Jerome “Big Duck” Smith

Jerome “Big Duck” Smith died on August 21, 2026, at his home in New Orleans. He was 87, and he had cancer. He spent his life doing the two things this newsletter exists to honor: he put his body between Black people and the violence aimed at them, and then he spent the next fifty-eight years teaching children the history he had survived.

Smith was born in New Orleans on May 21, 1939, to Walter Smith, a merchant seaman, and Leona Juluke Smith, a seamstress and domestic worker. He joined the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as a 19-year-old student and eventually became its chairman, working as a field organizer in the years when that job meant absorbing violence on a schedule.

Two arrests, one lifelong injury

On May 24, 1961, Smith was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and booked on a charge of “breach of peace” after riding in on a Greyhound bus from Montgomery. It was the standard-issue charge used against the Freedom Riders, and the mugshots that came with it are now among the most recognizable documents of the era — collected by photographer Eric Etheridge in Breach of Peace.

On November 29, 1961, Smith led five other CORE members into McComb, Mississippi, to test whether the Kennedy administration would actually enforce the desegregation of interstate travel. A white mob was waiting. Smith was beaten with brass knuckles and sticks. The traumatic brain injury he sustained that day gave him headaches and mood disturbances for the remaining sixty-five years of his life.

The meeting with Robert Kennedy

In May 1963, Smith was in New York being treated for those injuries when James Baldwin invited him to a gathering that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had asked Baldwin to convene. The room held Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Rip Torn. Smith, then 24, was the only person there who had recently been beaten nearly to death.

He told Kennedy he had watched federal agents stand and take notes while mobs worked him over. He said he could not be asked to feel patriotic about a war in Vietnam by a government that would not protect him on a bus in his own country. Then he wept.

The meeting is usually remembered as a disaster — Kennedy left angry. But historians have come to treat that room as a hinge in his thinking, the moment his understanding of the movement stopped being procedural. Smith did not soften it to make it land. That was the point.

What he did with the next fifty-eight years

In 1968, Smith co-founded Tambourine and Fan, a New Orleans organization offering children academics, sports, arts, and civic engagement — all of it braided through the city’s Black cultural traditions, the second lines and the Mardi Gras Indian practice. He ran it for the rest of his life. He was called Big Duck because children trailed after him in a line, like ducklings.

There is a version of Jerome Smith’s life that ends in 1963: the young man who made Bobby Kennedy flinch, a footnote in someone else’s chapter. He declined that version. He had a national platform available and chose a neighborhood scale instead — work that generates no headlines and cannot be finished. “The movement was a prayer,” he said. “The struggle was a prayer.” He expected to see it succeed through the children.

He is survived by his daughters Farin, Kami, and Saidah; his son Jerome Jr.; his brothers Walter Jr. and Archie Sampier; his companion Cynthia Thornton; and eleven grandchildren. You can read the full obituary, and this remembrance of why the nickname fit.

Why this lands now

Smith died in a year when federal agencies are actively editing this history out of exhibits, websites, and curricula. He spent his life insisting that Black history is not a commemorative add-on but the load-bearing account of how this country actually works — and he taught it directly to children, in their own city, in a form nobody could delete from a server. That turns out to have been a durable strategy.

Three ways to carry it forward

1. Fund the work he actually built. Tambourine and Fan continues in New Orleans, and youth cultural-education programs in your own city are doing the same work under different names. Find one and support it.
2. Learn the movement history of where you live — not the national storyline, but the local one. Who organized, who got hurt, which building it happened in. Smith’s whole method was that history has to be specific and close by to hold.
3. Say something when history disappears. When an exhibit, a webpage, or a curriculum quietly loses its Black history, raise it with the school board, the library, or the parks agency. Erasure depends on nobody noticing in time. The Amistad Research Center in New Orleans holds the primary CORE records — archives are how this survives an administration.

Thank you for reading along with us. See you next week.

Nicole