Daniel Smith Death
Daniel Smith, the descendant of a formerly enslaved person, passed away on Thursday at 90. Loretta Neumann, his wife, reported that he passed away on Wednesday night at a hospice facility in Washington. His son Rob and daughter April were standing by his side.
How did Daniel Smith Die?
His wife also reported that he had cancer and congestive heart failure, which confirmed his passing.
With Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Smith marched on Washington and attended the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first Black president. Smith’s remarkable life tale also includes fleeing the clutches of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. He also served in the final linkage to the country’s worst episode because he was only one generation removed from slavery. Thanks to his father, Abram. The father was born in Virginia in 1863 and was temporarily owned by a white man.
He had an Unusually Close Link to the American History of Slavery
On March 11, 1932, Daniel Smith was born in Winsted, the fifth of Abram’s six children, with his second wife, Clara. Smiths were among the only African Americans in their city. In an interview in 2020, he remembers getting out of bed and placing his ear to the doorway as his father enthralled his older children with tales he had heard as a boy. He described how two enslaved people who had attempted to flee were killed at the ‘hanging tree.’
In the winter, an enslaver made a tenant farmer lick a wagon wheel as his family looked on as punishment. When he was eventually permitted to trip it off, he had to leave some of his tongue behind since it had become frozen to the icy steel. In an interview, Daniel Smith expressed his “petrification” at the prospect of then-President Donald Trump rolling back years of black empowerment and urged people to embrace the Black Lives Matter Movement.
He recalled being the target of prejudice from a young age. However, he secretly dated some white girl students at his school. He enlisted in the military after graduation and served in Korea as a doctor. Upon his return home, he saved a truck driver in 1955 by diving into a river that a hurricane had flooded. He paid for his college tuition with the help of the military. A group of students of various races voted him president of the student body. He also went through a catastrophe during this time that would affect him for the rest of his life.
When Smith, a summer camp counselor, led his young campers to explore an ancient reservoir, he heard a disturbance and saw that girl had gotten too far out in the water and lost. Daniel Smith discovered a distinct pulse when she was subsequently hauled ashore. However, as he approached the white girl to start mouth-to-mouth therapy, he overheard police exclaiming that she was already dead. Smith stopped when he understood the officer would prefer to see her die than have a black guy help her.
Following graduation, Smith and a Jewish companion were dragged into the racial activity of the time. The two traveled to Washington in 1963 to take part in March. While attending graduate school in Alabama, he had intended to specialize as a veterinarian. However, his activism won out over his academic interests, and he finally found himself in command of a civil rights project.
Furious white nationalists attempted to drive his car off a highway and set fire to his office building before he swerved into a gas station filled with Black customers and escaped his assailants. In 1968, he moved to Washington. He started working for the government and founded a national training program for family doctors that is still in operation. In the 1990s, Daniel Smith retired. At the Washington National Cathedral, where he worked as an usher, he got to know Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. His marriage to Neumann, an environmentalist, and longstanding federal employee, occurred at the cathedral in 2006.
