Ashana Bigard
Ashana Bigard interviews Jerome Smith on Super Sunday in New Orleans.
Many years ago, I had the good fortune to meet Harry Belafonte at a gathering in Oakland, California. When I mentioned that I was from New Orleans, Louisiana, the great singer and civil rights activist asked me if I knew Jerome Smith. “Yes,” I said, “Of course.” Belafonte proceeded to tell me that Smith was, in his opinion, more than half of the reason that we have civil rights today.
Such accolades were not uncommon for Smith, founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. This, as recorded by James Baldwin, is what Lorraine Hansberry said of Smith while pointing him out at a 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy: “You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man over there. That is the voice of twenty-two million people.”
Jerome Smith, known by his nickname Big Duck, died on August 21, at the age of eighty-seven. I spoke with him many times over the years, and his death feels to me like the loss of a family member. I know he lived a long life, and that many people in this city celebrated him. But his death still stings. He will be missed. He was dearly loved. We are his legacy, and we have the responsibility of continuing his work.
Smith joined the Congress of Racial Equality when he was nineteen years old and rode as a Freedom Rider in 1961, enduring beatings and more than a dozen arrests as he challenged segregation across the South. He became a leader of the New Orleans sit-in movement. He then spent the rest of his life doing the quieter work of that same fight. He fought for equity by celebrating women, children, and his entire community.
In 1968, Smith and fellow activist Rudy Lombard cofounded Tambourine and Fan, a youth organization rooted in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. The group taught generations of children about their history, their culture, and their worth. He fought by showing up to city council meetings and school board meetings. He quietly paid the utility bills and mortgages for cash-strapped people in his community, despite not being a wealthy man himself. He was an incredible human being who did so much for so many, and most people do not know the full scope of what he did.
Even as I write these words, I don’t know the whole of it. But I do know this: According to the famous playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and according to Harry Belafonte himself, the civil rights that Black people, immigrants, women, and everyone protected under the Civil Rights Act enjoy today exist in large part because of the courage, conviction, and power of Mr. Jerome Smith.
I am immensely proud to say that I knew him and spent time with him, and gratefully, so many in my community can say the same. I feel sorry for those who never got the chance to know his powerful hugs, his energy, his incredible voice, his engaging stories. But hopefully we can all learn more about his decades of advocacy, if we tell the truth as we recreate public education around American history.
Smith should be in every history textbook that our children read, so they get a glimpse of the giant who walked among us who fought for all children to be treated equally and justly, who understood that the celebration of culture, love, and community go hand in hand with the fight for justice, and that they are an integral part of that fight, not separate from it.
If Jerome Smith’s legacy and his life meant anything to us, then we carry the responsibility, in our everyday lives, of speaking truth to power and of celebrating our children, our community, and our culture. We must bring the fullness of who we are into every room, loving our community, including its flaws, and seeing the beauty in ourselves and others.