The Psychological Effects of Segregation: Lillian Smith’s Analysis of the Southern System that Harms Blacks and Whites Alike
In the sixty-nine years that Lillian Smith lived in the South, the region changed dramatically and the toll of the crimes perpetrated by its residents are innumerable. Smith’s life was greatly shaped by her experiences as a Southerner and even though she sees the injustices and the hypocrisy of her home with open and discerning eyes, she would still claim to be a Southerner and be proud to call the South her home. She lived in the region for the majority of her life, as she says, “[t]he heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most”. Of the injustices that Smith details in Killers of the Dream, segregation is the greatest of ills and the one that inflicts the most psychological damage on all the people of the South — child and adult, black and white, poor and rich. Smith filters and evaluates her life experiences with segregation, oppression and hate, experiences similar to those of many Southerners, through her considerate point of view and modern works of other thinkers. Smith is able to detail and demonstrate the daily toll segregation takes on residents in the South, as well as interpret the storied and complex reasons for the current political and social situation she lives in while writing Killers of the Dream, published in 1949 and again in 1961, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement. …
The introduction to my Southern autobiography paper on Lillian Smith. I’m in the library right now procrastinating on writing a Sociology paper due tomorrow. I may publish the entirety of the paper to GoogleDocs and link to it here later after being prompted by Mills… I think I did a good job and it’s basically a summary of major points in the book and what I learned.
