When an old Black woman saw 10-year-old Jerome Smith defiantly tear down the Jim Crow divider separating Black and white passengers on a New Orleans streetcar, she slapped the young Black boy, and as she dragged him off, she vowed to the fuming white conductor and passengers that she’d beat him good. Then, after she had safely pulled him out of the sight of white folks, her tears flowed.

“Never, ever stop,” she said. “I’m proud of you. Don’t you ever quit.”

He didn’t. Jerome “Big Duck” Smith grew up to become a leader of the New Orleans sit-in movement. He became a kind of evangelist for the Congress of Racial Equality during the spring 1961 Freedom Rides, and at a McComb, Mississippi, bus terminal that fall, he bore the full brunt of the kind of white fury the old woman in New Orleans had leaped to save him from. He was viciously beaten by a white mob, some of whom used brass knuckles, and he suffered headaches the rest of his life.

Smith’s passion, including his fiery refusal to play nice with elected officials hemming and hawing on civil rights, won him admiration.

He died Friday in New Orleans at 87 years old.

Smith’s passion, including his fiery refusal to play nice with elected officials hemming and hawing on civil rights, won him admiration from the likes of Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry. After the height of the Civil Rights Movement, he co-founded “Tambourine & Fan” with fellow CORE activist Rudy Lombard, and his indefatigable commitment to mentoring children, who were said to look like ducklings as they toddled behind him, earned him the name “Big Duck.”

The history of Black people’s unyielding demand for freedom and dignity in the United States remains under attack. Under the guise of stamping out critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion (which is itself objectionable), conservatives have banned or attempted to ban lessons and library material that appropriately call out the racist people and racist systems that worked — and continue to work — to keep Black Americans from enjoying the full fruits of citizenship.

But even many of the wrongly banned stories about that fight for citizenship may give the misimpression that all the hard work of toppling Jim Crow was done by people with famous names, like those who led national organizations or gave important speeches.

Smith was not nationally known and not given to speechmaking. But without people like him, some of ways the U.S. changed for the better in the 1960s simply wouldn’t have happened.

In my contribution to “Jerome Smith: Man of the People,” a forthcoming collection of essays edited by Freddi Williams Evans and published by the University of New Orleans Press, I argue that Smith was every bit as daring and resolute as his fellow Freedom Rider John Lewis, and that it’s only a quirk that only one of the two became nationally known.

But, as someone who once lived in his beloved Treme neighborhood and watched him walk — he never learned to drive — throughout the city, it was obvious that the love Black New Orleans had for him was boundless. Not just because of Smith’s daringness, but because he understood that desegregation was not the end goal and that the freedom to sit wherever one wanted wouldn’t mean much if Black children weren’t convinced of their own self-worth. My wife and I can attest that he never missed a chance to tell our daughter she was beautiful, brilliant and talented — or demonstrate she was worth his time.

Smith accepted her invitation, as a second grader, to speak at her school’s Black History Month program and laughed as she introduced him as “one of the bravest men in New Orleans, maybe even the country.” One day, when she’s even older, she will grasp the magnitude of Mr. Big Duck likening her to Hansberry.

Martin Luther King Jr. reportedly said the Civil Rights Movement depended on “creatively maladjusted” people, those who “who can’t be adjusted, people who have to upset things.” To that point, as kind as Smith could be to people who were deserving of it, he was just as impatient with those dragging their feet, pharaoh-like, when it came to alleviating oppression.

In May 1963, the writer James Baldwin convened a group of Black luminaries at Robert F. Kennedy’s New York City apartment to push the attorney general and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, to do more on civil rights. Baldwin invited Smith, who was in New York seeking treatment for the head injuries he sustained in the aforementioned attack in Mississippi.

“Mr. Attorney General, you make me want to puke,” Smith is quoted as saying in “Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington.”

“I don’t care what you think, and I don’t care what your brother thinks either,” he said.

To Smith, the act of explaining to Kennedy — or to anybody, for that matter — why he should be free was humiliating. And, he explained, his commitment to nonviolence was weakening as a result.

“Bobby was quite angry,” Harry Belafonte told Chris Matthews in 2018, not just at Smith but at the other Black people who didn’t come to his defense. But Hansberry told Kennedy that of all the “many very, very accomplished people” present, Smith was “the only man who should be listened to,” and Horne said that after Smith, people such as herself, famed psychologist Kenneth Clark and the lawyer and Dr. King speechwriter Clarence B. Jones not “keep up the pretense of being the mature, responsible spokesmen for the race.”

Smith had an effect. By multiple accounts, he compelled Kennedy and his brother to take the civil rights more seriously.

The audacity that Smith showed Kennedy was the same audacity required for him and his contemporaries to walk toward people trying to kill them. But focus too much on the Kennedy confrontation and you’ll make the mistake of caricaturing Smith as an angry man.

He smiled too big, laughed too loud and danced too freely to ever be labeled such. Like so many others in the movement, his primary driving force was not anger but love — for himself and for his people. The ranks of that generation of fighters are thinning out, and the current wave of fascism threatens to overwhelm us. But we don’t have to wonder what we should do now.

Just follow Big Duck’s lead.

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