Hambidge is excited to offer a free private screening of Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence by HJacobs Creative.
From August 17 through August 21, the film will be available to view here.
Hambidge will host a discussion with the filmmakers on Thursday, August 20, 6pm EST, via Zoom. Sign up here to hear their thoughts about Lilian Smith and making the film. Audience members will have the opportunity to join the conversation and ask questions.
Lillian E. Smith (December 12, 1897 – September 28, 1966) was a writer and social critic who lived in Clayton, Georgia. A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions virtually guaranteed social ostracism.
A fearless writer best known for her national bestseller, Strange Fruit (1944), she couldn't look away from the toxic social conditions that repressed the lives and imaginations of both blacks and whites. Segregation amounted to "spiritual lynching,” she said. She used her fame in the 1940s and 1950s to write and speak about it, becoming a champion for civil rights before the Civil Rights Movement took off in the late 1950s.
She wanted change and saw no reason to go slow. She was unrelenting, uncompromising, and unforgiving towards white southerners who wanted to keep the status quo.
Find out more about her and the film here.
About the Filmmakers
Hal Jacobs brings a career in freelance writing and developing written/video resources for higher education into film work that focuses on arts, social justice and the environment. The Lillian Smith documentary is his first full-length project. Previously he worked on “Mary Crovatt Hambidge: Whistler, Wanderer, Weaver, Utopian,” a short documentary about Georgia weaver/entrepreneur/visionary Mary Hambidge, who founded the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, the oldest artists' residency program in the Southeast. His next project will look at a liberal arts education program taking place in Georgia prisons, Common Good Atlanta.
Henry Jacobs is a Hambidge Fellow, a photographer, filmmaker and musician. He is also the Middle Chattahoochee Outreach Director for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. His photography has appeared publicly in several juried exhibitions and can be found in the permanent collection of the Lamar Dodd Art Center of LaGrange College. A licensed drone pilot, in 2016 he travelled to La Libertad, Guatemala, to produce documentary films for a project called "Love Crosses Borders.”