that on the surface there were a great many changes--but, deep
down, did I think anything was really different? Indeed I
did. Twenty-five years ago, I pointed out, the great majority of
Southerners, white and black, acted on the assumption that there was a
real difference between the two races: "Now we know this is not
so. And that's the root of the problem--blacks have turned out to be
just like us, and we're no damned good."
          This back-handed assertion of common humanity did, in its ironic
way, recognize the widespread disillusionment among those of both
races who had been sustained by soaring hopes in the glory days of the
civil rights movement. The idealists had believed--perhaps had had to
believe--that the inspired gallantry of liberated blacks and their
white supporters would usher in the beloved community of Martin Luther
King's dream. It was in this company that I placed Les Dunbar, quoting
from his recent appraisal of The South and the Near
Future in Clark College publication:
          
            We did not pass from a segregated to an integrated
society. Only in a relative sense have we come from an unjust to a
more just society; most certainly we have not passed from a wandering
in the desert by blacks and from moral squalor of whites into a
'beloved community.' We attained none of these. What was accomplished,
however, is a vast enlargement of choice.
          
          And that, of course, is so. As the cliche has it, those who measure
progress against the ideal of a fully integrated society see the
bottle as half-empty; the pragmatists who measure against the point of
departure see it as half full.
          The indomitable woman in whose name we are gathered today surely
qualified for the certification I bestowed upon Les Dunbar. By 1943,
when SRC was created out of the remains of the more timorous
Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Lillian Smith had already
rejected the prevailing arguments for gradual change; for her,
segregation posed a moral choice between good and evil, life and death
of the spirit. She publicly declared that SRC's temporizing policy
made t-he organization "potentially more harmful than beneficial." And
she was unimpressed when Guy Johnson, the first executive director,
replied that it was unrealistic to adopt a policy that would restrict
SRC's membership to those who were willing to denounce segregation but
were powerless to do anything about it.
          If Miss Lillian did not prevail, neither did those she scorned as
killers of the dream--the dream she shared with the dedicated young
preacher who became her friend. Her adamant rejection of the demeaning
social conventions of the day may have scared off some potential
allies, but it also made one of our most pragmatic presidents the
first to employ the full authority of his office in support of
Southern blacks who had taken to the streets to protest denial of
their civil rights.
          One evening early in 1960 Miss Lillian had dinner with Coretta and
Martin King, and afterward they drove her to Emory University hospital
where she was undergoing treatment for cancer. As they passed through
a corner of DeKalb County a patrolman noticed a white woman sitting
beside a black man and automatically halted the car. When he
discovered that the driver was the trouble-making preacher who had
just moved in from Montgomery he concluded that his driver's license
was bound to be invalid. Martin was fined twenty-five dollars, given a
six-months suspended sentence, and released on parole. Some months
later, when he refused bond and went to jail in Atlanta to dramatize a
student sit-in at Rich's, the DeKalb court charged him with violating
parole. On this second trip to the drumhead he was whisked off in the
dead of night to Reidsville state prison.
          In desperation Coretta King put in a call to the young Democratic
candidate for president who was then heading into the home
stretch. Jack Kennedy offered reassurance, Robert Kennedy got in touch
with the 

DeKalb County judge, and Martin was returned to his father's
Ebenezer Baptist Church in a blaze of televised glory. Daddy King, who
had been publicly supporting Richard Nixon on the ground that his
Baptist faith would not permit him to vote for a Catholic, recanted
and offered a ringing endorsement of the Democratic ticket. The
resulting sweep of the black precincts in all the major cities
provided Kennedy's narrow margin of victory, and left him beholden to
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement he led.
          From the beginning, the civil rights movement depended upon
political finagling as well as eloquent appeals to the conscience of
the white majority. There was a splendid irony in the maneuvering that
took place in the traditional gap between rhetoric and reality--which
became even wider after the Citizens Councils unfurled the banner of
massive resistance and accentuated the discrepancy between what
leaders of both races said in public and what they were privately
willing to do. When Jack Kennedy was told that Daddy King had to
suspend his anti-Catholic bias in order to convert to the Democratic
cause, he said, "Who would have thought that Martin Luther King's
father could be a bigot?" Then, reflecting upon the life and times of
old Joe Kennedy, he added, "But, then, we all have fathers."
          So we do, and progress on the race front can be measured by the
tempering of attitudes from one generation to the next. The fathers of
my generation of white Southerners took their stand on what their
preachers told them was biblically-sanctioned moral ground, reducing
the region to poverty as they sacrificed self-interest on the altar of
white supremacy. My contemporaries, with no more valid claim to
probity; concluded that they had rather abandon Jim Crow than pay the
price required to maintain segregation in the face of mounting black
protest.
          So it was that when Bull Connor unleashed police dogs and firehoses
against black children in Birmingham, Jack Kennedy employed his
cabinet's corporate heavyweights to convince the Big Mules of the
Alabama establishment that racial violence was bad for business. After
the White Only signs came down the President told Martin and his
aides: "I don't think you should be totally harsh on Bull Connor. He's
done as much for civil rights as anybody since Abraham Lincoln."
          Those of you who labor in the vineyard of race relations are
painfully aware of the circularity that has always characterized
public discussion of the basic issue. In the old days the demonstrably
inferior social condition of the black minority was cited to justify
the caste discrimination that perpetuated the inferior condition--and
so the dogma of white supremacy came to prevail everywhere in the
nation when blacks began to migrate from the South in substantial
numbers. That ghost, at least, has been laid by the enlargement of
choice that is the not inconsiderable legacy of the civil rights
movement.
          When the federal courts struck down the barriers of institutional
segregation a third of the black population promptly moved into the
mainstream, visibly giving the 

lie to the myth of inherent racial
inferiority. In terms of educational attainment, income level, and
type of employment these blacks are certifiably middle-class, and are
more or less being accepted as such by their white counterparts. The
larger society--burdened as it is by the third of the black population
still confined to a poverty-stricken underclass--is a long way from
being free of the residue from the racist past. But the tempering of
restrictive majority attitudes has been sufficient to change the
dimensions of the American dilemma.
          This shows up most significantly in politics. Those of us who were
on the front line in the early days of the movement may be appalled by
the resurrection of George Wallace in Alabama, but there is surely
encouragement in the fact that he could re-enter the lists only by
proclaiming himself a born-again integrationist, repentant of his
race-baiting past and wholly committed to advancing the welfare of the
blacks whose votes he sought and won. Then there is Ronald Reagan,
whose political strategy writes off the black vote but who hotly
denies that his reactionary policies are tinged with racism. "I want
everyone to understand that I am heart and soul in favor of the things
that have been done in the name of civil rights and desegregation," he
has proclaimed, and, if you accept his remarkably constricted view of
contemporary society, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.
          But if the President has rejected the dogma of white supremacy he
has fervently embraced the doctrine it produced--the old states rights
federalism elaborated by our forefathers in defense of slavery and the
second-class citizenship that succeeded it. The President's so-called
"new" federalism ignores not only the lessons of the bloodshot past,
but the reality of contemporary demography, which reflects the
transfer of the enduring race problem from the rural South to the
center of the nation's great cities, where it has produced what is
rightly labeled an urban crisis. The black underclass is not trapped
in northern slums by institutionalized race prejudice, but by a
debilitating, self-perpetuating culture of poverty that cannot
possibly yield to the kind of social Darwinism in which the President
places his faith. We are long past the share-cropping days when blacks
were kept in their place so they could be exploited as a source of
cheap labor; along with the Hispanics and poor whites who share its
misery, the black underclass has become surplus population, a
non-productive burden increasingly seen as intolerable in a shrinking
economy.
          The secular theology called Reaganomics holds that this condition
is of no concern to the federal government and can readily be disposed
of by placing responsibility for its cure upon state and local
authorities assisted by the benign working of the private sector. That
delusion cannot endure, and when it is finally dispelled there will be
much work to do--particularly for organizations like SRC which have
always had to find their way in the void between rhetoric and
reality.
          I have never been blessed with a faith strong enough to take me to
the mountaintop from which Martin Luther King caught sight of the
promised land, and assured his people that, with or without him, they
would get there one day. But I have never doubted that his vision of a
beloved community represented the only goal that would, in the end,
prove acceptable to Southerners. Miss Lillian believed that, too, and
when, at the end of her life, she revised Killers of the
Dream, she closed with these lines:
          
            So we stand: tied to the past and clutching at the stars!
Only by the agonizing pull of our dream can we wrench ourselves from
such fixating stuff and climb into the unknown. But we have always
done it and we can do it again. We have the means, the techniques, we
have the knowledge and insight and courage. All have synchronized for
the first time in history. Do we have the desire? This is a question
that each of us must answer for himself.
          
          
            Mary Frances Derfner is Vice-President of the Southern
Regional Council and chairperson of the Smith Awards Committee. Other
committee members for 1982 included Tony Dunbar, John Popham, Wilma
Dykeman and Lottie Shackelford.
          
        