We Must Not Remain Silent: Lillian Smith’s “Address to White Liberals”

Whenever I go to the Lillian E. Smith Center, I take time to look around, and inevitably, I always find something new that I’ve somehow missed in my previous trips. Usually, i scan the numerous books that Smith has in her library, her bedroom, and elsewhere. During a recent trip, I picked up Bucklin Moon’s Primer for White Folks (1945), a book I’d picked up before and one that Moon inscribed to Smith. Primer for White Folks in an anthology, collecting writing from various authors filled with “writings by and about Negroes from slavery days to today’s struggle for a share in American Democracy.” Lillian Smith’s “Addressed to White Liberals” appears near the end of the collection, and her essay immediately follows Chester Himes’ “Democracy is for the Unafraid.” In a recent post, I wrote about the ways that James Baldwin, in “The Creative Process,” and Lillian Smith, in “The Role of the Poet in a World of Demagogues,” approach the role of the artist in society, and I see Smith’s “Addressed to White Liberals” as a precursor, specifically to her 1965 speech.

Smith begins “Address to White Liberals” by writing, “We are facing a serious racial crisis in our American life today, a crisis that cannot be met in the old way or with the old answers if were are to avoid tragedy.” Here, Smith foreshadows her opening sentence in Killers of…