Rest in peace.
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When he was a boy in the 1940s, Jerome Smith climbed aboard the St. Claude Avenue streetcar in New Orleans and sat down in a section reserved for White riders. Smith was Black, and segregation was the rule. White riders and the White conductor “went crazy,” he said in an interview, and told him he deserved a beating.
An elderly Black woman intervened, slapping Smith and dragging him off the streetcar, apologizing to everyone and promising to see that he got the thrashing they had threatened. But once she walked him around the corner, she kissed and hugged Smith and told him he was a man, Smith recalled.
“I never did forget that,” he said in a 1988 oral history interview for the Amistad Research Center. “She was crying and trembling and said she was afraid for me, but she made me know then … that I can never, ever stop.”
He never did.
Smith, 87, died in his Mid-City home on Friday after a battle with cancer, said Robert "Two Scoops" Stanley, a longtime friend and chief program officer of Smith's organization, Tamborine & Fan.
Stanley said a celebration would be held to honor Smith at Professional Funeral Services on North Claiborne Avenue at 7 p.m. on Friday.
Smith credited his mother for the courage he showed on the streetcar that day and for the rest of his life, one that saw him become a mainstay of the civil rights movement in New Orleans and beyond. He participated in picket lines, sit-ins and Freedom Rides, endured jailings and beatings and, when he was 24 years old, confronted U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963 with what he said was the federal government’s failure to do more for African Americans.
An unidentified New Orleans police detective stands behind, left to right, Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray Jr., Archie Allen and William Harrell at a Congress of Racial Equality sit-in lasting almost five hours at the segregated Woolworth's department store lunch counter in New Orleans on Sept. 9, 1960.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY RALPH URIBE
In what might be Smith’s most enduring legacy, he co-founded Tamborine & Fan, an organization designed to instill in New Orleans children the importance of culture, history and tradition.
“It is important to give these children these places of gathering, where that light in the child’s eye is respected,” Smith said in a 2017 video produced by the New Orleans Recreation Department Commission. “The light in a child’s eye is more powerful than the sun, because if that light ceases to be in the child’s eye, then the world is over.”
Smith was known as “Big Duck,” because children followed him like ducklings.
U.S. Rep. Troy Carter called Smith "a freedom fighter, a mentor and a servant of this community who loved his people deeply."
"Duck didn’t have much patience for excuses," Carter said. "If our children needed something, he was going to fight until somebody listened. ... New Orleans is better because Big Duck walked these streets."
"We have lost a giant," District Attorney Jason Williams said. "New Orleans has lost one of its fiercest champions. And I have lost someone whose presence in my life meant more than I can possibly put into words."
Smith was “at his core, a civil rights warrior,” said former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now president and CEO of the National Urban League. “He was committed to civil rights and racial justice as a calling, as a ministry.”
Former City Council member James Carter, a longtime friend who regards Smith as a mentor, said Smith’s spirituality, coupled with his resourcefulness, made him “a powerful force to reckon with. … His determination to equalize the playing field and not to subjugate anyone is an unimaginably powerful offering to humanity.”
Louisiana Appellate Judge Edwin Lombard, whose brother, Rudy, founded Tamborine & Fan with Smith in 1968, remembered Smith as a man who never was satisfied with the status quo and was determined to set things right.
“There was a drive that I haven’t seen in many people that propelled him to get things done,” Lombard said. “Once he saw a wrong, he wanted to right it and did whatever he had to do to change it.”
Civil rights activist Jerome Smith wipes a tear as he escorts the casket of Rudy Lombard from New Zion Baptist Church in New Orleans on Dec. 20, 2014.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER
But there was more to him than that, said Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, chief equity officer at Ashé Cultural Arts Center.
“What set him apart was the assurance of victory,” she said. “He helped us all to feel assured that we will overcome, that equity and justice are not just possible, but we have to achieve them.”
Smith always said these attributes came from one person: his mother, Leona.
“My mother was the well from which I drew much of my strength,” he said in the book “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience.” “She taught us all to stand up for our dignity. … I’d never surrender because that was the strength she brought to me.”
That attitude started young, he said in the Amistad interview, when he insisted that White merchants address his mother as “Mrs. Smith,” instead of her first name, the custom during segregation.
Civil rights activist Jerome Smith, second from right, is escorted out of a New Orleans City Council public hearing on whether to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces on Dec. 17, 2015.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY BRETT DUKE
Because he had once seen his father take down the segregated seating sign on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, Smith behaved similarly when he was riding solo on the St. Claude line. “I knew that I wanted a seat and that my daddy would take the sign down and we would just sit,” he said in the Amistad interview. “It just so happened that I was by myself.”
That incident, and the reaction it touched off, came as young Jerome was often the head of the house when his father, a mariner, was away for extended periods. Paul Robeson was one of his mother’s heroes, and Smith grew up learning about the singer and political activist.
He was a drum major in the Joseph S. Clark High School Band, and he joined the Southern University band when he enrolled at the Baton Rouge school.
Freedom Rider Jerome Smith of New Orleans is shown in a May 24, 1961, police photo after his arrest in Jackson, Miss.
PHOTO FROM MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
He joined the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and participated in sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters at Canal Street stores.
In 1961, White and Black activists who became known as Freedom Riders rode buses through the South to test Supreme Court rulings banning segregation in interstate bus travel and at bus stations.
Smith rode on two trips. On the second trip, from New Orleans to McComb, Mississippi, “I realized we were going to be in for something” as the bus pulled into McComb, where a howling mob was waiting, he said in the Amistad interview.
“Women were hollering, ‘Kill ‘em, kill ‘em, kill ‘em,’” said Smith, who was beaten with brass knuckles. “I worked my way to the door, and then to the street.”
Somehow, he said, an older, nonthreatening Black man was able to drive a weather-beaten truck through the crowd.
A photo by William Lovelace, of New Orleanians Jerome Smith and Doris Castle arriving in Mississippi by bus during the civil rights era, is displayed at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson on Oct. 26, 2018.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY EMMA SCOTT
“If he hadn’t come through, I would have been dead,” Smith said. “He didn’t get out of his truck. He just asked me if I could hear him. I said yes. He said, ‘When you feel the truck, just roll over.’ I was able to flip into the back of the truck.”
Another Freedom Rider, Thomas Valentine, joined him, and they rode out of town atop feed for the old man’s hogs.
They were driven to a place Smith described as an old juke joint in the woods. When Burke Marshall, who was in charge of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, tracked then down, he implored Smith and other demonstrators to stop protesting and get to a hospital, Smith said in “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder.”
“We’re not stopping. We’re going back,” Smith replied.
That moment was emblematic of the way Smith felt about the movement: The notion of being part of a great collective with a noble goal kept him from feeling alone and worrying about physical harm, and it made him determined to do more.
New Orleans police officers arrest civil rights activists Jerome Smith, center, and William Harrell, rear with arms in air, at an almost five-hour sit-in at the segregated Woolworth's department store lunch counter in New Orleans on Sept. 9, 1960. Smith holds prayer beads that were given to him by a White woman in the crowd watching the arrest.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY JIM PITTS
“No individual strength was great enough to achieve that purpose,” he said in the Amistad interview. “There was no surrender.”
The McComb beating caused headaches that afflicted Smith for the rest of his life, however.
“I told him it was nauseating for me to be there because it was nothing but a hoax and a joke, that it was about PR,” Smith told the Amistad interviewer. “I didn’t think it was real unless he was about to restructure Wall Street and have his children walk where I was walking.”
Others backed him up. playwright Lorraine Hansberry, best known for the play “A Raisin in the Sun,” pointed to Smith and said that despite everyone else in the room, “the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in “Robert Kennedy and His Times.”
“This boy just put it like it was,” Horne said later. “He communicated the plain, basic suffering of being a Negro. The primeval memory of everyone in that room went to work after that. ... He took us back to the common dirt of our existence and rubbed our noses in it.”
But the country “still doesn’t understand,” Smith said in the Amistad interview. “The emotions of the time have not changed; the plantation is still very much intact. That definitely has not changed. We have gotten some improvements, but improvements as they relate to the spirit have not changed. That doesn’t mean that it won’t change. I have to believe that it’s going to change.”
In New Orleans, Smith and Rudy Lombard started working with young people when they founded Tamborine & Fan to teach the importance of music and social awareness. The tambourine symbolizes Mardi Gras Indians, and the fan is an artifact of street parades.
The two men “created a curriculum for understanding how music, street culture and social justice are connected in New Orleans, and then taught it by example,” Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes wrote in “Talk That Music Talk,” a book about New Orleans’ brass bands.
Jerome Smith, director of Tambourine and Fan cultural and education program, is shown in 1977.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY G. ANDREW BOYD
Besides imbuing children with the importance of culture and social justice, Tambourine & Fan was set up to steer young people away from crime and drugs, Edwin Lombard said. Smith “knew that if somebody didn’t intervene, they’d wind up in jail or dead.”
With that group, which is based in the Tremé Recreation Community Center, Smith “taught them the truth about their history and encouraged them to stand up and fight for righteousness and justice,” said Pat Bryant, a longtime political activist. “That’s the greatest gift that anyone can give a child, to teach the child how to stand up for a righteous society.”
It was a logical extension of what had dominated Smith’s life.
“I thought the movement was everything, the beginning and the end,” he said in the Amistad interview. “I had all this fuel from childhood; … I was always present in it. … I remembered what the lady on the St. Claude streetcar told me. I was glad to be a part of that. …
A painting of civil rights activist Jerome Smith, by artist Sean Randall, is shown March 7, 2018, at Where Y'Art gallery in New Orleans.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER
In a 2014 conversation with The Times-Picayune, Smith said his mission “is not civil rights.” Rather, he said, “We demand that our humanity be respected.”
Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.
www.nola.com
Jerome ‘Big Duck’ Smith, longtime New Orleans civil rights activist, dies at 87
He participated in sit-ins and Freedom Rides, endured beatings, stood up to Robert Kennedy
- By JOHN POPE | Contributing writer
- Aug 21, 2026
- 8 min to read
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When he was a boy in the 1940s, Jerome Smith climbed aboard the St. Claude Avenue streetcar in New Orleans and sat down in a section reserved for White riders. Smith was Black, and segregation was the rule. White riders and the White conductor “went crazy,” he said in an interview, and told him he deserved a beating.
An elderly Black woman intervened, slapping Smith and dragging him off the streetcar, apologizing to everyone and promising to see that he got the thrashing they had threatened. But once she walked him around the corner, she kissed and hugged Smith and told him he was a man, Smith recalled.
“I never did forget that,” he said in a 1988 oral history interview for the Amistad Research Center. “She was crying and trembling and said she was afraid for me, but she made me know then … that I can never, ever stop.”
He never did.
Smith, 87, died in his Mid-City home on Friday after a battle with cancer, said Robert "Two Scoops" Stanley, a longtime friend and chief program officer of Smith's organization, Tamborine & Fan.
Stanley said a celebration would be held to honor Smith at Professional Funeral Services on North Claiborne Avenue at 7 p.m. on Friday.
Smith credited his mother for the courage he showed on the streetcar that day and for the rest of his life, one that saw him become a mainstay of the civil rights movement in New Orleans and beyond. He participated in picket lines, sit-ins and Freedom Rides, endured jailings and beatings and, when he was 24 years old, confronted U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963 with what he said was the federal government’s failure to do more for African Americans.
An unidentified New Orleans police detective stands behind, left to right, Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray Jr., Archie Allen and William Harrell at a Congress of Racial Equality sit-in lasting almost five hours at the segregated Woolworth's department store lunch counter in New Orleans on Sept. 9, 1960.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY RALPH URIBE
In what might be Smith’s most enduring legacy, he co-founded Tamborine & Fan, an organization designed to instill in New Orleans children the importance of culture, history and tradition.
“It is important to give these children these places of gathering, where that light in the child’s eye is respected,” Smith said in a 2017 video produced by the New Orleans Recreation Department Commission. “The light in a child’s eye is more powerful than the sun, because if that light ceases to be in the child’s eye, then the world is over.”
Smith was known as “Big Duck,” because children followed him like ducklings.
U.S. Rep. Troy Carter called Smith "a freedom fighter, a mentor and a servant of this community who loved his people deeply."
"Duck didn’t have much patience for excuses," Carter said. "If our children needed something, he was going to fight until somebody listened. ... New Orleans is better because Big Duck walked these streets."
"We have lost a giant," District Attorney Jason Williams said. "New Orleans has lost one of its fiercest champions. And I have lost someone whose presence in my life meant more than I can possibly put into words."
Smith was “at his core, a civil rights warrior,” said former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now president and CEO of the National Urban League. “He was committed to civil rights and racial justice as a calling, as a ministry.”
Former City Council member James Carter, a longtime friend who regards Smith as a mentor, said Smith’s spirituality, coupled with his resourcefulness, made him “a powerful force to reckon with. … His determination to equalize the playing field and not to subjugate anyone is an unimaginably powerful offering to humanity.”
Louisiana Appellate Judge Edwin Lombard, whose brother, Rudy, founded Tamborine & Fan with Smith in 1968, remembered Smith as a man who never was satisfied with the status quo and was determined to set things right.
“There was a drive that I haven’t seen in many people that propelled him to get things done,” Lombard said. “Once he saw a wrong, he wanted to right it and did whatever he had to do to change it.”
Civil rights activist Jerome Smith wipes a tear as he escorts the casket of Rudy Lombard from New Zion Baptist Church in New Orleans on Dec. 20, 2014.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER
But there was more to him than that, said Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, chief equity officer at Ashé Cultural Arts Center.
“What set him apart was the assurance of victory,” she said. “He helped us all to feel assured that we will overcome, that equity and justice are not just possible, but we have to achieve them.”
Smith always said these attributes came from one person: his mother, Leona.
“My mother was the well from which I drew much of my strength,” he said in the book “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience.” “She taught us all to stand up for our dignity. … I’d never surrender because that was the strength she brought to me.”
That attitude started young, he said in the Amistad interview, when he insisted that White merchants address his mother as “Mrs. Smith,” instead of her first name, the custom during segregation.
Civil rights activist Jerome Smith, second from right, is escorted out of a New Orleans City Council public hearing on whether to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces on Dec. 17, 2015.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY BRETT DUKE
Because he had once seen his father take down the segregated seating sign on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, Smith behaved similarly when he was riding solo on the St. Claude line. “I knew that I wanted a seat and that my daddy would take the sign down and we would just sit,” he said in the Amistad interview. “It just so happened that I was by myself.”
That incident, and the reaction it touched off, came as young Jerome was often the head of the house when his father, a mariner, was away for extended periods. Paul Robeson was one of his mother’s heroes, and Smith grew up learning about the singer and political activist.
He was a drum major in the Joseph S. Clark High School Band, and he joined the Southern University band when he enrolled at the Baton Rouge school.
Joining the movement
Smith left in his sophomore year to be a dock worker, and he got involved in the labor movement. He soon became intrigued with the nascent push for civil rights and joined that movement, starting with a meeting on Dryades Street. When he saw Rudy Lombard, one of the local movement’s leaders, on a picket line, Smith told the Amistad interviewer, he picked up a sign and started marching.Freedom Rider Jerome Smith of New Orleans is shown in a May 24, 1961, police photo after his arrest in Jackson, Miss.
PHOTO FROM MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
He joined the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and participated in sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters at Canal Street stores.
In 1961, White and Black activists who became known as Freedom Riders rode buses through the South to test Supreme Court rulings banning segregation in interstate bus travel and at bus stations.
Smith rode on two trips. On the second trip, from New Orleans to McComb, Mississippi, “I realized we were going to be in for something” as the bus pulled into McComb, where a howling mob was waiting, he said in the Amistad interview.
“Women were hollering, ‘Kill ‘em, kill ‘em, kill ‘em,’” said Smith, who was beaten with brass knuckles. “I worked my way to the door, and then to the street.”
Somehow, he said, an older, nonthreatening Black man was able to drive a weather-beaten truck through the crowd.
A photo by William Lovelace, of New Orleanians Jerome Smith and Doris Castle arriving in Mississippi by bus during the civil rights era, is displayed at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson on Oct. 26, 2018.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY EMMA SCOTT
“If he hadn’t come through, I would have been dead,” Smith said. “He didn’t get out of his truck. He just asked me if I could hear him. I said yes. He said, ‘When you feel the truck, just roll over.’ I was able to flip into the back of the truck.”
Another Freedom Rider, Thomas Valentine, joined him, and they rode out of town atop feed for the old man’s hogs.
They were driven to a place Smith described as an old juke joint in the woods. When Burke Marshall, who was in charge of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, tracked then down, he implored Smith and other demonstrators to stop protesting and get to a hospital, Smith said in “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder.”
“We’re not stopping. We’re going back,” Smith replied.
That moment was emblematic of the way Smith felt about the movement: The notion of being part of a great collective with a noble goal kept him from feeling alone and worrying about physical harm, and it made him determined to do more.
New Orleans police officers arrest civil rights activists Jerome Smith, center, and William Harrell, rear with arms in air, at an almost five-hour sit-in at the segregated Woolworth's department store lunch counter in New Orleans on Sept. 9, 1960. Smith holds prayer beads that were given to him by a White woman in the crowd watching the arrest.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY JIM PITTS
“No individual strength was great enough to achieve that purpose,” he said in the Amistad interview. “There was no surrender.”
The McComb beating caused headaches that afflicted Smith for the rest of his life, however.
The Kennedy confrontation
And he was invited to join them for a May 1963 meeting with Kennedy, brother of President John Kennedy, at the attorney general’s Manhattan apartment. Kennedy was on the defensive, and Smith was having none of it. At one point, he said, “I’ve seen you guys [from the Justice Department] stand around and take notes while we’re being beaten.”“I told him it was nauseating for me to be there because it was nothing but a hoax and a joke, that it was about PR,” Smith told the Amistad interviewer. “I didn’t think it was real unless he was about to restructure Wall Street and have his children walk where I was walking.”
Others backed him up. playwright Lorraine Hansberry, best known for the play “A Raisin in the Sun,” pointed to Smith and said that despite everyone else in the room, “the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in “Robert Kennedy and His Times.”
“This boy just put it like it was,” Horne said later. “He communicated the plain, basic suffering of being a Negro. The primeval memory of everyone in that room went to work after that. ... He took us back to the common dirt of our existence and rubbed our noses in it.”
Congress acts
A month later, in a nationally televised address, President Kennedy spoke about race and the need for change. In July 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act; the Voting Rights Act followed a year later.But the country “still doesn’t understand,” Smith said in the Amistad interview. “The emotions of the time have not changed; the plantation is still very much intact. That definitely has not changed. We have gotten some improvements, but improvements as they relate to the spirit have not changed. That doesn’t mean that it won’t change. I have to believe that it’s going to change.”
In New Orleans, Smith and Rudy Lombard started working with young people when they founded Tamborine & Fan to teach the importance of music and social awareness. The tambourine symbolizes Mardi Gras Indians, and the fan is an artifact of street parades.
The two men “created a curriculum for understanding how music, street culture and social justice are connected in New Orleans, and then taught it by example,” Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes wrote in “Talk That Music Talk,” a book about New Orleans’ brass bands.
Jerome Smith, director of Tambourine and Fan cultural and education program, is shown in 1977.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY G. ANDREW BOYD
Besides imbuing children with the importance of culture and social justice, Tambourine & Fan was set up to steer young people away from crime and drugs, Edwin Lombard said. Smith “knew that if somebody didn’t intervene, they’d wind up in jail or dead.”
With that group, which is based in the Tremé Recreation Community Center, Smith “taught them the truth about their history and encouraged them to stand up and fight for righteousness and justice,” said Pat Bryant, a longtime political activist. “That’s the greatest gift that anyone can give a child, to teach the child how to stand up for a righteous society.”
It was a logical extension of what had dominated Smith’s life.
“I thought the movement was everything, the beginning and the end,” he said in the Amistad interview. “I had all this fuel from childhood; … I was always present in it. … I remembered what the lady on the St. Claude streetcar told me. I was glad to be a part of that. …
A painting of civil rights activist Jerome Smith, by artist Sean Randall, is shown March 7, 2018, at Where Y'Art gallery in New Orleans.
STAFF FILE PHOTO BY CHRIS GRANGER
In a 2014 conversation with The Times-Picayune, Smith said his mission “is not civil rights.” Rather, he said, “We demand that our humanity be respected.”
Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.
Jerome ‘Big Duck’ Smith, longtime New Orleans civil rights activist, dies at 87
He participated in picket lines, sit-ins and Freedom Rides, endured jailings and beatings and stood up to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
