Isiah C. Smith

Isiah C. Smith (1922–2012) was a judge and civil rights attorney. He was Palm Beach County, Florida's third black lawyer. He and William Holland, Palm Beach County's first black attorney, fought successfully to integrate the county's schools, golf courses, department stores, airport taxi service, and the Florida Turnpike's restaurants and bathrooms through lawsuits and negotiations in the mid-1950s. While working with Holland at their practice, Smith also served part-time as Delray Beach City Prosecutor from 1970 to 1977. In 1986, he was appointed by Governor Bob Graham to become a circuit judge for Palm Beach County. He stepped down in 1992, having reached the age of 70, the mandatory retirement age in Florida for jurists.

Early life Born Isiah Courtney Smith on September 15, 1922, in a log cabin near Lake Helen, Florida, a small town near Sanford, and known to most who knew him as I.C., Smith walked eight miles to elementary school because "The city had a school bus for the whites, all our friends, and we had to walk." Consequently, his father bought land and eventually moved the family next to the black school. In 1940, he graduated from Euclid High School in Deland and enrolled at then Florida A&M College. While there he met William Holland, who would become Palm Beach County's first black attorney and a pioneer in Florida's civil rights movement. Smith and Holland promised each other that they would open a law practice in Florida to serve "the people of our community." However, before he could graduate, the United States entered World War II and Smith volunteered and was sent to the intake facility near Raiford.

Smith was at the facility for three weeks and had not been sworn in. Finally he marched through the segregated camp to the white officers and un-volunteered. A year later, he was drafted, and then rejected at the same camp. He suspected that they thought him to be a troublemaker. During the war he worked building locomotives in Chester, Pennsylvania, that were eventually sent to the Soviet Union. He returned to Florida A&M College after the war and soon met Henrietta Mays, a librarian at the college, who he was to marry. "He was very studious," she said. "He was the only student I knew who carried a dictionary in his back pocket all the time."

In 1956 the law firm of Holland and Smith successfully fought to eliminate separate eating and bathroom facilities on the newly opened Florida Turnpike. By the late 1950s, they had also integrated the county's department stores and the airport's taxi service. Smith died on February 29, 2012, in Delray Beach, Florida at the age of 89.