TO THE CHAPTER INVISIBLE
Donald H. Smith, Ph.D. 1932–2019 26 th Junior Grand Vice Polemarch (1952) Professor, Author
By Aaron Williams
T he 26 th Junior Grand ter Invisible on August 10, 2019 at the age of 87. Brother Smith served the fraternity as its Junior Grand Vice Polemarch in 1953 under the 15th Grand Polemarch William H. “Stud” Greene. He was initiated into the fraternity in 1950. A professor emeritus and past chairman of the Department of Education, Baruch College of the City University of New York (CCNY), Dr. Smith was a cel- ebrated and trail-blazing African American educator. Vice Polemarch Donald Hugh Smith (Alpha Rho 1950) entered the Chap- Dr. Smith was born March 30, 1932 in Chicago, IL to Madeleine Franklin Smith and William Henry Smith who was a renown pianist, organist and choral direc- tor who composed many classic arrangements of old spirituals
such as “Plenty Good Room,” “Good News,” “Climbin’ up the Mountain Children,” and, his most famous “Ride the Chariot” and served many years as the dean of music at Wiley College in Marshall, TX. Smith grew up in Chicago and attended schools in the Chicago Public School Sys- tem. He graduated from the Univer- sity of Illinois-Champaign in 1953 and subsequently earned a M.A. degree in 1959 from DePaul Uni- versity and a Doctor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964. Working first as a teacher in Chicago, he received an award for superior teaching from the Chicago Board of Education while working at historic Wendell Phillips High School, the city’s first predominantly African American high school. In 1967, he served as the chief educational consultant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Adult Literacy-Jobs Project
in Chicago. He was a founding director of the Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Il- linois State University, the first of its kind in the country. Later moving to New York City, Dr. Smith established innovated educational programs that ad- dressed the institutional disad- vantages that afflicted African American and Latino students in inner city schools where Dr. Smith fiercely advocated for their welfare and felt it was the respon- sibility of educator like himself to redress the persistent racism that diminished the self-esteem and life potential of students of color. Writing ground-breaking research papers such as “The White Coun- selor in a Negro Slum School” (1967), “The Rhetoric of Riots” (1968), “Reading as a Liberating Act” (1977), and “The Social and Academic Environment of Black
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