Daniel Smith, last child of an enslaved person in the US, dies at 90

Daniel Smith, considered the last surviving child of an enslaved person, died in Washington on October 19. During his long and eventful life, he witnessed firsthand many of the pivotal moments of the African-American experience. He was 90 years old.

His wife, Loretta Neumann, said the cause of death was heart failure and bladder cancer.

Smith’s father Abram Smith was born a slave in Virginia during the American Civil War and was 70 years old when his much younger wife Clara gave birth to Daniel in 1932. Daniel Smith was the last living child of an enslaved person in the United States, historians who have studied his generation say they have no knowledge of others.

A retired federal official, Smith was born in Connecticut and used to say that he lived a quiet life without great emotions. But he also jokingly compared himself to a “black Forrest Gump”: he took part in the March on Washington in 1963, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 and was in the audience for Barack Obama’s first inauguration as president in 2009.

In 2021 Smith told the Economist about the stories his father told: “I remember hearing about two slaves who were chained together by the wrists and tried to escape. They were found by feral dogs hiding under a tree and hanged from it.”

Daniel Smith himself also faced fierce racism. In the mid-1950s, while working at a YMCA camp in Connecticut, he saw a white woman rescued from a flooded quarry, passed out but still alive. He started performing CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) on her, but a white police officer told him to stop. As Smith watched in disbelief, the woman died.

“That’s racism at its best,” he told Springfield College professor Martin Dobrow — where Smith studied — when he was interviewed for a 2020 article. “He let the girl die, preferring that to seeing a black man touch her lips. I will never forget that.”

But his father also imbued him with ambition and a keen awareness of his own worth. Despite growing up poor, Daniel Smith and several of his brothers went to college and held middle-class jobs.

“Daniel Smith represents the survival aspect of slavery,” historian Sana Butler, author of “Sugar of the Crop: My Journey to Find the Children of Slaves” (2009), said in a telephone interview. “In the case of 90% of the people I interviewed, their parents told them to do their best.”

Daniel Smith dreamed of being a veterinarian. He began graduate school at the historically black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and then became involved in the civil rights movement. When he left for the state, a friend of his mother’s offered him a pistol for his protection. Smith did not accept.

He lived for four years in Alabama, helping to run an adult literacy program and later directing an alleviation initiative in rural, poor Lowndes County.

Criminal arsonists set fire to the church where he had his office. One night, as Smith was driving home and driving along an unlit stretch of road, a car full of white men came up behind him at high speed and slammed into his bumper. The men cursed him with racist swear words and tried to throw him into the gutter.

“If they had caught me, I would have died,” he told the New York Times in 2013.

But he also lived moments of joy. A friend persuaded him to drive from Connecticut in 1963 to participate in the historic March on Washington. Entering the city amid tens of thousands of other cars, they got lost.

“Suddenly a police officer on a motorcycle stopped us,” he told the NYT. “We strive to stay calm.”

Instead of harassing them, as they predicted, the policeman asked if they had a place to stay. When they said no, he took them to the home of a white family where they rested in sleeping bags alongside 20 other people who were to join the march.

“I felt that this was the beginning of a new era for black Americans — that white people started to have more respect for black people,” Smith said. “From that moment on, I thought, ‘America is America. It’s become what the Constitution stands for.'”

Smith remained optimistic despite everything else he witnessed in the 1960s — he moved to Washington in 1968, just weeks before the assassination of Martin Luther King sparked days of violent protests in the city, but he felt his idealism was being rewarded when he saw the first black president to take office.

Daniel Robert Smith was born on March 11, 1932 in Winsted, northwest of Hartford, Connecticut. His father had been born into slavery in Massies Mill, a small community southwest of Charlottesville, Virginia. Like many enslaved people, Abram Smith never knew his precise date of birth, but he thought he was born in 1862 or 1863.

When the end of the Civil War led to the emancipation of Virginia’s slaves, Abram Smith continued to work at Massies Mill for a few years. After that he migrated north, first to Philadelphia and then to Poughkeepsie, New York, before settling in Winsted, where he found work as a janitor at Gilbert Clock, the city’s largest company.

In Winsted, Abram met the woman who would become his third wife, Clara Wheeler, nearly 40 years his junior. He died hit by a car when Daniel was 6 years old. After that, Daniel’s mother had several jobs as a housekeeper.

Daniel also worked: before and after school, he worked long hours as a veterinary assistant. During the Korean War he enlisted in the Army, hoping to be included in a unit that worked with dogs. But the Armed Forces were still in the process of racial segregation and told him that this type of work was not allowed for blacks.

He returned home to attend Springfield College in Massachusetts. In 1957, he made headlines as a local hero when, during a flood that claimed 87 lives, he rescued a truck driver from a river whose waters had risen too high. The case was narrated by journalist John Hersey in a report published in multiple vehicles.

Despite being one of only a handful of black students at Springfield and rarely being included in college social activities, his peers liked him and elected him student council president. Smith graduated in 1960 with a degree in general studies and then spent three years as a social worker before leaving for Alabama.

He moved to Washington to work at the Office of Economic Opportunity, the flagship of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program. There, Smith developed neighborhood health centers in rural and underserved areas, and in 1972 he launched a federal program that brought doctors to these areas.

But he also faced discrimination from a white administrator, including the threat of demotion. Smith resisted and, with free legal assistance from a reputable Washington law firm, won the lawsuit and, in addition, a salary increase.

He later set up emergency health centers in Lebanon, Morocco and South Africa. In 1986, he accompanied Desmond Tutu’s inauguration as Archbishop of Cape Town on the spot.

After retiring in 1994, Smith worked as a volunteer usher at Washington National Cathedral. He eventually became the chief usher, having ushered three presidents —George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—and their families into their seats.

His first marriage to Sandra Hawkins ended in divorce. Smith married Loretta Newman in 2006 in a ceremony at the National Cathedral. He leaves, in addition to Newman, his daughter, April Motaung, his son, Daniel, and a granddaughter.

He and his wife retired to Takoma, a leafy neighborhood in northwest Washington, where he wrote an autobiography published this year: “Son of a Slave: A Black Man’s Journey in White America.”