From his youth, Jerome Smith had dedicated his life to the fight to bring down Jim Crow segregation, where he grew up in New Orleans, as well as in the 1961 Freedom Rides across the South and the fight against racism in the decades afterward. He died from cancer Aug. 21. He was 87.
Smith stood up to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy at a meeting at one of the Kennedy family’s homes in New York, May 24, 1963. The dispute captured the determination of many civil rights fighters and Blacks across the South not to subordinate the struggle to end Jim Crow to the needs of the Democrats, who ruled with the support of racist Dixiecrats based in the South. The clash laid bare the administration’s desire to get civil rights groups to tone down their actions going into the 1964 presidential elections.
After dropping out of high school, Smith became a longshoreman and got involved in the unions on the docks. He joined and helped lead sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in New Orleans, part of the ongoing movement nationwide to bring down Jim Crow. Then he decided to participate in Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality to desegregate interstate transportation.
In 1963 Smith was in New York receiving medical treatment for serious injuries suffered two years earlier, when he was assaulted by racist thugs with brass knuckles during a Freedom Ride he had joined in McComb, Mississippi.
In New York, he was invited by writer James Baldwin to a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, who was trying to line up Black figures to back Kennedy’s reelection campaign in 1964. Several prominent Black artists took part, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, musicians Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, and psychologist Kenneth Clark.
Robert Kennedy began by presenting a self-serving list of the administration’s “accomplishments” in standing up to segregation, before getting down to his main goal. He said that Southern Dixiecrats were “in revolt and we have to be somewhat considerate about how we keep them on board, if the Democratic Party is going to prevail in the next elections.” In trying to achieve this, he asked those at the meeting to explain why so many African Americans were becoming attracted to Malcolm X.
Smith became increasingly agitated. “I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you and your brother,” he told Robert Kennedy. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail-party patter.” Pointing to the role of Kennedy’s Justice Department during the Freedom Rides, he said, “I’ve seen you guys stand around and take notes while we’re being beaten.”
Smith told the attorney general that he had been pledged to nonviolence, but was “close to the moment where I’m ready to take up a gun.”
Kennedy was “shocked,” biographer Larry Tye says in Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon. “But Smith wasn’t through,” Tye writes, “Not only would young blacks like him fight to protect their rights at home, he said, but they would refuse to fight for America in Cuba, Vietnam, or any of the other places the Kennedys saw threats.”
“You will not fight for your country?” Kennedy exclaimed in horror, “How can you say that?”
Smith didn’t back down, saying that being in a room with Kennedy, “makes me nauseous.”
Kennedy grew increasingly angry, turning away from Smith to appeal for support to those at the meeting.
Instead, Hansberry told Kennedy, “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” she said, pointing to Smith.
Hansberry recounted the exchange later, saying, “What we are interested in, is in making perfectly clear” that “we are represented by the Negroes in the streets of Birmingham.” The meeting was taking place as Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor was turning dogs and fire hoses on youth fighting to desegregate the city in Alabama. The fight there, the broadest yet against Jim Crow, inspired working people around the country.
As the meeting broke up, Robert Kennedy turned to Belafonte and said, “Well, why didn’t you say something?” Kennedy later recalled Belafonte, who shared his concern about the Democrats’ reelection in 1964, replied, “If I sided with you on these matters, then I would have become suspect.”
“We left convinced that we had made no dent or impact on Bobby,” Clark said.
By the time the 1964 elections took place, a layer of vanguard fighters for Black freedom had begun organizing independently of the Democratic and Republican parties. The Oct. 26, 1964, Militant featured an article about the candidates that the Freedom Now Party was running in Michigan and elsewhere, as well as growing support for the Socialist Workers Party, including Clifton DeBerry for president and Ed Shaw for vice president.