Marble Falls I first met Jerome Smith in 1976. I didn’t know who he was or anything about him then. We had just opened the ACORN office in New Orleans on Howard Avenue near Lee Circle. One of our primary funders then was the Sherwood Forest Foundation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The money originally came from Singer Sewing machines. Lois Masor, the ED, asked if I could find Jerome Smith, because they couldn’t get in touch with him at Tambourine & Fan, no matter how they tried, but, since I was there, could I deliver a message. They had an address on North Robertson. The street runs parallel to Claiborne Avenue as it comes into the upper 9th Ward. There’s no parking. I located the address and parked around the block and walked over. I knocked on the door and said, “I’m looking for Jerome Smith.” They took me to the back, and I say, “Anne Peretz wants you to get in touch because a guy named Hyatt at a Boston shoe factory has 1000 pairs of shoes for you to distribute.” I didn’t understand any of this. He nodded. I knew somehow Anne Peretz knew him from the civil rights movement, and that was that.
Forty years later, I reminded Jerome of our first meeting when he was sitting at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse one evening, where he was a regular, always nursing a cup of tea and often a gluten-free bread. He was a quiet, steady, humble, and sweet man. He was living in Baton Rouge at the time, where he had relocated after Katrina. He would get a ride up there from a friend. By that time, I had run into Jerome occasionally, usually at City Hall. I knew what Tambourine & Fan was about and how important it was to many children in the city and to building generational understanding of racial and cultural pride and social justice. Some called him “Big Duck”, because of the way kids, like little ducklings, would follow him around. I didn’t. I had reverential respect for him. More importantly, I knew Jerome was legendary, not just in New Orleans, but as a central, though often unheralded, rock in the civil rights movement, including as a member of CORE, where NWRO’s George Wiley had been deputy director. When he would praise ACORN, it was like putting gold in your pocket.
Jerome had been a freedom rider on the bus in the south. He was at the lunch counters on Canal Street, when it counted. He had been beaten within an inch of his life in McComb, Mississippi, only 90 miles north of New Orleans. He had told Attorney General Robert Kennedy that they weren’t doing spit to protect African-American voting rights in the south. He was the epitome of the civil rights movement in New Orleans and the South.
At his death in New Orleans days ago at 87, the local paper featured a half-dozen pictures of him, including his mug shot from an arrest in Jackson, in a page-and-half tribute that had obviously been in preparation for years. Congressmen, judges, and former mayor and the head of the Urban League, Marc Morial, gave tributes. An oral history he had given included hair-raising, death-defying stories of the civil rights struggle. The story included historian Arthur Schlesinger’s quotes from singer Lena Horne and playwright Lorraine Hansberry about his rebuke to Robert Kennedy.
He was a giant and an inspiration to all who stand in his shadow and do the work. Thanks, and respect!