Ferdinand Smith

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.

He left to live in Panama, where he worked as hotel steward and salesman: he first experienced Jim Crow conditions.

Ironically, Smith's name came to the fore because he was tried internally by an NMU committee for failing to support the 1934 strike but later cleared the union.

[1][2] In 1940, Smith joined Chicago Alderman Earl B. Dickerson to meet with Donald M. Nelson, Chair of the War Production Board.

[6] In 1944, Smith had at least one major speech written for him by Frank Marshall Davis during the presidential campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In March 1948, Smith found himself lumped into a group of Communist party and labor leaders, headed for deportation.

Pressman represented all five, at least some of whom had their own attorneys: alleged Soviet spy Gerhart Eisler (represented by Abraham J. Isserman), Irving Potash of the Fur and Leather Workers Union; Smith, secretary of the NMUM (Pressman); Charles A. Doyle of the Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers Union (Isadore Englander), and CPUSA labor secretary John Williamson (Carol Weiss King).

[2] 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.

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.