Get Your Free Audiobook

Prime logo New to Audible Prime Member exclusive:
2 credits with free trial
1 credit a month to use on any title to download and keep
Listen to anything from the Plus Catalogue—thousands of Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks
Download titles to your library and listen offline
₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.
Killers of the Dream cover art

Killers of the Dream

Written by: Lillian Smith, Margaret Rose Gladney - introduction
Narrated by: Elisabeth Ashby
Free with 30-day trial

₹199 per month after 30-day trial. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for ₹586.00

Buy Now for ₹586.00

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice.

Publisher's 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.

©1949, 1961 Lillian Smith; Introduction copyright 1994 by Margaret Rose Gladney (P)2023 Tantor

What listeners say about Killers of the Dream

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.