It was a great honor to have our documentary “Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence” receive the best full-length documentary award at the 2020 Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival. One of our first interviewees for the film was Lonnie King, a Morehouse alum and Atlanta Student Movement leader. We talked to him in fall 2017 (he died in spring 2019 before the film was finished), and he spoke very movingly about how important Lillian Smith’s voice was to him in the early 1960s. His interview gave us a much deeper understanding of her role in the struggle for human rights and social justice in the South — and the role that whites have in that struggle.
In August, “Breaking the Silence” was awarded “Best Georgia Made” at the Macon Film Festival. The film was also selected earlier in the year by the South Georgia Film Festival — and has been screened publicly or virtually by nearly 50 public libraries, and college, church and social justice groups.
Just as important are the talk-backs. The number-one question being: Why haven’t we heard about her before? Why are the voices of those white demagogues so familiar, but hers isn’t? She felt that she was being silenced in the South by the powers-that-be, but we discovered how many people she inspired behind the scenes, from the girls at her camp to openminded college students in the 1950s and ‘60s, Freedom Riders, and men like Lonnie King, John Lewis, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s been quite an honor to share her words and vision with others. To bring her back into the conversation that we should all be having with others and ourselves.
