Organizing Heroes: Frank Smith Jr.

In the third installment of "Underdogs United," Ben MacConnell interviews Frank Smith Jr., a civil rights organizer and the founder and director of the African American Civil War Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Smith recounts his organizing career, beginning with his first "conscious moment" as a child when he viewed pictures of Emmett Till's body being pulled from the river in Jet magazine. He describes his frustration with local business leaders who sold out the college students leading integration efforts in Atlanta, and finally, his decision to join Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to build power in Mississippi's 'Black Belt' by registering African-Americans to vote.

His tales of courage and his ability to laugh—literally—at terrorism demonstrate that true heroism lies not in the pursuit of ease, but in the unwavering resolve found within when things get tough.

For more on the tremendous history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): https://snccdigital.org/.

To learn more or plan a visit to the African-American Civil War Memorial Museum:  https://afroamcivilwar.org/

Permission has been granted to use all music  in this podcast including:
Song: Waiting Room from album: 13 Songs; written and produced by Fugazi, Dischord Records, released 1988
Song: Merchandise from album: Repeater, written and produced by Fugazi, Dischord Records, released 1990

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/yeti-music/at-dawn; License code: WJJSYCE7FEDDVDOD

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/yeti-music/prisms; License code: C1AYWH9MNYRVUZDQ

Transcript

Underdogs United Podcast Episode 3: Organizing Makes Heroes Transcript

*** Phone Ringing ***

Benjamin MacConnell 00:09

You know when they say, never meet your heroes, they're wrong. 

*** Answering the Phone ***

Frank Smith, Jr.: Hello Frank Smith. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Yeah, Dr. Smith. It's Ben McConnell. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah. Hey, Ben. How are you? 

Benjamin MacConnell: I'm okay. How are you doing? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: We're going to do it on this line? 

Benjamin MacConnell: Is that okay? Would you like me to call you on a landline? 

Frank Smith, Jr. : No, it's fine with me. We don't even have a landline. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Yep, it's 2024, isn't it? 

Frank Smith, Jr: That's right. That's right. That's right. 

Benjamin MacConnell: I want you to meet Frank Smith, an authentic American hero cut from the deep history of organizing people into a force for good.  My interview with him will take us back to a time when registering African Americans to vote could get you killed. A place called Marshall County, Mississippi in 1962. Organizers like Frank faced police harassment during the day and Klan reprisals by night. 

Instead of running away, Frank and his friends dropped out of college and ran toward the struggle. His life and the stories he shares in this interview need no additional commentary, really. So I'll stay out of the way. 

But humbly, I just want to say this at the beginning. My fellow organizers and I have not and will likely never face the level of physical and mental intimidation that Frank and his fellow organizers endured. 

And yet, I often find myself yearning for the labor to be less trying to come just a little bit easier. My takeaway from talking with Frank is I actually had it all backwards. It's not the labor that must get lighter. 

It's the steely resolve that he possessed that we should be praying for. Thanks, Frank. 

*** Fugazi’s Waiting Room music ***

Benjamin MacConnell: Welcome to the Underdogs United Podcast, the podcast series dedicated to anyone curious about or deeply committed to organizing people into a force for good. 

Who knows? This could be your life's calling. I'm your host Ben McConnell. 

*** Fugazi’s Waiting Room music fades ***

Benjamin MacConnell: So for the people listening that have no idea what SNCC is, tell us a little bit about it. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Okay, so the student SNCC, first of all, the letters stand for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

And it's a good description of how we started out. We were all students based in mostly historical Black House campuses, each of which started their own demonstrations in the local community where the school is located. 

So I was in Atlanta at Morehouse College, and we started as City Movement in Atlanta, and then later when we formed SNCC, which was a federation of these campus organizations, which was what SNCC was. SNCC then for the first time in 1962 developed a program where we would send, ask people to drop out of school essentially to pause their education and go live in these communities to try to register people to vote. 

And some of that was due to the fact that we would go in and spend a few days in some communities, let's say over the Easter holidays, and then when we left, the local people would be punished for by, white clan people, let's put it that way, would be punished for coordinating with us, cooperating with us, for marching with us, picketing. 

And so in the meantime, we'd be back on our campus, or wherever, where we were, safe. And so we decided we couldn't no longer expose people to that kind of danger and then leave them. So now we've become an organization where our number one objective is to get people to go and live in these neighborhoods, to embed themselves in the local neighborhood and organize them. 

And it actually was a tremendous success. So that's sort of how it got started. That's the sort of thumbnail of how it got, it's really how it got its beginning and how it really gained footing as a civil rights group. 

Benjamin MacConnell: And so just in the beginning, it was kind of a disparate set of student organizations and then the voting registration campaign became a national movement that drew from all over the country. Is that about right? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah. And let me just mention this - in the beginning, it's a sit -in movement that's going to these restaurants and drug stores and various places where they had lunch counters. And, and, and those lunch counters were an outward symbol of discrimination - a much deeper profound discrimination process that was in the laws of these states. 

And really was in, in, in the constitution of the United States until the, the 64 civil rights act was passed 1964 civil rights act. So we're talking 1962 here now. So we're two years before the civil rights act is passed. 

So, so, so, so, so that, that's what SNCC was doing. And that, that became sort of the symbol of the movement - integration at the lunch counter. And you know Dr. King had started this group back in Montgomery, Alabama, around integration on the buses. 

The Montgomery movement starts because Rosa Parks is sitting in a seat on a bus and some white person get on there and tell her she got to move further back toward the back because only white people sit in the front part of the bus, Black people have to sit in the back part of the bus. So that of the movement had to do with integration as well. 

SNCC transitions from integration, lunch counter integration to voter registration to trying to get people registered to vote primarily because in these what we called “Black Belt” counties, these counties are called “Black Belt” because of the soil. 

But that fertile soil that's Black is also soil where African Americans end up as slaves when they're brought to this country in the beginning and so by the time we get to the 1960s civil rights movement, they're still living in those states, those what we call Black Belt states. 

They were also called the Black Belt because in many of these cases, the Black population outnumbered the white population. And when I went to Holly Springs, Mississippi to Marshall County, Mississippi in 1962, Marshall County was 76% Black. 

That's why they wouldn’t let any Black people register to vote. Because they know - 76% Black - that means that the 34% white community was ruling over these Black people in a so-called democratic society. 

There was a lot of resistance, a lot of violence letting these people register to vote because they knew that once Black people got registered to vote, there would be more equality and more democracy and more cooperation in this county. 

And so we were right from the beginning in a fight with those people who wanted to maintain the status quo. 

Benjamin MacConnell: And once they got registered, did you see a shift in power? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Absolutely. I was in Marshall County, Mississippi, the largest town in Marshall County is Holly Springs, Mississippi. The mayor of Holly Springs has had a Black mayor now for the last 30 or 40 years. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed the poll tax and the literacy test. 

But more importantly, they sent federal registrars in the Mississippi to register Black people to vote. And those people that they targeted, when the federal registrars came into Marshall County, they targeted a list of people that we had already worked with over the years, trying to help them figure out how to pass what was called the literacy test that you had to take to get registered to vote. 

It was a literacy test that Black people had to take, white people didn't have to take it. White people were grandfathered in. Illiterate white people could be allowed to vote. Illiterate. white people would be allowed to vote. 

They wouldn't even take the chance. They knew they would fail. So they didn't have to, they exempted them. They exempted them because their grandfathers had voted. And so because Black people's grandfathers had not voted, we couldn't be grandfathered in. 

So the process was just stacked from the beginning. And we were challenging that in every way we could. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Yeah, I read your field notes in preparation for this interview. And a lot of times you're reporting on how many tests were taken down at the poll station. 

So that was, yeah, it's almost unfathomable to think about that in your lifetime, to think that Black people needed to take a test in order to vote, it's insane. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Right, and actually one of the, just to contrast that even more, I remember we got, we were all summoned from our various locations - me from Holly Springs, Mississippi to Greenwood, Mississippi. 

When one of our people got shot in the spring of 1860, I mean, 1963, it was February, Jimmy Travis gets shot. Yes, and so they bring everybody to, and as part of our demonstrations going on there in Greenwood get arrested. They arrest about four or 500 people. 

They let all the local people go home, but they kept the civil rights workers in jail. Bob Moses, myself, Lauryn and about 12 of us in the jail, we eventually ended up in federal court in Greenville, Mississippi. 

And the judge asked Bob Moses, who was our leader, do you really want all of these, do you really think all of these illiterate Black people ought to be allowed to vote? Bob said, well, first of all, you got a bunch of illiterate white people who have been voting all these years, and nobody had said anything about that. 

And then he said, secondly, in a profound way. He said, Mississippi can't have it both ways. They can't tell Black people that they gotta be literate and educated to vote and then not provide them with the education. 

So you can't have it both ways. You can't tell them… You can't lock them out of the schools and put them in inferior programs and then tell them that they can't be full citizens until they can vote. 

So it can't have it both ways. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Robert Moses kept popping up. He sounds like he was quite the organizer. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah, he was a brilliant man. Absolutely, brave, brilliant, tough. And Mississippi had the class of the SNCC organizers. 

I mean, I take this quote from a book written by a whole female staff from SNCC called “Hands on the Freedom Plow”. And one of the writers in one of the... she was actually stationed in Alabama, she said, ”make no mistake about it, the class of the SNCC organizers were in Mississippi”. 

Now, some of that is based on the fact that Mississippi had a reputation for being the most violent and most scary place probably in America for Black people. And so you had people like me who were going in there, you know, they, they coined a phrase now after that, that, that we were, we were going into danger instead of running away from danger. 

We're going into danger. Yes. But the guy who was a spiritual leader and emotional leader and the mastermind of the organization there in Mississippi was Bob Moses - who actually was born in New York city, by the way. He came to Mississippi when he was an adult, full adult, he was older than we were But we accepted him because he was on the, he was on the ground on the scene and he was one of the bravest person I ever met. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Yeah. So we're talking about you when you were with SNCC from 1962 to 1968 so you're what 19, 20 years old? How old are you? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Well, uh, in 1962, when I went to Mississippi morning, 42, so I would have been 20. Twenty years old and I stayed there until I was 26 when I moved to Washington, DC. 

So, uh, yeah, it was, it was, uh, what would have been college and graduate school for an average American person now, uh, which meant I had put my education on hold. I ended up later on by 82. When I get my PhD, I'm the oldest person in my class. 

So… And my wife went to medical school. She was the senior citizen of her class. So we sacrificed our young years for, uh, for a higher call. 

*** Musical break fade in and out ***

Benjamin MacConnell: What made Frank Smith at 20 answer the call to go to Mississippi? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Well, you know, it's something that I think about a lot in my old age. But I will tell you that my first memory of many things related to this was when I was in eighth grade, when I looked at a jet magazine that had that story in there, the picture of Emmett Till, this mutilated body. 

*** Vintage News Reporter Recording: This is the muddy, backwoods, Tallahatchie River, where a weighted body was found, alleged to be that of young Emmett Till.***

 Frank Smith, Jr.: With a fan, a big fan tied around his weight, so he wouldn't surface, he visited surface. But I saw that when I was in eighth grade. I was probably 12, 14 years old, so. that's my first conscious moment. But by the time I got to college in 1959, the civil rights movement starts in earnest in 1960. So it's the end of my freshman year, first time I marched and picketed and go to jail when I'm a student at Morehouse College. And it was in the air, it was everywhere, everybody. And I did determine at a very early age that I was not going to allow somebody else to do more for my freedom than I did myself. 

So that sort of put me on a trajectory at college where I was demonstrating in Atlanta. And then when SNCC… Bob Moses actually came to Atlanta, and personally recruited me and asked me to come to Mississippi with him. 

So I had a particular attachment to him. And so he, but that was, that was it. And I actually found my calling, my group and we're still… My best friends today are people who were with me in the civil rights movement. 

My wife, first wife, Jean, was the mother of my two children. She and I met through SNCC and got married and eventually stayed together and then came to Washington together so she could go to medical school here at Howard. 

So it set my life on a certain trajectory, which it continues today. I mean, the exhibit here at the African -American Civil War Museum is called Civil War to Civil Rights. And it's a story of Black people fighting for freedom here in the United States. 

And it starts historically with the Civil War, which is a good place to start it. And then we transition to the civil rights movement and then talk about the future from the last part of my exhibit. 

Benjamin MacConnell: I see that. So not that it has to be magical, but describe a little bit getting recruited by Bob Moses at Morehouse. What was that like? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Some of it was that I had become disillusioned with the Atlanta movement. In the first place we had the best boycott. You know, we're trying to integrate lunch counters in Atlanta. We would picket at these places and then, we eventually started a boycott. And it was my job - I was the campus organizer - who probably did most of the organizing in the community around Atlanta. 

So we eventually convinced people not to shop in those stores. The stores didn't care that much that students didn't shop there. You know, students didn't have any money anyway and nobody really cared that much about us - whether we came in there or not. But our presence there would disturb the customers who are already in the place. And, you know, it was a consciousness raising program to try to make these people realize that Black people had been treated badly. 

And some of them didn't care about that, but there were some whites who cared about it, first of all. And then secondly, we coupled that with a boycott - we asked people not to shop there. So African-Americans, we really brought that Rich’s Department Store to its knees. 

Then at some point or another, Martin Luther King, Sr. and the downtown Black business people got involved with the white business people. They came with some kind of… what they call settlement, which was not really a settlement - it was a sellout. It was not a settlement, and I guess they thought we didn't know the difference since we were college students. But we knew the difference between the sellout and the settlement. So, I had become so disillusioned with that. 

And that's how Bob heard about me. He said, “Look, you know what? There's never going be a real movement in Atlanta. You got all these old people here who've run the place.” And they still run it till today, by the way, mostly. 

But that’s one of the reasons why I didn't go back to Atlanta. And I was invited back by many people there, including some of these older business people who they realized later that we could have gotten a lot more out of that agreement if we held out, that they sold out too quickly. So, they got little or nothing out of it. Took ten years to integrate after we had that settlement, which was ridiculous. So, by the end I was fed up with that. Bob heard about it. That's why he came to talk to me about it. 

Now, I had never thought about going to Mississippi.  But let me just add one other thing. I was born in Newland, Georgia, just south of Atlanta. And I grew up on a plantation. I was one of the few people in SNCC who came from the outside and actually picked cotton and chopped cotton. And I picked peaches and tobacco - not tobacco. But so I came out of a farm background, and I knew something about what it took to motivate people in the farming community.  And so, I had a combination of college, and by then some time in the city of Atlanta. But in Mississippi we were assigned to these rural areas. 

I went to Holly Springs, which was 76% Black. It was cotton. All these fields were cotton fields. Now they got some other stuff there. I was there a few weeks ago, in May actually, to speak to a class there, a graduating class at West College. But in old days it was all cotton. Cotton was king. 

And there were Black farmers who owned land there. As a matter of fact, when I first heard about these Black soldiers in the Civil War, I heard about it from a man named Mr. Reeves. Henry Reeves, who was a farmer. He had, one of those people got 40 acres in that 40 acres of mule thing. 

By the time I got there, he had more than 40 acres, he had about 200 acres, so he was a big farmer for Black people. But he also was an NAACP organizer, who was trying to register people to vote. And so he lived in Denton County. He heard there was a freedom rider who had located in Holly Springs in Marshall County. And he came to see if I would add his county to my list of places where I worked, as if I didn't have enough to do already. 

So he came over there and I got interested in working with him. And he had his grandfather's rifle and his uniform. He was the one that told me about these soldiers. So I got interested then and it stayed in my mind, I guess, in my heart. Until years later, I'd be in Washington DC, trying to figure out how to rebuild this historic Black community called Black Broadway. I came up with the idea of putting up a monument to these soldiers. And now that monument is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as a monument with more names than any other monument in the world. 

So it's been a real process, but the reality in life is that we learn as we go. We should take what we learn and use it. You don't learn and just get rid of it. You learn it and put it back somewhere in your mind.  So one day you'll be able to call upon it again to use it when the circumstances are right. And so that's the second lesson I teach to people. The first one is that you can win these rights, as they did during the Civil War, and that period afterwards with these 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment. 

And you can win these rights in Marshall County… right after the Civil War in Marshall County, they had a Black mayor in College Springs, they had a Black sheriff for a few years. And then the Klan gets in there and the White Citizen’s Council and they run all these people out of office. They don't regain those rights until we come in at the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and eventually get the Voting Rights Bill passed. 

The Voting Rights Bill really is the one that changes the place. Because lunch counter integration in Marshall County was not going to change the place. 

What changed it was getting those, taking the trappings of power, the sheriff and the mayor and the police chief, taking those people out of office and putting in some more caring people. And in some cases, those people didn't have to be Black. They were white people who knew that they had to cater to these Black registered voters in order for them to be able to get reelected. So, and then, and if they did something stupid while they were in office and the next time around some Black people got elected, they might still get arrested for having violated the law five or six years ago. 

So, so it changed the whole trajectory of Mississippi. 

Benjamin MacConnell: It's all about power, isn't it? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: It's all about power, who has access to it and how you build coalitions so you can make it work for everybody. 

Benjamin MacConnell: And that's just as, I mean, in doing this podcast and looking at every positive thing that's happened under a democracy, it seems like it always comes back down to power. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah, and it comes down to power, but it also comes down to those fundamental items that are in the Constitution of the United States. I think that when people talk about this country as an experiment, as a magical experiment in the world, it's based on the notion that all people… what makes us equal is our vote counts equal to equal. 

If you're a billionaire, you only get one vote. If you're Frank Smith, you get one vote. So technically, that makes us all equal. Now, a billionaire with his money can maybe go out and buy himself a few extra votes. 

But if I get busy, I might go out there and find a few extra votes too. Somebody who cares about the same items and same issues I care about, and we might still win. 

Benjamin MacConnell: And we call that organizing. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: We call it organizing, absolutely. 

And then the most important thing is that threat of danger that I talked about earlier. What made Mississippi and rural Georgia and Alabama a horrible place to live was the threat that… you faced the local cops - if you tried to sit in and try to get your rights.  And then at night, you faced the Ku Klux Klan, which is what happened to Emmett Till. They show up at your house, you know, drag you out of your house. In some cases, they burn the house down and stuff. So just the object violence, the object violence and threat of violence was so thick and palpable that anybody who had a little bit of sense and two nickels of the rub together got the hell out of there. 

Because it was just a tough place to live and to grow up. And people ought to be able to live and grow up where they want to. People who have worked the Mississippi Delta, who cleared those fields and built those factories and those mines and those tobacco fields ought to be able to stay there if they want to stay and they ought to be able to make a living for themselves and their families.  I mean, they ought to live without fear and without intimidation. And so they have a right, the right to be there. This is their area… It's their country, it's their community.

I was back there, I was back there this year in May - as I told you - it was really amazing to me to see that a number of the young people who are in office there now, people who are second to third generation, they were born in Mississippi, they went away to college in some cases, came back, went away to graduate school, law school, came back. Now they're the ones who are the mayors of these little towns and sheriffs and they're gonna make it work. 

They're battling it out day by day. And my hat's off to them. I chose not to go that way myself. I moved to Washington, but I think those people, including members of my own family, who have stayed there and fought this thing out, they deserve credit for what they've done.  And they ought to be able to live there in peace. And they ought to be able to get some satisfaction out of their life like everybody else. 

Benjamin MacConnell: And now, one of the things that I find fascinating about SNCC is just the sheer violence and threats and intimidation that organizers faced. I mean, I don't know what stands out for you, but in reading your bio, getting a dog shot and killed at your footstep, a police officer beating up SNCC workers on the office porch, Jimmy Travis in Greenwood. I mean, what stands out to you as the most ferocious act of intimidation while you were organizing? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: [Laughs] Well, first of all, uh terrorism. The purpose of terrorism is to put fear in the minds of people, the larger community. In other words, we did this to Emitt Till, we'll do this to you. If you don't get up out of here and don't leave us alone, let us run this thing in the way that we want to do it. 

So that's the first thing. And so many of us who have seen that - as I did - most of the people will tell you, the first thought they ever had about doing something in the movement had to do with that picture of Emitt Till, about the same time I did. 

Because we're all in the same age range. We're all within four or five years of each other in terms of our age group. So so so. And many of us... Now the the people from the North may not had seen this. I don't think Stokely Carmichael - I had never heard him say he saw Emitt Till.  

I never heard Colin Cox or these other people say they seen this. But the people who grew up in the South all saw this. And the purpose, I'm sure that the people who perpetrated that crime were probably satisfied when they found out that the picture would be circulated because they thought that was going to scare the hell out of everybody. 

That is just a misnomer that the world is with all the time - that “if you mutilate somebody, you’ll scare everybody else.” That's not what usually happens. What you do is motivate somebody to say, “Look, we're going to make sure this never happens again.” And we got to do whatever we have to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. So that's, I think, the first thing. 

But secondly, these individual acts of violence, I mean, we all faced it one time or another in some lonely jailhouse.  Ha! I was just back in Indianola, two weeks ago, and went to one place where there was a jail, which actually was about 12 feet by 12 feet. Had four beds, four bunk beds in there. So it doesn't take long to fill up a jail like that. [Laughter] You get about 20 people and they put us all in there. They pack us in there too, like sardines, in those jails. And then they would let these people come in and look at you at night and you’d figure they were the head of the Ku Klux Klan or whatever it is, come through the jail cells, just looking.  And they weren't going to do anything to you in front of all these other people. Very rarely did that happen. But uh… And even when they beat you up, when people like you and others were beaten up, they pull you out of the jail cell, took you somewhere else. 

They bring your ass back bloody and bleeding. And you know, “well, he was sitting in the back of the truck and handcuffed and he fell around as the truck was moving”. That's not true. Everybody knows that wasn't true. So there was some of that. But um the most scary moments were the times when you get - for me - was when I got stopped by myself. There was a certain amount of security, a lot of confidence, a lot of bravado that we had when we were together. 

And this is what got me into Mississippi in the first place that kept me there for all those years. The SNCC staff of about 30 or 40, 50 people, we had made a commitment to each other that if one of us got arrested or shot as Jimmy Travis did in Holly Springs… Greenwood, those of us would leave where we were and come to see about it. And if they put him in jail, we'd end up in jail together. We're not going to leave him in jail by himself. We weren't going to leave town until we got him out. And we had to keep bringing people in there. 

You know, in Greenwood, we brought in, Dick Gregory and Al Hibbler, the singer, and all of these people who came to town. We flooded it with a bunch of people from outside the Greenwood, including the staff, it was only about 25 or 30 of us. And so we just, and that was the message to everybody else that, you know, you're better off leaving us alone, let us do this. Because if you don't, you know, we were able to involve the whole town in this, and then we'd boycott the city, tell people not to shop anymore, wear old clothes. And, you know. So we brought these little towns to a standstill. 

And that just, that got everybody's attention. 

Benjamin MacConnell: So there were safety in numbers, basically, is what you're saying? 

Frank Smith, Jr.:  Yeah, as well as psychological inspiration and having people that you knew around you who were not gonna leave you, they weren't gonna run. If somebody, you know, they saw somebody with a gun, if this place got bombed or something like that. So. It was dangerous work, and when I look back at it, quite honestly, I'm surprised so few of us got killed, quite honestly.

If you told me when I was coming up as a kid in Georgia that Black people and white people would be able to go to school together! White men would die and go to hell before they let Black kids and white kids sit next to each other, Black boys and white girls sit next to each other in a classroom. The schools in the South have been integrated now for 60 years, and some of them are really, some of them are more integrated than schools in the North. The colleges - the Ole Miss has more Black students than Tougaloo College. 

They have four times the number of students as Press colleges who I spoke when I was down there. And up in the Mississippi Delta, Delta State was all white when I left, Delta State now is 75% Black. So it's been a fundamental change. And these people now who graduated from Delta State Blacks are more likely to stay in the city. And so it's made a big difference in the country. 

And, you know, it's a part of what these.. the discussion went on during, so one, they're writing the 13th and 14th, particularly the 15th amendment. These states were saying, they didn't want to live under Black rule.  What does Black rule mean? They mean, if you let all these Blacks in this county register to vote.. .they outnumber whites three to one. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Yeah, there's trouble. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: White people gotta live under these Black people. I am sure that they thought that they had mistreated these people for so long, that if they ever got the power of the badge and the gun and the courts, that they were going to take out revenge on these people.  And that was, that some of that reverberates through the war. First Lincoln didn't want to arm these slaves and put them in the Union Army because he was scared. He said one time, he said “they wouldn't make good soldiers because they were going to be too busy trying to get revenge on the owners who mistreated them so much.” And I would say that that would have probably been a natural reaction for most people. But there's no history of Black people in these sheriff departments that I know of, the police departments in Mississippi and other places, of them, uh, Black people actively organizing to seek revenge on white people who they think might have treated them bad. Matter of fact, sometimes I think they're too meek and humble. They should be more aggressive and probably get more done. But that's why they... put old people like me out to pasture so we can sit on the stage and think about our past. 

We're not in charge anymore. [Laughter]

Benjamin MacConnell: So, you know, in my organizing, the biggest public intimidation is a Facebook post. But an official posted, you know, saying, this is the most divisive figure in our community right now. Pay no attention to him. And listening to you right now describe that you, you know, traveled in packs to ensure your safety. And but it really wasn't all that bad. It's just kind of bizarre to me, honestly, that I mean, to fear police during the day and the Klan during the night. I mean, Dr. Smith, that's pretty crazy. 

Frank Smith, Jr.: It is pretty crazy. 

Well, let me just let me just say this to you. This is something that I think that I would like for white people and Black people to know... For white people to know and Black people to remember: Okay. I was born in Newland, Georgia in 1942. It was originally segregated. I walked to school every day. White kids rode to school on a bus. The road I walked on had no sidewalk. So I walked on the sidewalk on the road till I saw a car coming. Then you had to hit the ditch so you didn't get hit or get run over by a car. Traveling along that road every day was a school bus that had white kids on it. And these kids were going to school on a bus that was provided by the county. I was walking to school with no bus. They were taking my Daddy's tax money like they were taking everybody else's tax money. If they bought something in the store, I pay sale tax. He worked so he paid his payroll tax. 

So so we were paying full taxation. But we're getting no services out of it. So, and also the other part of it, expendable Black boy - you’re being taught the Emitt Till story. If you see white people, don't look at them because they’ll accuse you of all kinds of bullshit. If you meet them on the sidewalk, let them have a sidewalk, they don't want you bump into them. If you do, they’re going to say, you know, all kinds of stuff. So this is part of teaching a Black boy how to survive. 

So, and all of that, I endured all that as a kid. 

And I'll give you an example. One example: so I was about 16 years old. I was driving by the end, a borrowed car. And I told the guy that I borrowed a car from. I was gonna put some gasoline in it before I brought it back. So at about eight o 'clock that night, I'm at the service station. In those days you had to go inside and pay first and come back and pump the gas. So I go outside and give the man my little $5, which is probably a day and a half work in the fields. So I can fill this guys’ car. So about halfway through the pump, some white kids pull up behind me and say, I want that pump, I need to put some gas in my car. 

So I said, well, you know, I just paid for my gas and I’m halfway through, give me a minute, I'll be finished. And he started, well, you know, I tell you to move, then they jumped out of the car. And I said, you know what, I'll be finished in a minute. 

So I'm trying to talk my way out of this. And I eventually do talk my way out of it. They don't bother me. So I get in the car, I'm headed home. Before I get home, somebody called my Dad and told him that I sassed some white boys and they were coming after me. 

So I don’t event know this. I pull up in the yard. My Dad is sitting in the front yard with a shotgun and now he's pissed off at me because he thinks I went out there and stirred all this up. And he thought he had taught me better than that, you know, how to survive and get away with something like this. 

Now he was gonna defend me now. Don't get me wrong. He was not gonna let these people, I was not gonna be on no Emmett Till. He wasn't gonna let you pull me out of the house. But he was pissed off at me because I had brought trouble on the family. Now, you know, he was pissed off by that for a long time, several days too. And so my point is that your life was so tenuous. So you live with this threat of fear and intimidation and stuff every day. 

So when I went to Mississippi, it wasn't new to me to have to face this kind of craziness. But by then we had made up our minds that the only way to ever stop this was we had to face it ourselves. And then in the summer of 64, we brought all these young white people down there so they could see the same violence we had seen. 

And of course it worked like, I don't know what, like a bad movie. Before we even got there, they killed Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. We were still in session in Ohio during the orientation. They stopped at Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, and they missed Goodman and Chaney first, by the way. 

And the sheriff who killed Cheney - because Cheney is the only Black one. The sheriff says, ”Y 'all done killed the white ones already. All you left me was this inbreed to kill.” And that's when he shot Cheney. So, and… that brought the whole lives of the nation, because I think Schwerner's family owned some New York City newspaper. 

And so now the world has seen this violence being perpetrated on white kids. And that's when the nation starts to change. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So that was, now, you know, I will tell you this, you have some of my stuff there. 

But I wrote my Mother a letter when I left Greenwood, and I think it was, I went there in February. I left in, I think, February, a year later, because SNIC re-assigned me to the first congressional district, which was in Columbus, Mississippi. 

And that's where I was, by the way, when President Kennedy was assassinated. But I wrote my Mom a letter, which she saved, too, by the way. And I told her in the letter, I didn't think I would get out of there alive because the Greenwood was the most violent place that I ever worked there. 

They did all kind of shit there. They bombed the office, they shot up our cars, they dragged some kid down the street. They called me one Saturday, the police department now called me one Saturday morning. They had mentioned some guy, they dragged this guy behind a truck. And they called the office, said they wanted somebody to come out there, because this was one of our people who had been killed. Now, I quickly took a little, now I was in charge, by the way, because Guyot was in jail. He was supposed to be in charge, but they locked him up already. And that's when he was in Winona. That's when they locked him up. He went to get Ms. Hamer out of jail in Winona, and they locked him up. They left me in charge of the office. 

By the way, I was the one who eventually went to get Ms. Hamer out of jail, which was a horrible scene to see them come out of there. They've been beaten and mutilated and stuff. 

But anyway, so I get out to this truck where they dragged this body behind, and this was a gravel road, so I couldn't recognize them anyway.  And the dude had one arm. Now, this was not somebody we knew. It was not somebody, and I couldn't recognize them anyway. But what was that all about? It was about them trying to show us this violence. 

So they would scare us away, make us leave the town and all this stuff. But they didn't realize that at that point, we knew we couldn't leave. because the local people, we were leading them, we were leading them to face this day and they were all by themselves. 

At least we had outside contacts. We had press contacts, we had those people, students. We had money, we could get money if we needed to. And we, so at that point we couldn't leave. But yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was, so I wrote her a letter telling her I was glad to get out of there because I didn't think I'd get out of there alive.  And she saved that one. She had been out of there, she saved that one. So I don't know where it is now. I've got to find it again, but she saved it for me. 

Benjamin MacConnell: That notion of not leaving them high and dry, that seemed to cling to you?

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah, yeah.

Benjamin MacConnell: There's a little write up about you thinking about going back from Mississippi your senior year to Morehouse and you get this newspaper clipping and somebody writes a note to you. This is what happens when you leave us, right? 

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Frank Smith, Jr. : Yeah, yep, yep. You know, actually Bob who called me up said that - Moses - because they had somebody, some guy that we, this was somebody that we had talked to, and who had tried to register to vote, and they killed this guy and dropped it.  They found his dismembered body in a river. They put him in a sack, a croaker sack, which has uh… one of those things that you bought to put cotton seeds in. It was a cotton sack - a cotton seed sack that had holes in it. So I guess they put him in there, so his body would sink. But they fished his body out and it took a long time for them to identify who it was. But they initially put in the paper that it was somebody who had been part of the civil rights movement over there. I didn't recruit him, well not someplace where I'd been, so I wasn't personally involved in trying to get this man involved. But it was enough to convince me that we couldn't leave these people. 

Benjamin MacConnell: But Bob Moses challenges you, he calls you and challenges you? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah, but he challenged himself all the time too. He lived with this. He lived with it himself. An organizer is somebody who's a judge of personality. You have to be able to connect with the people that you're trying to influence to go do something. That's how you get them to do it. And I think he thought he could convince me to come back and he did, by the way. So I did come back. He came back too. He came back. 

And actually, I'm just closing story about Bob because because in 63 in the fall when he starts talking about this summer project that takes place in the summer of 64.  He brought this to a staff meeting. We voted it down quite honestly. I was one of the people that voted this down. 

Benjamin MacConnell: This was his voter registration proposal? You guys voted it down?

Frank Smith: No, this was the proposal to do the summer project where we would invite our SNCC.. uh… white SNCC allies - our white campus groups to come. To his credit… us. And this is something that a lot of people lose about that - SNCC people lose this  too, at some point…

We always had a white group of white kids that supported us. We were active this generation of Black students who college campus activists. We also attracted attention on White college campus with activists, too. And we saw those as our allies. They raised money for us. We all helped. SNCC had staff people who were assigned to go to certain white campuses. I was assigned to a Carleton College in Minnesota, I believe it was. And so I went there two or three times. 

And when I get out, well, you can sit in jail for 10 days. You get out and you want to sneak over to a campus somewhere. So now you go talk to people on campus. You just got out of jail. You go and you’re a hero on the campus. “Yeah, that's right. We face these people. We need you to help.” 

But at that point, we weren't trying to bring them down now. At that point, we were not bringing them to Mississippi because we knew that that was gonna blow up. We knew that there would be like waving and a red flag in front of a bull. You bring some white people, especially white women down there. You see these white guys are gonna go crazy. 

So when Bob started talking about bringing these people down for the summer of 64, we voted this stuff down. We said, “”Look, man, we are facing this danger already. First of all, it’s not going to do any good. Secondly, we facing this danger already. Why would we invite more danger on ourselves? 

But that's when Bob said - and this is what convinced me - he said, “Look, see, people are killing us one by one. They killed Medgar Evers. They shot President Kennedy in the fall. Every time some civil rights advocate got killed, we always thought, you know, it’s a numbers game. They come after them in the morning. They come after us at night. 

So it scared us all. And this is the first time I ever thought Bob was personally afraid because I thought about myself as a SNCC for him in Mississippi. I was probably, if they had a list that they were working off of, I was probably number 50 on that list. 

I was not, you know, I may have been higher than that, but I told myself that I probably was low down on a list. But Bob was probably number one. And he finally just said to us, “Look, we won't be here next year. They're gonna kill us all off. And nobody gives a shit about us being killed. So they don't. care about Black people get killed”. 

So, so, so basically what he said, "Well, let's bring some of these white people down here and let's use them. They're going to lock them up too. They're going to put them in jail. They're going to do the same thing as them. They do us." 

But, um, and then as I said earlier, the, uh, the way, you know, the worst thing you could ever imagine happened - they killed Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. And, you know, we, we, we couldn't have scripted it any better. If you were writing a bad movie or bad play. Uh, and, uh, three, two Blacks and one white and, you know, that's when I say point, uh, you know, SNCC, uh, uh, that we, we told, we told a lot of people that, uh, they, they, they had to come and help us. 

Basically what we said to them, these college kids on this college campuses. And it was a summer program for them. So they came down during the school, school break schools out in the summer. So all these kids came down because they were out for the summer breaks. And instead of them going to the beach and other places, they came to Mississippi with us. And, uh, but they had a lot of information about what we were doing because we were going back and forth to these campuses, reporting to them. 

And we had a group called the Freedom Singers that were singing on these campuses, concerts and stuff. And then individuals like myself, who would go to some campus and talk to them. And we had, so it was a real, we were a real organization. And we found our allies in this thing. 

And that's what you have to do. When you're 20% of the population in the country, 20% can't rule 80% in a democratic society. That's not a democracy. If you're only 20%, you got to find some way, you got to reach across the aisle in order for you to become a majority. That's the only way you can become a majority. Unless you think you can kill off all of your opposition, which is what happens in these third world countries. They think they can kill off their opposition. And once they do that, the opposition is dead. So they can't ever form a majority against the people in power. 

Benjamin MacConnell: When I was a kid sitting in my, I can distinctly remember sitting in middle school, watching what must've been the Birmingham bus boycott and seeing just Black and white footage of dogs being unleashed on African -Americans and everything. 

And my conception of the civil rights movement until I really began to study it, I think is not uncommon for a lot of people. It's just like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rides in on a horse, ringing a bell and thousands of people just flood the streets. 

And then all of a sudden there's a changing of consciousness in the country. But when I read your field notes and when I read Bob Moses' field notes and just the whole infrastructure of SNCC and its voter registration drive. I mean, this is a Swiss clock. I mean, it's organized. You've got, you're writing field reports with specific numbers. You're organizing mass meetings. You're getting block captains. You're doing intensive canvassing. You're submitting budgets. You have mock elections. I mean, this is very well organized. And I think that's lost on people, this concept of, I mean, I don't want to take anything away from significant figures like Martin Luther King Jr. 

But I want to give credit where it's due. And SNCC is pretty intense in terms of organization. I mean, in terms of planning and execution and rehearsals. And I mean, it's strong grassroots organizing. Am I wrong? 

Frank Smith, Jr.: Yeah. Let me say, we talk a lot about Bob Moses. I do talk a lot about him. I was obviously very personally committed to him. But Jim Forman was probably the mastermind behind the overall plan. 

And Jim was actually an interesting guy. He was actually born in Mississippi. He was born in Holly Springs, but north part of the county. Went to Chicago as a kid with his parents. And so he would come back in the summers as a kid.  So he was like many of us from the south. We were visited by our relatives who went away to the north and came back and told us how great they were doing and how poorly we were doing with you know, going barefoot. 

And I used to wonder, “Why do my relatives come back down here?” I said, “If we’re such poor, ignorant people, why do you want to spend time coming back to visit us?” 

Then I went to Chicago. I had never seen that many poor people in one place in my life until I went up there. They didn't even have peach orchards, but they could eat peaches and plums and strawberries and stuff. They lived in this concrete jungle, man. 

I said, “how could anyone want to grow up like this?” So I realized why the parents were sending their kids back down into summer because they wanted him to get a little bit of acculturation as kids. 

But I wanted to mention a Forman because I remember sitting down with him in Atlanta with a map. And we were talking about places where we were gonna sign people in Mississippi. That's how I ended up in Marshall County, which was a combination of things. You look for places where the majority Black population and there was a college located there. So there were some kids on these campuses that already joined some demonstrating. And so there was a, and then we had a list of NAACP people who lived, who had been involved in, you know, the demonstrations there in those counties too. 

So we were doing what good organizers do. You go in and you work with the people, the structure's already there. And you bring to them the complaints you have and others. And so you try to make something out of it. 

And that's what I think made SNCC great. And also we need to make the point too, that we had, you know, as I said, we had an organic relationship with the white community, young white people in our generation who were more open -minded. We knew they were more open -minded than their parents. They had more of a commitment. And so we also, we knew that all at the same time. Yeah. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Well, I mean, your one field report, I mean, how often were you a field secretary or a field director? 

Frank Smith, Jr. : Well, we were called field secretaries. Yes. Okay. So, and by the way, let me mention one of the things about it Forman. It was Forman that required everybody to send these reports in. Okay. And, and I probably did more than most people because, you know, I had plenty of time to do them. And a lot of them are repetitive because, you know, not much happens there, you know, yeah. But, but I, and I, what I hope I communicated in that was the bravery of these people that we were working with. 

And I mentioned one name that you see occurring a lot. This man named Mr. Piggy's who was, who was a, he owned his home farm. He, he grew cotton and he also raised pigs. Yeah. And Memphis was only about 40 miles from Holly Springs - Memphis, Tennessee.  Okay. And Memphis had a, had a stockyard where you could sell animals. And Mr. Piggy's would, would, would look at the local newspaper, see what the price of pork bellies were, and he would take a load of pigs to Memphis himself. 

He was, he was, he was, he was a farmer. He borrowed money from the bank, the plant wealth. He had to pay the bank back. He had to figure out how much fertilizer he needed. Plus all this stuff. He was a businessman, but they would not let Mr. Piggy - and he was also a veteran, military veteran - but they would not let Mr. Piggy's register to vote. And he was determined that he was going to vote. And I mention him because when I started working with - he lived about 12 miles outside of Holly Springs.

And we went to his church. We started a program where we were teaching people how to pass the literacy test. Okay. So you start out with 20 people and then 20 become 19 and 18, 15… and it gets down to where it's just me and Mr. Piggy's after about six weeks of this. 

And I remember thinking to myself, “If Mr. Piggy stopped coming, I wouldn’t have to come down here?” Cause I got to drive back off to a road by myself at night from down there.  He had to go back to his farm. I had to go back.

But he was not going to stop. It took him forever. And he finally.. they never let him register to vote. He got registered to vote when the federal government sent federal registrars in there in the 1965, when the ‘65 voting rights act passed. 

About two months ago, I was, in January. I did a Martin Luther King speech in a little town outside of Chicago called Broughton, Illinois, just about 10 miles outside of Chicago. In that meeting, when I talked about my experience in Mississippi, was one of Mr. Piggy’s granddaughter. So when I finished talking - she's an adult now. She's an adult - about 50. So I finished talking, she came to me. She said, “Mr. Smith. Do you remember a man named Joseph Piggies?”

I said, "Yeah." 

She said, "They're my uncle." 

I said, "Oh."

She said, "I remember I was coming out there. To those meetings, she said, they brought her out there as a kid." 

And I said, "Man!" 

Now she lived out there in Chicago, outside of Chicago. Family members still live on the farm. She said, they still farm with each other. People still farm here. Some of her, one of her uncles still farming the land. Mr. Piggies - the one I knew - passed away. 

But these stories don't ever die. They don't ever die. They don't ever die, the people. And you never know when you're doing something and the other people are gonna take seriously, take care. But this later, the fact that they were knowing my name and from back there, and she raised her hand to say, “Look, you helped my family. We always start wondering what happened to you.” 

I said, “Well, congratulations.”

It’s a nice story about Mr. Piggies, but I tell you what, boy, there were times when I was thinking to myself if Mr. Piggies gave up, I would. But he wouldn't let me give up. And I guess I had to, as long as he was there, I had to go. 

Benjamin MacConnell: Mr. Piggies wouldn't give up, so I couldn't give up. It's the heart and soul of a great organizer. I wanna thank Frank Smith for giving us the time, encourage anybody who's listening to go to learn more about SNCC at the Digital SNCC Gateway. That's S -N -C-C -digital .org. It has all the history of the people behind that voter registration drive and their evolution from demonstrating at lunch counters to really building power down in the South. 

You can also go to Frank's African -American Civil War Museum and see for yourself the second part of his life, which is also just as heroic as the first. Now, thanks to everybody who's listening to his podcast. 

There's more to say, but that's all for now. 

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