[2] 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."

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.

However, before he could graduate, the United States entered World War II and Smith volunteered and was sent to the intake facility near Raiford.

He enrolled at Brooklyn Law School, where he attended classes at night after working days in a factory making plastic horses.

After he earned his law degree in 1954, his college friend Holland invited him back to Florida to join his practice in West Palm Beach.

After the county denied William Jr. entrance to the segregated school for two years, Holland and Smith filed a class-action suit.

To comply with one ruling, in 1961 Palm Beach County offered a plan that resulted in four black students transferring to white high schools.

[2][4] In 1956 the law firm of Holland and Smith successfully fought to eliminate separate eating and bathroom facilities on the newly opened Florida Turnpike.

Smith and his partner William W. Holland were honored as Civil Rights pioneers in Coleman Park where Negro league legends played ball.