Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
Killers of the Dream
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Ashby
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.00 for first 30 days
Killers of the Dream
Buy Now for £12.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Summary
A Southern white writer, educator, and activist, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) spoke out all her life against injustice. In Killers of the Dream, her most influential book, she draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation—the intricate system of taboos—that undergirded Southern society.
Published to wide controversy, it became the source (acknowledged or unacknowledged) of much of our thinking about race relations and was for many a catalyst for the civil rights movement. It remains the most courageous, insightful, and eloquent critique of the pre-1960s South.
"I began to see racism and its rituals of segregation as a symptom of a grave illness," Smith wrote. "When people think more of their skin color than of their souls, something has happened to them." Today, listeners are rediscovering in Smith's writings a forceful analysis of the dynamics of racism, as well as her prophetic understanding of the connections between racial and sexual oppression.