Homer Smith, Jr. (1909-1972)

January 14, 2018 
/ Contributed By: Malik Simba

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Homer Smith shortly after his arrival in Moscow

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Homer Smith, Jr., best known for his fourteen-year sojourn in theย Soviet Union, was born in 1909 in Quitman,ย Mississippi, to parents Mr. and Mrs. Homer Smith, Sr. In 1916, at the age of seven, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesotaย with his parents. Between 1922 and 1928, Smith studiedย journalismย at the University of Minnesota. His United States Post Office wages paid his University fees and living accommodations.

Witnessing racial discrimination at the university along with theย Scottsboro Boys cases and 22ย lynchingsย of Black citizens in the United States in 1931, Smith decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1932 because the U.S.ย Communistย newspaperย The Daily Workerย proclaimed it โ€œโ€ฆthe one political state which stood for social justice for all oppressed peoples.โ€ย  Smith applied for a position at the Moscow Post Office and was hired with a higher salary than his Minneapolis post.

Arriving in Russia in 1932 at the beginning of Stalinโ€™s Second Five-Year Plan, Smith witnessed endemic poverty and hunger. He also became involved with Mezhrabpom Film Corporation of Moscow, which created a film script titled Black and White, whose political aim was to document how the capitalist system in the United States oppresses its โ€œcolored citizens.โ€ The film company recruited 22 โ€œNegro actors,โ€ includingย Langston Hughes,ย Loren Miller, Wayland Rudd, andย Dorothy West. They sailed fromย New Yorkย on theย Europa in June 1932. Russian authorities, however, dropped the project when the U.S. recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, and most of the actors returned to the United States.

Homer Smith, however, remained, and in January 1938, he married Marie Petrovna, a Soviet citizen.ย  Smith had been sending articles to Black American newspapers since 1932 while he worked at the Moscow Post Office. When Germany invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, he was now a full-time war correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, and in 1944 he became half of the two-person Associated Press team in Moscow. As a correspondent, Smith covered the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union, the siege of Moscow, the devastation of Sevastopol, Crimea, and the excavation of deceased Polish Army officers in the Katyn Forest in Poland. Smith also reported on his 1945 visit to the Nazi extermination camp in Majdanek, Poland.ย  While most attention was focused on the Jewish concentration camp victims and survivors, Smith saw the postmortem photographs ofย Senegaleseย troops who were captured by the Germans in 1940 as they defended the Maginot Line in Northeasternย France. Many of them were transferred to Majdanek, where they died.

While in Moscow, Smith became friends with theย Ethiopian Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Blattenguetta Lorenze Taezaz. This friendship enabled Smith to leave Russia in 1946 and attain a position in the Ethiopian Governmentโ€™s news agency. With Taezazโ€™s help, Marie attained an exit visa and joined Smith inย Addis Ababa in 1947. There, the coupleโ€™s two children, son Alex and daughter Tenia, were born.ย  After remaining in Ethiopia for fifteen years, Smith renounced his Soviet citizenship and returned to the U.S. in 1962.ย  The FBI, as a Cold War necessity, had compiled a dossier on Smith and feared he was a foreign agent of the U.S.S.R.

The Smith family settled in Chicago,ย Illinoisย where he took a more critical, measured tone regarding quality of life in Soviet Russia in a series of articles written forย Ebony Magazine. Those articles and other writing became the basis for his 1964 autobiography,ย Black Man in Red Russia.

Homer Smith died in Chicago in 1972 at the age of 63.ย  In 2006, the National Association of Black Journalists honored him posthumously by naming him a Legacy Award winner.

About the Author

Author Profile

Malik Simba received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. He has held professorships in the departments of history at State University of New York at Binghamton and Clarion University in Pennsylvania. Presently, he is a senior professor and past chair of the History Department (2000-2003) at California State University-Fresno in California. Dr. Simba was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1979, 1987, and 1990. He serves on the Board of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program at California State University-Fresno.

Dr. Simba is the author of Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: From the Colonial Background through the Ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Dilemma of Black Lives Matter (4th edition, 2019). He has contributed numerous entries in the Encyclopedia of African History, Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois Encyclopedia, Malcolm X Encyclopedia, African American Encyclopedia, and the Historical Dictionary of Civil Rights. Additionally, Dr. Simba has published the definitive analysis of race and law using critical legal theory in his โ€œGong Lum v. Rice: The Convergence of Law, Race, and Ethnicityโ€ in American Mosaic. His essay, โ€œJoel Augustus Rogers: Negro Historians in History, Time, and Space,โ€ appeared in Afro-American in New York Life and History 30:2 (July 2006) as part of a Special Issue: โ€œStreet Scholars and Stepladder Radicals-A Harlem Tradition,โ€ Guest Editor, Ralph L. Crowder. The essays on Rogers contributes to our knowledge of street scholars or historians without portfolios. Dr. Simbaโ€™s other published works include book reviews in the Chicago Tribune, Focus on Law Studies, and the Journal of Southwest Georgia History.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Simba, M. (2018, January 14). Homer Smith, Jr. (1909-1972). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/smith-homer-jr-1909-1972/

Source of the Author's Information:

Homer Smith,ย Black Man in Red Russia: A Memoirย (Chicago: Johnson Publication Company, 1964; โ€œNeil Homer Smith, Newsman, Author is Dead at 63,โ€ย New York Times, August 18, 1972; Jack El-Hai, โ€œHomeland Insecurity,โ€ย Minnesota Alumni, Summer 2017.

Further Reading