Ferdinand Smith

Ferdinand Christopher Smith (5 May 1893 – 14 August 1961) was a Jamaican-born Communist labor activist. A prominent activist in the United States and the West Indies, Smith co-founded the National Maritime Union with Joseph Curran and M. Hedley Stone. By 1948 he was wanted by the U.S. Immigration Service for deportation, and is remembered as one of the most powerful black labor leaders in U.S. history.

Background Ferdinand Christopher Smith was born on May 5, 1893, in Savanna-la-Mar in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica. His father was a teacher.

In 1943, during a race riot in Harlem, local and federal officials asked Smith to come help ease tensions. He was also involved with maritime unions in the Caribbean and South Atlantic. Pressman went on to join Joseph Forer, a Washington-based attorney, in representing the five before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In April 1948, Pete Seeger partook in a benefit concert for Smith's defense. By that time, according to congressional hearings in 1955, Smith was no longer vice president.

On May 5, 1948, Pressman and Forer received a preliminary injunction so their defendants might have hearings with examiners unconnected with the investigations and prosecutions by examiners of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. (All attorneys were members of the National Lawyers Guild.)

Last years Smith was deported. He went to live in Vienna, Austria, where he worked for the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). In 1951 (or 1952), Smith found himself deported to Jamaica. He remained involved in union activism by organized sugar works and leading a union federation until his death in 1961.

Personal and death Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. was a close friend of Smith's.

Smith died on August 14, 1961, in Jamaica.

Legacy In the 1943 mural The Contribution of the Negro to Democracy in America by African-American artist Charles Wilbert White, Smith appears among: Peter Salem, Nat Turner Denmark Vesey, Peter Still, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and Lead Belly. "By placing Smith in the Contribution mural, White suggests the importance of organized labor to the collective uplift of African American communities, particularly given that the CIO was steadily gaining ground in the battle to eliminate long-standing patterns of racial exclusion within the American labor movement."

Historian Peter Cole has assessed: Through his position at the NMU, he [Francis Smith] gave money and spoke out on many issues: the racist hiring practices of New York City employers, the election of the black Communist Ben Davis to the NYC city council, the effort to oust notoriously racist senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, etc. Other struggles were anticolonial--as when he pushed for the independence of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, India, South Africa, and Ghana. In 1944, Smith was one of the most prominent labor or black leaders campaigning for Franklin Delano Roosevelt until being "red-baited." Smith embodied the ideal of the sailor as a working-class intellectual and cosmopolitan internationalist.