Desc: Miss Smith of Georgia: Directed by Dick McCutchen. With Lillian Smith, Ruby Dee, Carson McCullers. Portrait of the Georgia author and civil rights activist Lillian Eugenia Smith, known most prominently for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944). 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.