Lillian Smith was an outspoken southern liberal whose work focused on dismantling the racist, segregationist policies of the United States at a time when it was extremely unpopular and even dangerous to do so. In 1944, she wrote Strange Fruit, a novel about a bi-racial love affair in small town Georgia. The book was banned in Boston a month after its publication and the U.S. Postal Service refused to ship Strange Fruit until Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and convinced her husband to lift the mail ban.