(upbeat classical music) - [Narrator] These are the stories that move us, the stories that guide us, and the stories that reflect our community.

Filmed in our neighborhoods and local haunts by those who call this city home.

Atlanta filmmakers are documenting stories that show the life of our city in a way we could only imagine.

These are the stories that we tell.

This is "Atlanta on Film".

- Hi, I'm your host, Bobby Huntley, and this is "Atlanta on Film", WABE's weekly film series featuring a collection of stories that reflect our diverse community.

This episode is made possible by our friends at the Morehouse Human Rights Film Festival.

In this episode, we tackle racial injustices in two hard-hitting documentaries.

"The Defenders" by Roderick Red and "Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence" by Hal Jacobs.

(film reel clicking) (countdown beeping) (gentle music) (gentle music) - The movement involved some great and courageous people.

Aaron Henry, Fannie Lou Hamer.

So many people who every day took their lives in their hands to make Mississippi a better place.

But they had to have lawyers, likewise.

(gentle music) - We were also, I believe, sent here to help people to help themselves when it came to protection of basic civil rights.

- [Woman] Mississippi, it was the worst closed of the closed society.

- [Man] Blacks have been shot down in cold blood and their homes burned for demanding the right to vote.

- [Lawyer] There were so many things going on in Mississippi that were bad.

There were so many people who were arrested unfairly, in jail unfairly.

- Oh, the need was so overwhelming.

That's when I saw mass arrests and there were three Black lawyers and 900,000 Black folk.

But I sort of said that it was very clear.

That got me through law school and I knew where I'd go.

That got me through law school and I knew where I'd go.

- My best friend was Jack Young Jr and his daddy was Jack Young Sr. And I pretty much grew up in Mr. Young's house.

I was there often, and Mr. Young was a lawyer for the NAACP.

He represented Jane Meredith.

He represented Medgar Evers.

He represented the Freedom Riders.

He was the go-to civil rights lawyer in Mississippi.

- R. Jess Brown was probably one of my favorite lawyers.

I love to hear stories.

He was a comedian, but above all, he was courageous.

And I admired his courage more than any lawyer I've ever known.

(gentle music) - Carsie was not an active practitioner.

He was the President of the NAACP.

He was mostly active in Jackson with the NAACP.

He was active with the Freedom Riders.

I spent a lot of personal time with him and he was a great guy and a lot of fun to be around.

- The three primary African-American lawyers had the yeoman's responsibility of getting individuals who were locked up, released.

Those three men had to have significant courage, or as you say, to be fearless, to go and represent clients that they'd never met.

- When R. Jess came to Forest when I was in school, he had a rape case.

There was this guy, Black guy, of course, who was accused of raping a white woman, and they were, the white family was just really Forest society.

And the guy, he was from the county, and he was poor.

And R. Jess had the courage to represent him.

Obviously he did not win.

But I remember that day and it was just like, it was the best day in my young life then, for a Black man to stand up and represent another Black man when he was accused of raping a white woman.

- First of all, University of Ole Mississippi did not accept any Blacks, so no Blacks could go to law school there.

But those who graduated from law school there had a free pass, they didn't have to take the bar.

I remember my dad said that when he went to take the bar in Jackson that the Blacks had to ride on the freight elevator up to the floor to take the exam, whereas the whites rode on the passenger elevator.

So there was even discrimination in which elevator you rode on to take the test.

And many Blacks, and I believe Jack Young and Carsie Hall were two of those who studied under other lawyers here in Mississippi, before they took the exam, because that's what Blacks had to do.

- There were only two law schools in Mississippi and one of 'em was at Ole Miss, and Ole Miss did not permit African Americans to go to law school or any other school at the University of Mississippi.

And the other one was a law school that was owned by a law firm, and that school did not accept African Americans for its tutelage and didn't do so even when I became a lawyer.

I was not even allowed to go to their bar review course.

And it was it was three or four years later that they allowed Black persons to attend that law school, which was ultimately bought by the Mississippi College and it's the Mississippi College Law School now.

- When Jack passed the bar, he hung out his shingle as a lawyer on Fair Street and he began to practice law.

When the NAACP took on school desegregation, it began to bring cases throughout the south.

Some of the cases that they brought had to do with teachers, to get equal pay for teachers.

And when the opportunity came, when these people came to Mississippi and they needed lawyers, those lawyers would always have to have local lawyers to be involved in those cases.

And Jack and Carsie and Jess were lawyers who were normally the ones who were on the pleadings when a case was filed for school desegregation.

They were working with cause and effect, they were working with Jack Greenberg, they were working with Thurgood Marshall at points throughout the country.

- Very few people come along like Medgar who will put their life on the line every day, and he did that.

He was an inspiration to so many Mississippians and made a huge difference in our state.

There were so many things going on in Mississippi that were bad that he had to go and get his arms around and try to correct.

And he and Jess and Jack were the people who did that.

There were so many people who were arrested unfairly, in jail unfairly.

And they called Medgar, and Medgar called Jack, and Jack called Jess, and that's the way it worked.

- [R. Jess Brown] Sometimes it may come to your mind as to why are we rehashing what has happened here in the state of Mississippi.

I heard a history teacher who taught in the near high school, and his statement effect was this: He who knows nothing of the past has little understanding of the present and no conception of the future.

- There was the hostility in the judiciary against Black lawyers.

There were only a handful who would actually appear in court, two or three in the 50s.

And certainly those who were not only appearing in court, but appearing in court to change the system, there was hostility against them.

Mack Charles Parker was accused of raping or attempting to rape a white woman in that county and he was arrested for it.

And Jess Brown was engaged by his mother to represent Mack Charles Parker against that allegation.

- [Interviewer] Who employed you to represent M.C.

Parker?

- M.C.

Parker's mother employed me.

In fact, she came to me and employed me to represent him.

- [Interviewer] You weren't employed by the NAACP?

- No, I was not employed by the NAACP or any other organization, group, partnership or anything else other than his mother.

- [Interviewer] How did you feel that you were treated in trying this case in Pearl River County?

- Well, personally, I tried the case and I was assisted by Attorney Jack H. Young of Jackson, and we were both accorded, so far as attorneys are concerned, the same treatment as we had received any place else in the courtroom by the court officials.

- [Interviewer] Did you see any indication of undue hostility or any indication that there might be violence in connection with this case?

- Well, frankly, I didn't notice or observe any indication that there would be at that time.

However, prior to that the county attorney stated that it would be hazard to bring him there for preliminary hearing.

- When Jess tells the story, he was conveying that the judge was likely aware that there would be a lynching, that Mack Charles Parker would probably be taken from jail and lynched, which was not unusual in the South in those days.

It was a part of what we lived with in the 40s and 50s and into the 60s.

- Early on, there were a lot of things going on.

Boycotts, the leaders in every community would get arrested, we had to get 'em out on bond.

I didn't know how to do that.

Jess did.

- But I do remember that them traveling together to these different places, arguing cases.

They would ride together.

They would leave maybe about four o'clock or so in the mornings.

My dad would always have his briefcase and he'd have a lunchbox, a lunch that my mother had packed for him the night before because there were very few places where Black people could eat in these smaller towns.

And he would also have, they'd have a typewriter on the back seat in case they needed to type some documents and so forth and so on.

- One of the stories I heard about Jess Brown in court was the fact that he knew this particular judge had nothing good for Black people and his client.

And he told the young Black lawyer with him, said, now I'm going to raise this issue, and the judge gonna go absolutely crazy and throw me out but it's going to also get another judge on the case because of how he going to act with me.

And lo and behold, Jess raised some issues with the judge, judge got mad, threw him out, made all kind of reversible error, and lo and behold, he ended up with another judge after the appeal and his client got off.

But he spent a night in jail.

- Medgar would refer people to my father for legal assistance.

He would refer clients to my dad and they would travel together, sometimes to different small towns where these clients lived.

And I remember after he was assassinated in his driveway I remember my dad saying that one thing that Medgar had told him is that, one time when he dropped him off after a trip he said, "You know, Jess, the only place I feel safe is at home."

I knew at a fairly early age that he was involved in some controversial cases, but I didn't know all the ins and outs about it.

But when I really paid attention was when he started defending the Freedom Riders.

When the Freedom Riders started coming to Mississippi in 1961 he was working very hard day and night, day and night, because there was so many of them coming in, trying to handle the cases.

- With the influx of out-of-state civil rights people coming to Mississippi and just the sheer number of people getting locked up, that in itself created a real difficulty.

- [Man] We would sit there and the corps would come into the (indistinct) office.

Three hundred in Meridian, four hundred in Hattiesburg.

All over the state, mass arrests.

Now, look, try to understand something.

People are human.

You know what it means to have a family and three children who you're supposed to be home with to give some food, and you're sitting in a damn jail?

Just stop to think what it means.

People can be terribly courageous but while a fear begins to set in.

- The most important thing that those people who actually got and put their lives on the line, the first school desegregation suit was brought by Medgar Evers, and he was killed.

And then Gilbert Mason, I think they bombed his house one time.

Then it was Aaron Henry.

Obviously his wife was fired from her role as a teacher in the school district.

The Hudsons in Lee County, who had to sit up with their guns all night to keep from getting bombed.

I think their house was bombed at one time.

(somber music) - Just the courage of the, oh, I mean of Ms. Hamer, of Ms. Maber of the Carter, of my school desegregation plaintiffs who wanted their children to have a better education and whose names were up on the telegram posts, and who were shot at and bombed and threatened in every way.

They were the best role models anybody could ever have.

- My dad never showed that he was fearful, never even talked about it.

We did receive phone calls about people saying they're gonna bomb our home.

I remember he was handling one case and he had received a telephone call saying "if you show up for court, we will kill you."

My dad showed up and went on and did right where he went on and argued his case.

Well, he was that kind of person.

He focused on what he had to do.

(inspiring music) - And in the fifties, you know, going in that there will be no one who looks like you and your client in the jury or on the bench.

It was still, it was a tough job to be in for a black person to be a lawyer (chuckling) in the sixties and the fifties, it was a tough job.

- I had one judge called me a nigger.

He didn't call me, he asked, "nigger, where you going?"

And that hurt me so bad because I was handling a divorce case for Mr. Young and he knew this judge, and he didn't want to go over there.

So he sent me over there and it caught me by surprise.

For a while, I carried my diploma with me because a couple of judges wouldn't take my word that I was a lawyer.

(somber music) - And it was when I saw mass arrests, and there were three black lawyers, none of whom had gone to law school, bless their hearts.

But they'd studied law, and then there were three black lawyers and 900,000 black folk.

And most white lawyers didn't take any black cases that certainly didn't pay.

And so that got me through law school.

And I knew where I'd go.

- And so what happened was, it was national groups that came to the rescue, that sent whole, you know, cadres of lawyers to Mississippi to help.

The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Constitutional Law Center.

All of these groups established offices right there on Farish Street in Jackson.

(gentle piano playing) - We wound up dividing responsibilities.

The school desegregation work was primarily the responsibility of the Legal Defense Fund.

The Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, which was right across the street on Farish Street, took on prisoner cases.

And The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which was a few blocks at the other end of Farish Street, The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law took on the political cases.

So we divided responsibilities up.

And the political accomplishments of The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law are well known.

They, all of the cases to eliminate discrimination in voting, Frank Parker, who worked at that office, we lost him, he died at a very young age, brought the litigation to eliminate discrimination in polling.

And he backed a number of the candidates that became the first black elected officials in the modern history of Mississippi.

(gentle piano music) - If, had it not been for Frank Parker's ability to understand the importance of the Voting Rights Act, and how you apply it, a lot of us wouldn't be elected today.

- And when the Lawyers' Committee came in, when the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee came in, and we had a number of lawyers who started to come to Mississippi as a frontier, the resistance continued.

It was certainly, through the sixties.

- Second year as governor of this great state, why, we had a lot of attention paid to us that year.

The Freedom Riders came to see us.

You remember that?

Thousand of Freedom Riders.

And I got on television and I told the people to treat them with every courtesy, as long as it didn't violate our laws.

But I said, when they start violating our laws, put every one of them in jail.

And you know, Allen, you did that.

(audience laughing, applauding) And you know, you know when all the jails in Jackson were filled, and Allen Thompson's chicken cooked for fill on the fairground, there were 32 of them left.

And I entered an executive order sending 'em to Parchman, the state penitentiary, to put them in maximum security cells, where they stayed from three to four months.

And you haven't heard more from Freedom Riders, have you?

(audience clapping) - If you could have seen the way black people were treated, it was just horrendous.

- My name is Willie Long, and I was arrested Monday, Monday about noon, for demonstrating too.

I was over in the boys side where they separated the white boys from the colored.

And they had us all packed against the wall, but we couldn't stretch our legs, move our arms.

Where we would catch cramps and things like that.

We couldn't, we couldn't use the restroom, we couldn't get any water, without they say so.

- [Speaker #1] Later I was carried to the hospital, and had eight stitches taken in my head.

Another person was beaten by the same policeman.

Stitches were taken in his head and he was kicked while he was laying on the ground after he was struck with a club.

It was a gruesome scene.

I wouldn't have believed that if I haven't seen him myself.

- It has been my opinion in the past and it's my belief today that these marches, or assemblies, or demonstrations, or parades, or gatherings, or anything they are called, will accomplish nothing.

There has not been any proven instance of police brutality.

But it is something that they like to talk about when they break the law.

There are no justifiable complaints, here.

- One of the strategies for defending persons who were involved in the civil rights movement was to, once they were arrested, to have their cases removed to the federal court, under a law that was passed back at turn of the century.

And that's one of the strategies that local counsel, and counsel from outside of the state would use in order to get a fair trial for whatever these persons were accused of.

- A law review article, which was cited by the Supreme Court of the United States, it was related to removing cases from state courts where we couldn't get a fair trial to the federal court.

- [Speaker 1] And this gave us time, gave us time to corral our forces.

And this is when the out state lawyer started to coming in.

In the very beginning out of state lawyers, even though he was a lawyer, he could not, he could not practice.

We would have to take him to court, you know what I mean?

And introduce him, and then he would, you know, would have his say.

But just 3 lawyers, you know, we couldn't take lawyers all over the state.

(audience chuckling) So you see how we were hemmed in.

And it took some time.

(gentle music) - The demonstrations and the protests did work.

It galvanized a large segment of the country, as a whole.

It broke the spirit of apartheid that we had in the state of Mississippi.

What the country as a whole saw on television, basically led to the passage of The Civil Rights Acts of the sixties.

- We don't intend to flagrantly go out to violate real laws designed to protect all citizens of the city.

We just intend to test those which are discriminatory.

We shall be engaged throughout the days to come in very intensified community organization, in order that our people may be informed of all of their rights, as they are guaranteed under The Civil Rights Acts, and passed by the Congress over the last few years.

- Well, by that time, by 1968, as you pointed out, there had been congressional action.

There had been executive action.

It was a lot easier to navigate when you've got a Voting Rights Act, you've got, you have a Fair Housing Act.

We had tools that the lawyers didn't have before I got here.

So we used them, but we'd use those tools with, in terms of getting people to go out and test housing issues.

It gave us more than the lawyers before us had to work with.

- The white power structure of Mississippi was overconfident that it had it's quote "Nigras" unquote, in the state of such fear that none would dare file a lawsuit in Mississippi.

- I believe that the civil rights successes that we achieved in the fifties and sixties could not have happened but for the role of lawyers in helping to make them happen.

Now lawyers were a helping role, but a necessary role because our society is one based on the rule of law.

We, that's how it's done in America.

And so both changing the law, getting rid of Jim Crow, defeating apartheid as a legal structure, happened in the courts and had to be enforced in the courts.

But also could not have happened but for the passion and the activism and the the willingness to put real lives on the line, to go to court, to take the actions, to insist on the rights that lawyers could help enforce.

- I hope that the role of civil rights lawyers here in Mississippi has served as a foundation to ensure full participation of all people in our systems of government, education, the legal system and other aspects of life.

- There were problems all over the country.

This was not exclusive to Mississippi or to the deep South.

But that still, if you were gonna go to law school and be a lawyer, there was gonna be real opportunity in Mississippi to make a difference, to take those cases to court and to get some decisions that were gonna have lasting impact, not just for the South, but really nationally.

(gentle piano music) - On the success or failure of a movement, whether it's the one going on right now or the one that occurred when I was embedded in it, it's all about coalitions.

You must find friends when you're outside looking in.

Every single civil rights movement in America has involved white and black together.

And anytime you fail to do that, you're putting hurdles in your way that you're not going to be able to overcome.

- Mississippi was fortunate enough to have three homebred lawyers, and a whole lot of lawyers from around the country who came to Mississippi and just made enormous sacrifices.

- The role of lawyers was to protect the rights of individuals and to do what's right.

(gentle piano music) - What was required?

What was required was the direct legal intervention of the people themselves, of the Black movement themselves, with their own lawyers.

(somber music) (somber music) - Hello everyone, I'm Bobby Huntley and I am sitting here with Sarah Campbell and Roderick Red, and they are the creators and filmmakers of the, "Defenders: How Lawyers Protected the Movement."

Thank you so much for joining us today.

- Thank you for having us.

- Thank you.

Thank you so much.

- Now this documentary was equally eye-opening, moving, and just an emotional experience for me.

Beautiful story and beautiful execution.

Now, Sarah, you are with the Mississippi Department of Archive and History.

Just give us a little insight on that.

What exactly is that?

- The Department of Archives and History is a comprehensive history agency in the state of Mississippi that handles historic preservation, museums, historic sites, also the archives, which was really important to the film and the work that we did together.

So the film was made as a partnership between the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and Red Squared.

And so we were responsible more for like the research and getting all the information out of the archives and the writing.

And then we worked with the team at Red Squared for the production.

- Now Roderick, how did your production company become a part of this amazing film?

- We were brought on board by, spearheaded by some legends you know, Judge Reuben Anderson and Judge Fred Banks.

They really wanted this story to be told about these three lawyers, these civil rights icons, R. Jess Brown, Carsie Hall, and Jack Young.

And so they're a part of this organization called the Foundation for Mississippi History.

They fundraised, they raised some resources, and ended up bringing us on board to bring this project to life in partnership with the archives, you know.

It was an incredible experience.

- [Man] There was so many things going on in Mississippi that were bad.

There were so many people who were arrested unfairly, in jail unfairly.

- [Woman] Oh, the need was so overwhelming was when I saw mass arrests, and there were three black lawyers and 900,000 black folk.

- [Bobby] So with having access to all this amazing beautiful history and footage in all of those stories, what stood out to you the most that you felt really excited about?

Like, I really want people to hear about this particular story.

- I think part of it was just how much individuals had to make key decisions and choices about how to protest against, how to fight against, how to dismantle this system of Jim Crow in America.

And there were ways in which you had to have grassroots folks who just wanted to stand up and say, no, I want to go get better education for my child.

I should be in that public library.

I should have all of these services that I pay taxes for.

And then, but you had to have the lawyers walking beside them and making the legal arguments.

And so for me, it was that individual courage and determination to just break this system down.

- Yes, yes.

- And for me, you know, it was the incredible stories of the individuals who were doing the work and the fact that Mississippi was the center for all this racial work to be done in America, right?

The lawyers spoke about it all the time.

If you were gonna do any work that's gonna change America from a racial standpoint, you had to start in Mississippi.

And so, you know, even being here in Atlanta where obviously a lot of our famous civil rights legends come from, and so much, you know, history in terms of civil rights come from, it emanates from Mississippi.

It was unique to me that Mississippi was like, really that true center because everybody knows that racist history of Mississippi's past and kind of how it carries it into the future.

And so the lawyers really, really- It was a dual thing where the lawyers were really kind of excited to do the work in Mississippi because they knew they could make a lasting impact because it was, you know, so rough - Yeah, you would be amazed at the number of landmark civil rights cases that are from Mississippi, voting rights cases, and just the list is long.

- One of the things that stood out to me the most was even as lawyers, heavily credentialed citizens of the United States, they just didn't have- Blankly, nothing was fair.

They weren't getting paid from cases, you know, judges were throwing them out, sending them to jail.

They were risking their lives day-to-day as lawyers.

Can you give us a little bit more insight on what they went through, the day-to-day aspect of it?

- Yeah, one of the pieces that was really insightful for us was the live, the only live footage that we have of R. Jess Brown speaking to a news interviewer.

And he is so carefully spoken in that, and one of the things that is hard for us to understand is that for him to have his likeness on television in that role is basically putting a big target on himself.

And so he is speaking in ways that he is talking very carefully, and he is saying, no, we were treated just as fairly as we have been treated in other places by the court officials.

And all of that is saying we were not treated well by any of the other people in the town.

We knew our client was at risk of being lynched, but I have to say this when I'm on television.

You know, there's kind of this coded statement going on.

- How did you feel that you were treated in trying this case in Pearl River County?

Well, personally, I tried the case, and I was assisted by attorney Jack H. Young of Jackson, and we were both accorded, so far as attorneys are concerned, the same treatment as we received any place else in the courtroom by the court officials.

- Now, this film is such a beautiful marriage between our archival footage and beautifully shot interviews.

Was there any thoughts as to what the creative process were for in terms of inspiration of other films or other things?

Like what was the visual decisions behind it?

- For me, the visual- thank you for that question.

I don't get asked that question a lot.

I'm a really big fan of like Ava DuVernay, so I loved, 13th is one of my favorite documentaries.

One of the films I really liked watching recently was MLK/FBI, which talked about MLK's relationship with the FBI and how they were kind of trying to put things out there about him.

Yeah.

Because of the limited, because we knew we were gonna be archives heavy, and we were gonna be limited on the amount of footage we could show outside of the interview footage, we wanted to make sure that every kind of interview bit we had was beautifully shot.

So that way we kind of, and we were also very intentional on where they were.

We wanted to make sure we, you know, we shot 'em in a lot of old federal courthouses, and we wanted to give it a lawyerly kind of feel where the music was a reflection of that as well.

Because this was so big about lawyers and court cases and things like that.

We wanted it to feel scholarly.

We wanted to feel, you know, something of stature.

And so all those factors played a role into what we were trying to create.

And so, yeah.

- Can you pinpoint the beginning and the end points?

Like how long did it take to bring all this together to have a completed project?

- It took us about, it should have took longer, but it took us about a year.

- It was about a solid year.

- About a solid year from when it was introduced to when we were able complete it.

- Now, I had written the piece for Mississippi History Now.

I had written an article for one of our publications that's aimed at high school students.

So I had to do a good amount of research in reading books and things to get that research paper done.

And that research paper kind of formed the basis - Basis, yeah.

- For how we began with the documentary.

But in terms of the real work, it was from February to February.

- Yeah.

- Because we premiered it in February of this year.

- Wow.

- And man, I'm telling you, we felt like we were killing ourselves a couple of times.

I don't know if you think that's fast, but it felt fast to us.

- Oh, no.

I definitely understand.

Thank you so much to both of you for doing the work.

The hard work shows so eloquently on that screen.

It's one of the best documentaries I've ever seen.

We cannot wait to see more work from the two of you, individually, collectively.

We truly appreciate you.

- Thank you.

- The both of you for doing it.

- Thank you.

(film projector whirs and beeps) - In this next documentary, Hal Jacobs dives into the life of Lillian Smith, one of the first white southern authors to crusade against the evils of segregation.

A child of the South, she was deemed a traitor to her people for her stance on racial and gender equality.

This is Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence.

(film projector whirs and beeps) (guitar music plays) (guitar music plays) ♪ Change,...♪ - [Woman 1] She was the first white woman to really claim these things publicly to talk about the pathology of racism.

- [Man 1] She is a radical, nuanced, incredibly unprecedented white voice in American history.

- [Woman 2] She understood that it was a stunted society because of race.

- [Man 2] In my opinion, she was Jane the Baptist.

She came early.

- [Man 3] It was just great to see her named in King's letter that he wrote in a Birmingham jail only because King was very critical of moderate whites.

He was also very critical of liberal whites.

- [Woman 3] She was persecuted, she was oppressed, she was threatened, but she never backed down.

She paid a heavy price.

Whenever anybody reads her, they say why haven't I heard it before?

Why haven't I?

- When I read her now, it could have been written yesterday.

So I think part of her would say that's still going on, you know.

- So I was in my early twenties by the time I discovered her but immediately wanted to claim her as part of a genealogy that I needed.

As someone who had always struggled with the legacies of what had been a very pathological society, so racism and sexism, that came out of the Jim Crow South.

- I picked up "Killers of the Dream" and was just completely blown away.

And I would sit down and I would read a few pages, and I would just have to put it down.

And I just felt like Lillian was answering so many questions that I have had.

And she also is answering so many questions that I didn't know I had.

- I'm reading "Killers of the Dream," and she's talking about a South that I haven't experienced but was around for my grandparents and their parents.

And you still see the echoes and the ghosts that are left over from it.

I just find it incredible how she's able to not only pinpoint these are the problems and they've been here forever but then be so incredibly hopeful about it.

- We see in her something that we needed to hear.

And also we see in her the courage to keep on as we think about her today, that she is a resource.

She has thought about these things.

She's thought about the rationality behind them.

She's thought about the fears that people have as they look at changing old patterns.

- If she can do it that early on when whites are not really looking at this stuff at all, certainly not psychoanalytically and phenomenologically.

If she can do this, then certainly we can do it.

- I wish we had more Lillian Smiths around writing.

We do.

We have Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is a brilliant writer on race and privilege, and he calls out everybody.

We have writers like Paul Beatty who wrote the wonderful novel, "The Sellout," a novel which makes everybody uncomfortable.

We have people like Roxane Gay who calls out people and she's got that kind of Lillian Smith style, wit and bite to her work.

This is a country that needs to get a grip on its history, needs to acknowledge its history, and look hard at itself and do something about it.

- [Announcer] In Forest, as in every community in Mississippi, there is segregation of the races.

Drinking fountains are segregated.

Restrooms are segregated.

The local theater is segregated.

Negros sit in the balcony.

There is only one swimming pool in Forest for white only.

- [Woman 1] She wanted change.

She was ready to go right along with the young people, like change now.

- [Man 1] So as a white woman, Lillian Smith is examining what it means to be raised within a context in the South under white supremacy.

Her work, "Strange Fruit" or "Killers of the Dream," is a disagreeable mirror that it holds up to white America.

And it's been hard for white America to see itself.

And that takes not only brilliance and insight, but that also takes courage to be able to articulate whiteness in this form.

- [Woman 2] Lillian Smith saw a society that was expending most of its energy on trying to keep separate black and white when it was impossible.

They lost the Civil War militarily and they knew it, but by God they would win everything else culturally, socially legally, and we had politicians who were willing to go to any length to protect their privilege.

- [Man 2] So Lillian Smith has this incredible honesty.

She's the one who is willing to speak the truth to the structure of whiteness while facing death.

- But the kind of bravery it took to basically say to your whole culture, your whole class, everything you were raised with, I don't accept this.

This is wicked.

- [Woman 2] She just absorbed every experience she had and learned from everything and applied it to her own life and her own philosophy.

(gentle music) (gentle music) - [Man 2] She said that she was taught to love God and to know that Jesus is God's son.

And yet that she knew she was better than a Negro.

She said that despite the fact that her mother taught her about what it means to love and to be gentle and to care, her mother still taught her to put Negros in their place.

- [Woman 1] Well, Lillian Smith was brought up in a very privileged family.

They were very educated, very cultivated people.

She could be Lady Bountiful, the whole thing.

She credits her father a lot with saying if you see something wrong and you don't do something about it, that's worse than a sin.

Her father employed a lot of workers, black and white.

- [Woman 2] They lost a lot of their money in the First World War.

They moved to North Georgia because he had bought the mountain cabin as a vacation place.

When they moved up there, they were not the rich people in town.

(gentle music) - [Woman 3] This was a big culture change to move up here.

- [Woman 2] Her parents somehow scraped together enough money to send her to Piedmont College for a year.

At the end of that first year she began to dream of going to Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore to pursue her love of music, but she had to earn money to make that possible, so she did all kinds of things.

She worked as a maid and kitchen help at several hotels managed by her family, and she also taught at some of the local one-room schoolhouses.

- [Woman 3] She graduated realizing that everybody else had more talent than she did.

(gentle music) She had an older sister who had married Eugene Barnett, who was working with the YMCA in China.

- [Woman 4] And so Lil went and joined them in China and taught music in a school there.

- [Woman 2] She said, my eyes were opened.

The beauty of it, the strangeness, the exoticism, the everything about China.

But then she saw the real arrogance of outsiders who come and literally built walls to keep out the Chinese from their own public gardens.

- [Woman 4] That had an enormous impact on her because she saw the same sort of racism there that she had left here.

- [Woman 1] The walled cities.

The walls become a major metaphor in her writing because it's literally true that when you wall somebody out you damage yourself as well.

- [Woman 2] China opened her eyes to a whole other depth or dimension of the forms that life and relationships and the way people treat each other can take.

She didn't want to leave, but she got word from Clayton that she needed to come back because her father and mother, their health had failed and they needed her.

She said, I didn't know then I was coming back to Georgia for good.

While Lillian was away at Peabody.

In 1920, the family decided they needed more income and established Laurel Falls Camp for Girls on the property on Screamer Mountain.

- [Woman 1] Lillian stayed and ran it until 1948.

- [Woman 2] She was awfully young when she took over the responsibility of the camp.

(gentle music) - [Panelist 3] When I think of the privilege of young southern girls being able to go to that camp, because it was not like anything else in the south.

What I wouldn't have given to have been able to go to that camp.

The girls all came from families who had means because of the expense.

And she said we did have all of those ordinary competitive things like archery, horseback riding, games that the girls played.

But they also did painting, and theater, and dance, and all of the arts, and most importantly to her the regular and frank discussion of human issues.

They would just sit and talk about stuff and nothing was off limits.

- I, of course, I have a lot of biases.

Because she was such a strong member of my family context too.

But I don't think anyone was unaware of her presence.

She was a daily presence in first place when she was at every meal.

And then she spoke to us so often at Campfire, and on Sunday morning, which was not exactly a traditional religious service but was one that dug fairly deeply into issues and she always led that.

But she was just, she was walking around all the time.

You know, we saw her - [Woman 3] I think she came to study psychology, psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung, and others because she was trying to understand how to direct this girls camp.

- [Woman 4] Through activities like the theater program she had, asking these young girls to question the world in which they lived.

I think sometimes it made it more difficult for them to go back into those worlds.

(gentle music) - [Woman 3] It was small things or they sound small to us but when she made all of those young girls who came from very affluent backgrounds call black men and women, Mr and Mrs.

This was not done in the South at the time.

She was integrating that camp.

She couldn't have African Americans as campers, but inviting local non-white children to come up and play with the girls, and eat with 'em, and sometimes spend the night.

This was in the 1930s in North Georgia.

I mean, it's just, you talk about looking for trouble but somehow she managed to do what she needed to do to keep it okay.

- I'm not sure that people knew that all these things were going on.

The camp was outside of town, a mile out of town, up on the hill.

It was kinda like, and you know mountain folks were kinda like that.

You just go about your business and you don't mess in somebody else's a whole lot.

- [Woman 3] She's created, this world that she wants to live in.

She's created a place where she is in charge.

And she has other creative, intelligent, women working with her and she's working for the development and future of middle and upper class women who are still expected to basically get married and raise children.

- [Woman 1] In the early 1930s, Lillian fell in love.

She fell in love with Paula Snelling who was a math teacher during the school year but who was a horseback riding instructor at Laurel Falls.

Paula would eventually become a co-director of the camp later on and maybe this was for the sake of public appearances.

She was seen as Lillian's secretary.

- [Woman 3] Paula was the first person in her life who held both her heart and her mind simultaneously.

Because Paula was educated, they loved literature, But the thing about Paula, she said, "Paula read what I wrote and encouraged me.

And gave her critical response."

And she said of Paula, "I don't know what I would've done or how I would've continued in those early groping days without her encouragement."

She fell in love with Paula.

So all the rules and regulations about why she should not do that, it didn't matter.

- These women lived through McCarthyism.

To say that you were, gay, to be out, you risk everything.

In some states there were laws where you could be institutionalized, you could go to jail.

To me, the fact that she did everything she did makes this even more incredible.

That means she was even more at risk.

- [Woman 3] They were up there for good, all year round.

And she said "We could no longer get out into the world.

So we decided to bring the world to us and we founded a little magazine."

(upbeat fiddle music) She did a lot of writing for the magazine, and recruited a lot of writers.

Over the 10 years that they published it, I think she felt she learned a lot about the craft of writing, both from doing it herself and from bringing in all these pieces, reading them, publishing them.

It did put them out in the world in a way that they could not have been otherwise.

She took on the most powerful issues of the time.

Imagine the flow of ideas that came in from their writers and what kind of powerful effect that must have had on her mind and her awareness.

- [Woman 4] She turned what may have felt like an isolated place into, you know from an outsider's perspective at times what seemed like a kind of salon, A salon on Screamer Mountain.

- [Woman 3] For her to basically ignore the laws of Georgia, which meant that she invited black people to sit down at her table and have dinner.

- Both times that I went to see Lillian that was just my wife and me.

She'd invite me to come up for weekends to be with her and Paula.

One of the things that she kept saying and implying in some of her responses as we talked, was that "The South will change, it's inevitable."

It was important to have someone who didn't look like me articulating the kinds of things that I was articulating.

Yes, that was important.

(gentle music) - [Woman 3] People write and write and all of a sudden it all comes together.

Boom.

This amazing story.

(gentle music) "Strange Fruit" is so mature in its poetic language kind of lightning bolt moments of insight in human behavior.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) ♪ Strange fruit ♪ ♪ Bring it down in this garden of Eden ♪ ♪ Garden of Eden ♪ ♪ Eden premature, it's the love that we needed ♪ ♪ The love that we needed ♪ ♪ We stay freezing ♪ ♪ We stay frozen at war like Greeks and Trojans ♪ ♪ Temperatures, fries ♪ ♪ Feel the heat like an explosion ♪ ♪ Silencing our pain ♪ ♪ We cry with no emotion ♪ ♪ Eyes swollen with tears ♪ ♪ We stay hopin' ♪ ♪ Stay hopin' ♪ ♪ Back then from the way we stayed copin' ♪ ♪ Stayed copin' ♪ ♪ Trying to breathe through the pain ♪ ♪ We stayed choking ♪ ♪ A better day on the way we stay hopin' ♪ ♪ Stay hopin' ♪ ♪ Oh yeah, there's trauma and pain, but we ain't broken ♪ ♪ We ain't broken ♪ (gentle music) - "Strange Fruit" was a success, a huge success but it was the success sometimes for the wrong reason.

I mean that it was a banned book, it was considered a dirty book.

- There was a copy on our bookshelf but it was wrapped in brown paper.

(gentle music) - [Patricia] Eleanor admired Lillian Smith's courage and she did what she could to help her like she made sure that "Strange Fruit" would not be impounded and that it could go through the mail.

- [Woman 3] Lillian said of her writing, "I didn't start out to write this novel about racial things."

She said, "I look for the truth as I write.

And I put down what I find."

- The writers that we respect and enjoy and hold up as artists.

A lot of the white ones were very, very scared with good reason, of trying to inhabit the heads of African American characters.

Faulkner was very wary of that.

He knew he didn't know black people like they knew him.

Lillian Smith tried something that was really brave and that most of these writers, Faulkner, Harper Lee she kind of tried Flannery O'Connor on the margins.

But Lillian Smith, I think was just, just a braver artist in this way than they were because in "Strange Fruit" she really tries to imagine the lives of educated black folks.

- And obviously there were black writers doing this all over the place.

There was Zora Neale Hurston writing, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, writing around the same time or a bit before.

But white writers didn't do that and Lillian Smith would have none of it.

And I think that's another reason she was very much ahead of her time and possibly too far ahead of her time for her contemporary audience.

- [Woman 3] Lillian and her sister Esther, who was a drama teacher, actually wrote a stage version of "Strange Fruit" for Broadway.

Unfortunately, the play flopped with the critics and with the public.

This was a huge disappointment to Lillian who so believed in the story.

And she had also really loved living in New York City.

So she had to leave New York and come back to Screamer Mountain, where she said one time she never wrote another bestseller, but she did write another book.

It was supposed to be another novel, but it turned out to be something completely different.

(bouncy jazz music) (bouncy jazz music) - I make my students read "Killers of the Dream" and watch them get uncomfortable.

- She argues that what's going on there is that white men would rape black women during slavery.

And that while they're raping black women they would also place white women on a pedestal.

In fact, the pedestal will be so far removed from sexuality, that the white woman would take on this status as if she's asexual.

- And if ever there is a distorted human being it's the white southern woman on the pedestal and the men who used that for all kinds of excuses.

She saw that the same thing was true in terms of, sexuality and gender roles.

You know, that this very rigid definition of what a man should be, what a woman should be all those things are very restrictive.

- [Man 1] So this wonderful use of Freudian projection, the Freudian notion of the unconscious in the way in which this is operating in such a powerful and dangerous and violent way.

- "Killers Of the Dream", which should have been an enormous bestseller, just, I think was too tough for the time.

Plus, we're in a sort of war time and then post-war.

War time, nobody wants to get yelled at about race and immediately post-war, nobody wants to get yelled at about race because everybody was too busy trying to make life ordinary again and make all of their relationships fit the old patterns again because that's where security and comfort lay.

- [Film Narrator] If you've ever been in one of our southern states, you may have taken a sightseeing trip just as this family.

A trip to see one of the plantation homes that were built before the Civil War.

This beautiful mansion is one of many homesteads that were once the residences of southern planters.

These homes were centers of plantation life.

Inside the mansion, we can get some idea of the luxuries that a wealthy plantation family enjoyed.

The planter and his slaves, were part of an unusual class system.

The sharp division of people into two main groups, the owners and the slaves, left a lasting influence on the society of the South.

Today if we visit a social gathering in the south, we'll see some of these influences.

The traditional southern hospitality, the gentle manners and courtesy, the separation of society into distinct groups, and the relationship of that society.

- [Patricia] She's asking people to look at themselves.

She's not just talking about black people, she talks about the psychosis of white supremacy.

Her opponents simply said that she was trying to stir up hatred and that she was clearly off base.

"Lillian Smith has written a new book and brother is it a stinker!

Talk about your devious demagoguery Not only is this claptrap but very badly done claptrap.

A woefully unsound book, Miss Smith is a prisoner in the monastery of her own mind."

They part ways with her politically, they part ways with her intellectually, they part ways with her emotionally.

They don't understand her and what they think they understand, they do not like for they see this as a voice calling for change.

Change which they think is too abrupt, which would be upsetting to the South.

In one letter, she wrote a friend that said "You know, they say, I'm dropping bombs on Atlantic."

- [Woman 3] Lillian was convinced she was being silenced deliberately, all over the South.

Killers was not well-received by critics or newspaper editors.

Bookstores would not display it and her publisher finally just gave up and dropped it.

Magazine editors began pigeon-holing her just as a "race writer."

- James Baldwin says, "There are certain conditions under which we live under conditions of oppression, under conditions of terror and trauma where the impossible is the least that we can ask for."

So I think that Lillian Smith was asking for the impossible and why not, right?

I mean, if you have people who are suffering, who are being marginalized under Jim Crow and Jane Crow racism, if you have lynching of black bodies, if you have the degradation of black humanity, and you have this white woman who recognizes her complicity with this form of degradation, then I think that what's amazing about Lillian Smith is that she is doing that thing that Baldwin says is the least that we can do.

She is doing the impossible.

In fact, she is herself modeling what we all should do.

(violin music) - [Patricia] This is a woman who when the Brown decision comes down and few leaders in the South are willing to publicly embrace it and applaud the court, Lillian Smith declares that the Brown decision is the Magna Carta for every child.

- [Rose] And she writes, what she herself says is the only time she wrote a tract.

Meaning she wrote, you know specifically for a purpose to say, Now is the time, now is the time to act.

We can do this.

The Supreme Court decision can be obeyed.

Also, she ties in the results of the studies on children with different physical abilities.

And that takes that Supreme Court decision much farther than most people were thinking.

(violin music) - We should be asking for the impossible.

We should be demanding of whites in this case, to look at their prejudices to be honest about their racism, to remove those masks.

So for those who say that she was being unrealistic, I would say that Lillian Smith was being all too realistic.

Realistic in describing the gravitas of white supremacy and realist in describing what it will take.

The level of honesty and the profound acts of love and self-sacrifice that are necessary to overturning that system of oppression.

(gentle music) - [Rose] Lilly was diagnosed with cancer in the early fifties.

Now, in those days, cancer was still considered to be pretty much a death sentence.

She's facing her own mortality.

She's had radical mastectomy.

It returns.

And then she's writing the journey and she's trying to find out what she really believes.

- [Mary] Several times we were told that she might not make it, but then she would seem to be clear of it before it reasserted itself.

And during that time, she would do these things like go to India and write another book and so forth.

So she made a wonderful use, extension of her life.

- The journey, in which she explored her own life using psychological insights, was very confusing to people.

Confusing because she dealt with issues like fear and self-doubt, and the reviewers just didn't know what to do with it.

Now, this was the kind of writing though that drew in other adventurous and inquiring intellectuals and writers like Pauli Murray, who was just captivated by the journey.

In fact, there were passages that she loved to read over and over again.

Passages about how if one succumbed to it, fear could become disabling.

(groovy music) (upbeat music) - [Lonnie] It is very difficult to overestimate how important her voice was in, in the southern view of race that, that was out here at the time.

I don't think there's anybody else who could top her, primarily because she was writing about it.

You know, she was, she was bringing it forward in prose, excellent prose.

It was reassuring for young college kids like me to know that there were white people who were willing to go against the tide and articulate that the blessings of liberty, justice, and freedom ought to cover people of color too.

There weren't that many white people who were reinforcing our views.

They were on the other side.

"Get back", "stand back", you know what have you.

- [Chris] Lillian Smith was one of the keynote speakers at one of our conferences during the student movement days.

And I remember a story that she told about an experience that she had along with her brother.

They were playing in the backyard, and they were on this child game of treasure hunting.

And lo and behold, they came across a buried trunk, and they started digging.

And low and behold, the trunk was full of money.

So they rushed off to the store and put the money on the counter.

The store owner, the clerk, says "You can't buy anything with this money.

This is Confederate money.

You cannot buy anything with this money."

And then Lillian Smith said, "The nation, the South is trying to buy its future with outdated Confederate dollar bills."

(calm trumpet music) - [Brenda] Martin Luther King's home phone number was written in pencil on the wall beside the phone in the kitchen.

(calm trumpet music) (calm trumpet music) - He was arrested.

Do you know all this about it?

He was arrested when he had her in the car.

- [Woman 1] King was driving Lillian to the hospital when he got pulled over by the police.

Now it was probably because he was driving with a white woman in the front seat, but what they said it was because he had an expired tag.

The traffic conviction came up a few months later when King was arrested during the Atlanta student movement and charged with violating his probation.

He was put in jail, in DeKalb County, and in the middle of the night they snuck him out and sent him to one of the most dangerous prisons in Georgia, down in Reedsville.

Once this happened, with the presidential election only a month away, the Kennedys began to work behind the scenes for his release.

- Well, owe a great bit of gratitude to Senator Kennedy and his family for this.

- [Hal] At one point, the King that spoke of agape love said that "I'm sorry to say that, that the vast majority of white people in the United States are racist either consciously or unconsciously."

So I would think that Lillian Smith, given her work, in whether it's "Killers of the Dream" or "Strange Fruit", King would've recognized in Lilian Smith, an ally, a white ally who was not just rhetorically committed but who put her life on the line, who was capable of being stigmatized and being ostracized.

And I think this is the kind of courage that Martin Luther King was looking for.

This is the kind of courage that he appreciated.

(calm piano music) - [Film narrator] There were times when even the memories, rich as most of them are, didn't seem reason enough for staying on our mountain.

Twice it was swept by mysterious fires, one of which destroyed irreplaceable manuscripts and notes.

But with the courage, she has also demonstrated in a long fight against cancer, Lillian Smith stayed on, uncompromising in her protest, Commercially, she has never approached the success of "Strange Fruit".

Many an old friendship has been shattered beyond repair.

The fashionable description of her was "outcast".

But there is none of the martyr in Lillian Smith.

Her humor alone would make that unthinkable.

- For, for Lill, I mean her... there was no strong barrier between her life as activist and her life as artist, as writer.

The line between them was a very permeable membrane.

I mean, one just flowed into the other.

So not to be recognized as an artist was very painful.

- [Woman 2] She wrote memoir, which reads like a novel.

And one of the things that reviewers frequently say about memoirs now, at least bestselling memoirs is that they read like novels.

And Lillian Smith did that long ago.

She was a writer who was grounded in psychological insights.

- [Mary] She said, "Sometimes I get just so sick and tired of the only thing they want to talk to me about is race.'

- [Woman 3] She wasn't in the thick of things.

She wasn't in Washington - [Brenda] No longer notorious, no longer the bestselling author, probably considered somewhat eccentric, and maybe lost in the shuffle.

- [Woman 2] She was cantankerous enough to kind of fight with people.

I mean, she fought with people in the NAACP, and she got grumpy at other activists, and she just wasn't willing to play the be nice publicity game.

She was uncompromising.

And I think uncompromising artists and uncompromising activists don't always get famous and celebrated, but she was still as active as she could be and as engaged and committed as she could possibly be to the things that she felt were right.

- [Rose] She never stops writing, speaking, taking every opportunity, and say what she can about what's going on.

I don't think she was ever looking only just entirely at the deep South.

But she really sees this movement for social justice and breaking up of, of empires.

But she says, "Wherever they are, what people are really asking for is to be seen as human beings."

She's speaking globally as well as, as locally.

(peaceful guitar music) (peaceful guitar music) (gentle piano music) - [Woman 1] She just had worn herself out.

So her last thing to control was her funeral.

She set out very specific things she wanted to happen.

She didn't want her family to watch her being put into the grave.

- [Mary] The lines on her tombstone are from the journey.

She says, "I want my mind to cover the whole globe but I want my roots to stay here on home ground."

(gentle piano music) (upbeat music) - "It took grace under pressure," Murray told the audience, "for astronauts to brave the unknown and open a new frontier."

For James Meredith to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, under military guard, for Rosa Parks to refuse to give up her seat to white passengers, knowing that she would be arrested.

And for Lillian Smith to write about the psychosis of white supremacy and ally herself with the Civil Rights Movement.

"As women of conscious," Murray told the audience, "we have the responsibility of carrying on the great pioneering tradition of the valiant women who have gone before."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello everyone, My name is Bobby Huntley, and I am here with Hal Jacobs, the director of "Lillian Smith: Breaking The Silence", an amazing documentary.

Thank you so much, Hal, for joining us again.

- Thank you.

- So give us a little bit more insight of what about Lillian Smith stood out to you that want to help get a story out there.

- I'm, I'm one of those people who had never heard of Lillian Smith.

And I grew up in the south, and I took, you know, the, the the standard writing classes and everything.

And her name never came up.

And I was working on another film about a woman from North Georgia, who was an artist philanthropist.

And I would be driving down the highway, and I would see a sign about Lillian Smith.

And then people started asking me about her since I was in that area.

Like, what about Lillian Smith?

I had no idea until I went to Wikipedia, saw that she had written a bestselling novel in the 1940s, and then wrote another memoir, "Killers of the Dream".

That was just very radical.

And when I started reading her, I was just blown away by just, first of all, she's a brilliant writer.

She was identifying things in our society that are still going on today and were, and were just, you know, the hot button issues when I started the film in 2016 during an election year.

And so I just had to do that story and let more people know about her, basically - [Woman] Lillian said of her writing, "I didn't start out to write this novel about racial things.

She said, "I look for the truth as I write.

And I put down what I find."

- Now, Hal, why do you think not a lot of people know about her or her story today?

- I think that's a complicated question.

I think there are, are are several reasons why.

For one thing, she felt that after she had published "Killers of the Dream", which was directly attacking the social structures of the South and talking about how toxic white supremacy was, after that, she was virtually blacklisted in the south.

Her books were like put on under counters.

Newspaper editors stopped covering her work.

She was still well known in the North, the New York Times would still publish her things, but she was quieted down in the South, including network television.

She was just too controversial.

- [Bobby] So during the production of this documentary, what were some of the challenges or difficulties that you faced?

- I think it's always a challenge to make the past come alive in a way that will grab people's imaginations especially young people, which is the audience I want.

And at the time I didn't know anyone who was still living, who, who knew Lillian Smith.

And I, I, I approached it, you know, I went through the, the regular channels of finding a researcher editor who, who had invested her academic career, Rose Gladney.

And she was very well informed.

But it wasn't until I met Lonnie King who had been an Atlanta Student Movement Leader in the early sixties, that I really found the heart of Lillian Smith because he had a connection with her that was just amazing.

And, at first, I just thought maybe he had known of her in a third person kind of way, but she had invited him and his wife to her cabin, on the mountaintop, when interracial gatherings like that were banned against the law.

And he talked about how much she influenced him, and, and the fact that she was able to say things that he knew were true about the South, about this human condition.

But nobody else was willing to say at the time, whites were willing to say at the time.

That was, that was a powerful moment.

And, and then I started meeting other people who had a connection with her, and she just sort of came to life at that point.

- [Lonnie] It's very difficult to overestimate how important her voice was in, in the southern view of race that, that was out here at the time.

I don't think there's anybody else who could top her.

Primarily, because she was writing about it, you know, she was, she was bringing it forward in prose.

Excellent prose.

- So how did Lillian Smith's work ripple beyond the South in terms of Civil Rights and going into the world of human rights?

- I, I think she was recognized as somebody who was not just speaking about the southern condition but was talking about larger issues facing the world.

Basic human rights issues.

I mean, she had traveled the world.

She had been to India, she had been to South America, and she had spent time in China.

So she had a worldview, and she was recognized as such in, in the 1960s.

She was receiving awards for her vision.

And if her health hadn't brought her down, she was diagnosed with cancer in 1954.

She was doing the radiation treatments at the time which were very primitive, but she kept up her writing and her speaking engagements throughout the sixties un, until her death in '66.

After her untimely death in 1966, Martin Luther King wrote a really sweet note to the family and, and talking about how the world had just lost a very important voice.

- Thank you, Hal, so much.

And it was great speaking with you.

(film projector beeping) - Whether we are discussing the world that could be, or the world that we live in, it's evident that the ideals and morals we carry for ourselves and each other cast a ripple effect throughout our world.

And that impact continues in the next episode of "Atlanta on Film", where we sit with an alleged killer.

Then we take a trip down to Savannah, Georgia to see how one pastor's legacy created a lasting effect on the city as well as his family.

I'm Bobby Huntley and thank you for joining me.

I'll see you next week here at "Atlanta on Film".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)