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Arts & Entertainment

One Woman's Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement

Storyteller and performer, Joy Kelly Smith gave a presentation about growing up in the segregated south.

To commemorate Black History Month in late February at the , a native of Tennessee and the daughter of a Baptist preacher and civil rights activist, Joy Kelly Smith, shared her harrowing and inspirational story of growing up as an African-American in the segregated south.

Now, a storyteller, performer and teaching artist living in Manhattan, Smith gave an engaging presentation that included history, myth and song.

Her school was integrated when she was in the first grade, amid much controversy.  It was 1957, the same year the "Little Rock Nine", a group of African-American students who were enrolled in Little Rock Central High School, had to be escorted to school under the protection of the U.S. Army.

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Smith began by telling a folk tale as an allegory of what happened in her life.

It was a song and story from Senegal, West Africa about a little girl who was the sole survivor after everyone in her village died.  She went through the woods, braving the wild animals, until she reached another village where everyone had really long, swanlike necks.

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At first the little girl was self-conscious about her short neck, but eventually began staying with a family who lived there.  The girl began to sing and the people there had never heard music before.  One day a man told her to leave because she didn't look like everyone else and was an embarrassment.  So, she left and went back into the Forest.

The villagers who loved her went back into the woods to retrieve her.  As a punishment for the man who tried to banish her, they made him learn her song.

"Just because they spent time together and got to know each other they became great friends," said Smith.

Smith's father, the late Kelly Miller Smith, Sr., was a preacher at the First Baptist Capitol Hill Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and helped organize the Nashville Christian Leadership Council.

She recalled growing up and seeing "White Only" signs all over.

"It was a lot of ridiculousness at the time," said Smith who never rode on a segregated bus.  "We had an iron clad rule in my family:  We were not allowed to go anywhere we wouldn't be treated the same as anyone else."

At six years old when she began going to a school that had just been integrated, she was the only African-American in her first grade class.  There were people who stood across the street and yelled things and held protest signs.  While Smith doesn't remember this she said, "I knew I was doing something very important."

One school was bombed in Nashville the day after it was integrated, and it had only one black child enrolled.

Smith's father founded workshops in his church to train in non-violent resistance to prejudice based on the philosophy of Gandhi.  She remembers her mother telling her, "It is more difficult to not fight back and [instead] show dignity."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a guest minister at their church when Smith was about 11 years old.  King gave her a kiss on the cheek that left her spellbound.

When King was shot, her family went to the funeral in Atlanta after first visiting King's home.  There, she got to meet Rosa Parks, and told the woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus that she was "so brave."  Parks just smiled.  "She was a very sweet woman," recalled Smith.

Smith's childhood consisted of daily insults such as her young mother being talked town to by bank tellers, and her not being allowed to join the Brownie troop, as well as life-threatening situations like bomb threats on her house because of her father's commitment to the movement.

Smith said, "When I was a child, living with that kind of humiliation was horrible."

In her graduating class of 125 there were only 10 African-Americans.  In 1974, she graduated fifth in her class at the prestigious Wellesley College.

"My whole life I was either the only one or one of the few ... I learned through integration that people are people," said Smith encompassing the moral of her moving story.

One of the most poignant moments in the powerful presentation was when Smith spoke about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, in which four young African-American girls lost their lives.  She said, "I was really affected by this because one of the girls was my age."

Smith sang and played guitar on the emotional song "Birmingham Sunday", written about the tragedy by Richard Farina and sung by folk singer Joan Baez.

The heartbreaking piece that included the names of all four girls and the refrain, "and the choirs kept singing of Freedom" brought a tear to many an eye in the audience.

"There were a lot of bombings during that time," said Smith.

The performer first got a guitar because she wanted to learn how to sing protest songs like the Freedom Riders did, whom she met when visiting her grandmother in Jackson, Mississippi.

"Different colored people from different cultures all sitting on a bus together made people angry," said Smith of the courageous rebel riders.

"Bravery keeps coming back to me when I think of the Civil Rights Movement," said Smith.

The impassioned speaker addressed that it makes her angry when people glorify, as halcyon days, the 50s and early 60s which was for her, "a scary, unfair time."

While we've come a long way, "We transfer things from one prejudice to another to another," said Smith.  "There's only one race and that's the human race, and that's what we are."

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