Dan Smith, and American civil rights activist e son of a former slave, He died this Thursday in Washington at the age of 90, in a hospice center, accompanied by his children, April and Rob.
His life was a parable of the history of the rights that he defended from a young age. He was born on March 11, 1932 in Connecticut, he had to escape from the Ku Klux Klan in the segregationist South; in 1963, marched toward Washington alongside a crowd led by Martin Luther King Jr and in 2009 attended the inauguration of the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama.
Smith was one of the last living links in the American slave past: shis father, Abram, was born a slave 159 years ago, and he was the one who told him about the atrocities experienced, since he was a child. Thus he knew of the tree where slaves were hanged, or of the owner who forced his slave to stick her tongue in the frozen wheel of a carriage, and lose it when she walked away from him.
He felt ‘petrified’ that Donald Trump undid decades of racial progress
In 2020, Smith assured in an interview that he was “petrified” that then-President Donald Trump undid decades of racial progress and urged the public to support the movement Black Lives Matter, against police violence and racism from the deaths of black men at the hands of white police officers.
Dan Smith spent much of his life victim of discrimination. He joined the Army out of high school and was sent as nurse in the war in Korea. Upon his return, that force financed his studies at the university, where he was a student representative.
In the early 1960s, he had gone to Alabama to study vet. The American South in that decade was the epicenter of the civil rights movement and an army of activists arrived there from all over the country, strengthening their course.
At that time, Smith was the head of a civil rights organization and faced his first real fire test when the white supremacists burned down the building where he had his office.
