Civil Rights Educator Maxine Smith Dies At 83

When Maxine Smith was born in Memphis in 1929, the city was segregated by race. Smith graduated from Booker T. Washington High School at age 15. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, where she knew Martin Luther King, Jr ., who had also graduated high school early and was attending the nearby Morehouse College. “He was a nerd,” Smith recalled years later. Smith earned a Master’s degree at Middlebury College in Vermont and taught college level French. In 1957, Smith applied to a graduate program at the all-white University of Memphis, then called Memphis State University. She was denied because of her race. Smith said that rejection spurred her to get involved with the NAACP, “I just did what I thought was the right thing. What my adrenaline forced me to do.” Smith served as the executive secretary for the Memphis chapter of the NAACP from 1962 until 1995, and she helped organize the sanitation workers’ strike that brought Martin Luther King, Jr . to Memphis in 1968. In 1971, after