02/10/2025
Inside Colliding Worlds with Robert S. Smith
Patricia Obletz
Apr 20, 2020
The remarkable Robert Samuel Smith, PhD is the Harry G. John Professor at the Marquette University History Department and Director of the Center for Urban Research, Teaching & Outreach. He also finds time to accept numerous requests to MC events, join public panel discussions, facilitate community activist meetings; he serves on boards and committees, and authors books and columns, and single-parents his young son. Rob is as easy-going and intriguing in the classroom and on the stage as he was one on one for this interview. He is a positive influence on the march to justice, particularly in this State of Wisconsin hotbed of institutionalized racism. How did Robert S. Smith get from birth in 1969 to 2019?
Rob Smith unwittingly entered his future career in his first classroom at Purdue University. He thought he’d be an engineer, but experience, environment, education, genes and his own genius and spirit bathed by love led him to that unpremeditated class choice on the psychology of women. This was years before he chose to teach history -- we can’t fully understand history until we understand human nature. Only then can we identify and treat unnecessary imbalances that provoke malignant extremes of human behavior throughout history.
Evidently Rob never analyzed why he chose that psychology course: Nothing to do with growing up with his single mother from age two to 13, or having a sister 10 years younger at home and a girlfriend at Purdue? He wasn’t “that sophisticated back then,” he said.
Rob still audits law classes, sharpening his arsenal of educational activism. His 2011 Con Law class at Marquette Law School sharpened his skills in teaching “African Americans & the Legal Process. He begins his classes with current events, working backwards through the semester.
We noted today’s demonstrations of institutionalized racism, particularly in law enforcement. Which sent us to Rob’s personal history forged by his parents, each born into a different world, but whose ancestors were imported from Africa as slaves. Curious about his lineage, Rob recently had his DNA analyzed: Nigerian, Congolese, Sierra Leon and 16% British Isles.
• His mother’s roots were in North Carolina and Texas.
• His father’s roots were mostly in Georgia.
• His mother’s family, with southern roots, became lawyers, doctors, judges and engineers.
• His father’s family became cotton sharecroppers until, according to Rob’s paternal grandmother, her husband Samuel, who was an overseer, did “something” that precipitated their sudden departure for Indianapolis in the late1950s, early ‘60s. By the time Rob was old enough to ask questions, his father’s family was untraceable.
Inside colliding worlds
After marrying his mother, Rob’s father spent Rob’s years between two and 13 in and out of prison. Rob said, “My dad was a two-time felon, yet he was able to get a job as a garbage man who then was promoted to troubleshooter before he retired from his 20-year career with the City of Indianapolis.
“Of course, this was before employers inserted ‘The Box’ on job applications to be checked yes or no regarding criminal history. The creation of that kind of background check and that system of thinking also is part of the buildup of the carceral state.
“Others who had been incarcerated with him had what people would generally consider pretty good paying jobs with local government in various ways. This was also before systems could be so hyper-connected by computers.
“In the 70s, they were just enacting the drug laws and there were far more rehabilitative programs in prisons then than now. My dad gained a certain set of skills and developmental kinds of things while incarcerated. The day he was released, a corrections officers said she hated to see him go, but was glad he was going. He said he was never going back. Once out of prison, he became an ordained minister and got a real estate license while working on sanitation trucks.
“My dad was home until I was two and again in that six-year window through my years in junior high and high school. We talked about his past. He confessed to the first crime that got him convicted, but said he was framed for the second one. Both were violent crimes committed with or by his community of hustlers.
“The Smith side of my family had a range of experiences with law enforcement. Some of that was domestic violence. In fact, one of my older cousins would protect the women in the family from domestic abuse.
“In the 70s, the police were more aware of community members. Even though my cousin was physically assaulting another person and possibly engaging in physical acts of violence with the police, they never took him to jail -- they understood that he was performing a role for the family.
“They could have shot him on multiple occasions, but they did not. This is a significant change from today’s mindset, where the first inclination seems to be extreme violence and shooting.
The word criminal becomes synonymous with Black
“I think militarizing the police changed the culture. When the word criminal becomes synonymous with Black, which converged over a generation, you have this build-up of the carceral state:
• the criminalization of activism,
• the criminalization of poverty
• the criminalization of mental illnesses.
“An uncle on my father’s side had some form of schizophrenia -- he’s better now, but in the 70s and 80s, he was suffering dramatically. He’d been in an institution that was suddenly closed, stranding him without support.
“He acted out violently at home. Once, my cousins and I were watching Star Wars in the Madam CJ Walker theater, an iconic space in the black community in Indianapolis. Ushers found us and said that our grandmother was in the hospital, something is happening at home, we had to go.
“As the story was replayed to me, my cousin defended his grandmother and mother against his own father's attack; the police came and he’s so worked up about it, he attacks his father in the police car. They restrain him, and calm him down, and then take his father to jail.”
He shook his head. “But, soon after, a young man named Michael Taylor was handcuffed behind his back and put in the back of a police car, yet ended up with a bullet in his head -- and the officers went free..That scenario in the late 1980s exposes the murky almost unbelievable arguments about why a teenager has to be killed while in handcuffs in police custody in so many cities -- it's so absurd that he died and the story that we were given was so absurd that it sticks out.
Racial baptism
When asked about his first experience with racism, Rob said, “A lot of scholars talk about racial baptism.
“I became aware of my race when I was about four and said that my mother was white – she was very fair-skinned and had an Afro like Angela Davis’. She quickly adjusted my understanding of race by making it clear that Black people of varying hues would always be Black.
“But, in terms of facing racism,” Rob said, “I was about 10 years old when a white kid – we were playing football, referred to me as the N word. I'd heard the word loosely said among Black people, but never had I experienced it with the intent to harm or insult. At that moment, I was surprised, but I wasn't offended, because I didn't quite know the full scope of it.
“That moment remains vivid. It was a weekday evening at the church that supported recreational sports. We were playing in a football practice. The kid used the N word after I tackled him. I don't remember there being a racial imbalance in the field.
“I was also part of the school busing moment, so I remember there being protests against busing, but I don't remember all of the details, but the impression was that busing was wrong.
“Among the many options that had been a part of school reform, busing when white children are discouraged from harassing black children had its benefits. But there were so many cases of vicious, hostile resistance from parents and kids that black children had to face when bused to white schools — we almost never see it with white kids being bused to black schools.
“I think that was part of the local strategies to make busing fail. But by the 1980s, when I experienced busing in middle school and high school, I just don't remember having problems. I was always a pretty good student. My parents prepared me effectively with their expectations and extracurricular opportunities to enhance my growth and my learning.
“I also was taught in junior high to always keep ID on me. My step-father used to say to me, ‘you're a big kid so police officers are not going to know that you're only 13. They're going to treat you like an adult.’ He told me how to manage those situations.”
In the late 1980s, Rob was on the way home with two different friends at different times when he had his first two police encounters. Both occurred his junior year near his black neighborhood high school. The first time, neither student had a license; they admitted to taking his friend’s father's car without permission. The police followed them home and said to put the car in the garage. Rob said, “First they went through our stuff and found a copy of Othello in my book bag. I was in an advanced literature course, so I know Shakespeare and explained the play to the police –-
“We also had a joint in the ashtray, but the police never looked in the ashtray. They left. We took the joint out and smoked it -- they were clearly just harassing us -- I don't remember in that moment being afraid that we would get shot. I remember feeling like, if they find that ma*****na, we're both going be in a lot of trouble at home.”
A striking moment
The second encounter occurred as a snowstorm gathered speed after school; another friend drive him home, briefly stopping at a girl’s house to say they couldn’t visit because of the storm. As they left, a police officer pulled them over. She was white and asked why they were in that neighborhood. When told school was nearby, she kept pressing them on what they were doing there since school was over. They mentioned their friend. “The officer said, ‘Does she want you over here?’ And without waiting for their answer, she said, ‘Do her parents want you there?’ That was a striking moment. She let us go.
“I was pi**ed off and told my mom I wanted to file a complaint. She said, ‘You can file a complaint, but nothing's going to happen. And they'll be on the lookout for you.’ She wasn't dismissive, but she was communicating that, yeah, this is what we've been telling you, this is not going to be the last time.
“My dad died at 50 when I was 25 years old, but during those formative teenage years, we were able to establish a relationship, which didn’t go as deep as father-son interaction today, I learned a lot from him and his side of my family. Today there are many conversations about masculinity and what it means and the ways in which it can be toxic, but there was no vernacular around what would be healthy ideas around manhood and masculinity back then. The first time I explored questions of gender-based identity was in the psychology of women course I took freshman year at Purdue.
“My mom's grandfather was a WWII veteran, who worked as a postman for 30 years with the GI Bill. He worked a double shift before they had those little trucks, and he paid off his home in 10 years. He's the youngest in a number of very successful African Americans who were middle and upper class, a small number, but they had been part of the Indianapolis Black elite community for some time.
“We had a great uncle who was a judge dealing with Indiana’s deep south Jim Crow mindset. The long-standing Black community might be small, but it has made in-roads in economic and even political security in some ways that, in northern cities, the migration experience muddies up.
“When large numbers of southerners move, that changes things. My father's side of the family are Black southerners from Georgia and part of that migration experience. I think the struggles that that side of the family experienced were because, as migrants, they're trying to anchor themselves, but they don't have the education or generations of stability to help them by the late 50s, 60s.
Learning by example
Rob’s mother was the first affirmative action director for the City of Indianapolis under Mayor Richard Lugar] “before those HR-related positions became hyper-professionalized and required a college degree. She was responsible for hiring as many Black people as possible – there were few Latinos back then. My mother, Sharon Lynn Maxey, was also in charge of the youth work program.” Rob spent some summers cleaning up parks with other Black students.
“Someone jokingly said that, when Sharon was the affirmative action director, everybody got blue collar jobs,” Rob said. “But, deep cuts to that infrastructure have made people forget how much city and state government employees were part of that build-up of the United States today. Indiana (then) employed far more people than it does today due to state and local government jobs being downsized, cut and outsourced.”
As he grew, Rob’s mother would say he was acting like the Russells; at other times, she’d say he was acting like the Smiths. “Those two worlds colliding in my upbringing, I think, is a very useful way of understanding the Black experience, and coming together in this urban landscape where you're dealing with economic transformations, busing, schools, and where this criminalization of the Black community is very pronounced,” Rob said.
“African Americans know that issues with race are not going anywhere. The history of the Black Freedom Struggle shows there will always be efforts to challenge racism from a broad set of perspectives and tactics. The future will see more and more sophisticated tactics,” he said.
Rob’s mother prepared him for college by sending him to a magnet school for fifth and sixth grades, and then to middle and high schools for advanced students. In high school, Rob pursued courses to prepare him for a career in engineering; he was selected to be one of 40 Indiana students to attend free two-week engineer summer camps.
The camp in 1986 was an introductory engineering program for minority students at Purdue University. Many of the kids ended up going on to Purdue with Rob. “At that camp, we made robots, we did computer programming, we visited different industries, we partied and had fun. We were crazy, hormonal teenagers, 17, getting ready for college — most of my really good friends prior to Purdue were there.” Today, that camp costs $2,500 to attend, “an indication of the receding state and federal support for these kinds of efforts.”
By his junior year, Rob had taken all the advanced placement classes possible in addition to being elected student council vice president, and then senior class president.
Rob was in junior high school when his mother lost her position in Mayor Richard Lugar’s office for lack of a college education. They fell on tough economic times. But the family held together. Barely. His mother’s future husband lived with them, but battled alcoholism. Occasionally, he was emotionally violent, but hit Rob’s mom only after he left for college. Rob’s father lived around the corner, “which kept the physical violence at a minimum.”
Rob knew his step-siblings born to his father and another woman. Both stepbrothers were incarcerated. The elder, James Jr., had significant mental health challenges, which Rob and his mother attributed to the fact his father had traces of dormant syphilis in his blood. She thought this fact somehow was impacted in a fringe way by the Tuskegee experiments.
His mother believed that mental health was a significant issue that the family was grappling with both individually and as a family unit. Rob said his “mother would say that Grannie had to be the toughest person around, because she was dealing with so much, both in terms of her children, who were experiencing various forms of mental illness, and her children who were either incarcerated or -- some of her kids were successful, but they distanced themselves.
“My mother had a very close perspective on it; she was very astute. My grandfather, her dad, was angry that she didn't maximize her brain. He imagined her being a doctor or — anything she wanted to do. But she was an activist and ran for local office, on the ground, meeting everyone. Even though she didn’t win, she ended up managing the advertising accounts for a black newspaper, The Indianapolis Recorder. She was still connected to all the church leaders and all the business leaders.
Hundreds of people came to Rob’s mother’s funeral. She was connected to the community leaders who created the Indiana Black Expo. It began as a festival in the park to being a two or three-week celebration of community organizing with artists, musicians, health screenings, college fairs, resume building workshops, and more.
“Richard Lugar, the mayor when my mother was the Affirmative Action Director, sent her hand-written holiday cards. And she would always talk about politics. She told me to stay away from it, and that she didn’t think Republicans and Democrats were very different because Richard Lugar was a centrist Republican who went on to be a US Senator -- The Tea party ousted him in 2013. I remember thinking, okay: the tides have turned.”
The tides began turning with the Nixon then the Reagan years when Rob enjoyed the freedom of college, of having his own space, and the War on Drugs altered the future for so many people of color.
While earning his Masters from Central Michigan University, Rob worked as a residence hall director. He learned what the university structure was. While studying for his PhD from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, he was a research assistant for the American Society of Legal Historians. He met other scholars and law club members who clerked for impressive judges, growing his wide network of scholars and activists.. He met his wife there; both received teaching offers in Milwaukee.
The only thing Rob regrets is not getting a law degree concurrent with his PhD. But he wasn’t encouraged to do so by anyone with a law degree, he added.
Opening doors. Closing doors.
Rob was 18 and in his first classroom for a psych 100 class at Purdue University when a man with a ponytail walked into the classroom, turned on the overhead and began lecturing at the podium. Rob knew then that he wanted to teach higher ed. Although offered corporate jobs, money couldn’t buy Rob. Higher ed weighed more than money in the bank on Rob’s scale for success.
Rob’s following psych class, the Psychology of Women - furthered his future. The professor was social psychologist Janice Kelly at Purdue. She invited him to join her research team to study group think, looking at other relationship-like variables within same s*x groups, examining the way people communicate, charting interactions within naturally-occurring scenarios. He found the brain, and human behavior and human interaction fascinating, but he didn't want to teach psychology. He’d discovered that the field was inherently racist and s*xist.
Rob said that, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, too many studies excluded women and people of color, and they were over-generalized. The academic community may be significantly more diverse now than it was then, but nowhere near enough to help everyone in need. He said that significant disciplines and subdisciplines were beginning to critique the traditional approaches: “I became a student of some folks that were working on gender related topics or race related topics. I remember conversations where it was clear that the academy was under critique.
“And so, history became an opportunity to (take) an interdisciplinary approach to things. History gives you the latitude to study law, study economics, study politics, (which) helped me think better as a historian -- I was already pi**ed off about people telling me that Black people riot because it's hot outside -- That was also in a text book, which then suggested factors that lead to aggression in terms of big groups and populations, such as limited resources and overcrowding. These statements are not all fully conclusive or fully supported; then the book made some statement to the effect that the weather does seem to be a predictor for African Americans because urban disturbances occur in the summertime. I argued with that professor, and I'm sure it hurt my grade, but it became clear to me then that a very knowledgeable person can also be woefully ignorant.
“One day, walking through the library I saw all these books on black psychology. I had never even heard of this subdiscipline, or that there was this whole research agenda that looked into the black experience specifically on its own merits. Alvin Poussaint’s books were new to me – Purdue had no course on this discipline.
“At the same time, I was taking a couple of history classes studying cultural anthropology and the ways in which it informed race and racist ideologies. That helped me move to a place where I thought, well, I'll study history because then I get to see how all the different parts fit.”
Beyond the classroom
Rob hung out with a group of men who considered themselves radicals – from 1987-92. They made a commitment to continue whatever spirit of activism they had in whatever jobs they’d take. “One of the most ardent of our radical crew was a white guy, Tony. He drove through the night from Purdue University to the University of Kansas to go copy every edition of the Black Panther newsletter in 48 hours. We were largely African American, but we had other guys from different backgrounds. We were just trying to figure it out. But we wanted to have a powerful voice.”
They’d meet at the Black Cultural Center infrequently because they were serious students. They asked fellow students to be more aware of their own history and culture, and had conversations about the centrality of Africa and the history of politics. “We weren't trying to shut anything down,” Rob said. “At best, we were trying to enlighten others about something that we probably still were learning. But this was around the time of Rodney King. We led some of those conversations, as well as ones on affirmative action and higher ed.”
Rob graduated from Purdue and, while managing a residence hall at Central Michigan University in pursuit of his Masters degree, he contemplated his options. Psychology was out, but he understood higher ed and wanted to be a faculty member. He also knew he wanted a PhD, but not in which field. The class he took that decided his Masters of Arts study looked at the ways that law and legal systems inform our understanding of race and actually shape definitions of race. He realized that he could use this social science background to understand the impact and the role of law on history. “It's been rewarding, it's been a lot of fun. It’s useful in understanding what’s going on in the world today.”
