In the summer of 1962, Frank Smith Jr. was registering voters in Greenwood, Mississippi. He’d planned to return to Morehouse College to finish school – but then received a newspaper clipping about the lynching of a local Black man with a note that read, “This is what happens when you civil rights workers come and then leave.”
A threat! If he returned to the safety of Washington, DC, the people he’d been organizing with would be in danger of white supremacist violence.
So Smith stayed to protect his community, which upset local racists further. He was constantly followed, and once nearly shot – the gunman instead accidentally killed a dog!
When he confronted a police officer about their brutality, the cop claimed he would “never make it out of Greenwood alive.”
Smith refused to be silenced, organizing in Mississippi for six years. Afterwards, he served four terms on DC’s City Council.
Not done yet, he later founded the African American Civil War Memorial Freedom Foundation and Museum, the only national museum dedicated to Black troops who fought in the Civil War.
The fight for freedom is dangerous, but leaders like Smith remind us that while violence is frightening, what’s more frightening is accepting inferiority. We must be resilient and refuse to let fear keep us from fighting back!