Vince Compagnone

George Walker Smith: “The reason I can work so freely has to do with the traditional role of black preachers.”

The monthly luncheon meeting of the Catfish Club, held in the basement of the Golden Hill Presbyterian Church, is a scene reminiscent of The Godfather.

“If I tell you white folks my plans, first thing I know, you’ll try to stop me.”

Vince Compagnone

As various San Diego leaders — most of them black — file into the basement. Reverend George Walker Smith, president of San Diego City School Board and possibly the area’s most influential black leader, stations himself all alone at the head table. A short, wide, dominating figure. Smith sits with his legs spread and his palms flat on the table.

Tom Goodman leans over Smith intimately, whispers to him, embraces him repeatedly.

Vince Compagnone

His humorous frog-like eyes scrutinize the members of the Catfish Club as they slap each others' backs, fill paper plates with creamed com, fish, and slaw, and sit down at the tables surrounding him. Smith has a look about him, a slightly amphibious image that makes it seem as if, at any moment, he might wake from his apparent stupor . , . and hop, scaring the hell out of everybody. Or, better yet, his tongue might dart out and snatch up some unsuspecting associate.

Smith: “There’s nothing I can’t stand more than some cat with two secretaries out front, especially if he’s black."

Vince Compagnone

No one sits down at Smith’s table, seemingly out of deference. The men, who banter and guffaw, include school board attorney Ralph Stern; municipal court judge Bruce Iredale; county marshal Michael Sgobba; two timid and pale representatives of Pacific Telephone Company, and other members and visitors Smith likes to call the Catfish Club’s “white tokens.’’ The rest of the men are all black businessmen, civic leaders, police and fire officials, including deputy fire chief Ben Holman, and Rufus DeWitt, dean of students of the community college district. “Bill Kolender (San Diego police chief) was supposed to be here,” booms Smith. “He told his secretary he’d be at the Boy’s Club for lunch. Now, a man can’t be two places at once. Maybe Mrs. Kolender better check up on that.” Everybody laughs and pokes each other.

Slogan over Smith's desk: “If you lead a good life, go to Sunday School and Church, say your prayers every night, when you die, you’ll go to Kentucky . . . .”

Vince Compagnone

The last “white token” to show up is tall, gangly, rosy-cheeked Tom Goodman, superintendent of schools and scourge of the San Diego Teacher’s Association. Smiling, Goodman dishes up his plate, then looks for a place to sit. Peering at an empty seat or two near the rest of the men, and at the empty chairs at Smith’s table, Goodman makes his decision. He marches over and sits down next to Smith. During the rest of the meal. Goodman leans over Smith intimately, whispers to him, embraces him repeatedly. The Reverend doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

First on the agenda is the matter of money. Smith begins by chiding members of the club who haven’t yet paid their dues. (The donations help pay for social action programs and a Head Start school supported by Smith's Golden Hill church.) The members pass greenbacks above their heads and the money piles up in front of the Reverend. Somebody yelps, “Hey, George, how long can somebody come as a guest before he starts having to pay?” and points in an exaggerated way at rock-jawed Marshal Sgobba. who turns red. Judge Iredale. a guest, whips out his wallet and offers to pay for his lunch. Several arms reach out and try to stop him, but he insists.

“That’s fine of you. Judge,” coos Smith.

“Call me Bruce.”

“I referred to you as Judge for the benefit of the rest of these lawbreakers. Thought I’d let ’em know.”

Smith keeps harping at everybody about money. “Pay before you leave,” he commands, over and over. Somebody says, “Preachers always got to embarrass you about money.”

After they finish eating, several men make announcements. One entrepreneur, introduced as the “black Howard Cosell.’’ drums up support for the Southeast Kiwanis Club's Crime Prevention rally. “We’re holding it at the Jackie Robinson Y; a real high-power group’ll be there. San Diego Alarm Company will be raffling off bolt alarms . . . Another man recommends that everybody come to a lecture by a reformed alcoholic and author of a book called I'm Black and I'm Drunk (changed in the second printing to I'm Black and I'm Sober). The last announcement is that the “black Howard Cosell” has been married.

“I needed a tax shelter,” he protests, to general hooting.

“One less walker on the street,” someone else jokes.

Smith commends one member, Don Williams, for pursuing his candidacy as County Recorder. “Anytime a black like you can live in Lakeside, you've paid your dues to run for office.” One of the black businessmen chimes in: “They still got toilets for colored folks out there." Everyone laughs.

This monthly meeting is, in fact, a way of paying political dues. Just as the “Hour in the Barrio” — a similar gathering held by Chicano leaders — is a touchstone for local power, the Catfish Club is viewed by many as a way of maintaining contact with the grassroots; but more importantly, as homage to George Walker Smith.

During the last few moments of today’s meeting, everyone moves to the door, swapping tales and swatting backs. School superintendent Goodman, who has hardly spoken to anyone except Smith, has ducked out the door. A white man is on one knee beside the still-seated Smith holding his hand and whispering.

Relatively few people who live outside Southeast San Diego know much about Smith or the influence he wields, but as school board president, minister, political operative, and community leader, he has made his presence felt nearly everywhere. “George is more influential than most people think,” says George Stevens, executive assistant to county supervisor Jim Bates, and, like Smith, a minister who has been active in civil rights for years. “People can’t often remember the names of whites who’ve served on the school board, but they remember George Walker Smith. He’s turned what is basically a nonpolitical position (school board) into one that has influence in politics, education, and industry. When George Walker Smith makes a phone call here, it’s like Tom Bradley making one in Los Angeles.”

While Smith has been scorned by some observers — usually white liberals — as an "Uncle Tom,” his role in San Diego has been far too complex for such simplistic criticism. Even the most strident of the black radicals of the Sixties are hesitant to find fault, despite the fact that he is a Republican, a fiscal conservative, middle class, against busing, and generally disdainful of radicals.

Smith's conservatism, however, can be misleading. He is as bitter and eloquent as the most ardent of the Sixties radicals. “White racist America,” he likes to say, “prides itself on three things: whiteness, maleness, and money.” He touts business and “quality education” as the black salvation. “You show me one liberal who’s helped us make any real economic progress. They can’t even buy you a good lunch,” he says. His opposition to busing, in fact, stems not from a distaste for integration, but rather for his scorn for "white racist America.” Hate for minorities is just below the surface of this nation, he claims, and in every city where busing has occurred, the hate has “raised its ugly head."

The dearth of criticism from former radicals may in part be due to the fact that so many of them now share the same views and have joined him in the middle class, and also because they respect his power. He is the classic big-city patrone, who serves as ombudsman for a large segment of San Diego's black (and now, Arab) population; he greases the wheels for them, writes their letters of recommendation, mediates the law, and gets things done, cares about them.

George Walker Smith was born in 1929 in Hayneville, Alabama, a small town two hours by car from Montgomery. His father, Will, supported George and his ten brothers and sisters by working as a laborer in a dairy farm for one hundred dollars a month. The children attended elementary and junior high schools near Hayneville which took in black students, but when young George decided to pursue a high school diploma (then an unusual ambition for a black in the South) he had to transfer to Miller’s Ferry Institute, a private school for blacks founded and financed by the Presbyterian Church.

Then came four years at Knoxville College (in Tennessee) where Smith studied chemistry and German. The only member of his family to attend college. Smith hoped to become a doctor. a dream that was abandoned because of the prohibitive cost of a medical school education. Instead, he took a job as a science teacher and athletics coach at the Annemaine Academy after graduating from Knoxville in 1951.

Within a year he was back in the arms of the Presbyterian church as a student at its theological seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Smith was now twenty-six years old. Most of those years had been spent in schools, yet the seminary was the first institution he attended in which blacks and whites shared classrooms, bathrooms, and dining halls without regard to color. Unencumbered by the segregationist strictures of the South. the Presbyterian church chose a wealthy, primarily white congregation to host Smith during his apprenticeship in the ministry. But the move from Hayneville. Alabama to a northern city such as Pittsburgh was mild compared to the trip Smith took when he was ordained by the church in 1956. That year he gathered up his wife Elizabeth, his two daughters and his son. packed the family car. and set out for San Diego, where he was to assemble the Golden Hill Presbyterian Church — the first and still the only Presbyterian congregation in San Diego’s black community.

As Smith remembers San Diego then, it was “just like Mississippi." There was no such thing as open housing; only a few restaurants would serve blacks. The black community was fragmented. “We couldn’t get enough blacks together to even have a riot.” he recalls. Four years after he arrived, though. Smith was nominated to San Diego Kiwanis Club by Dr. Doug Miller, a dentist. Smith says he was the first black in the country to join the Kiwanians. “I told Doug I considered them beneath me educationally. Hell. I didn't need that fraternization. They needed mine more than I needed theirs.”

In 1963, seven years after his move to San Diego, Reverend Smith decided to run for the city’s board of education. Then thirty-four years old. he could not have chosen a more difficult time to attempt to become the first black on the board. During the year of Martin Luther King's Poor People’s March on Washington, the bombing of a Birmingham. Alabama Negro church (killing four young girls), the assassination of black leader Medgar Evers, and President John Kennedy’s declaration of a moral crisis. Smith avoided questions of race whenever possible. He cloaked his concerns for blacks in calls for programs to aid the “socially handicapped” and a guarantee that “every person have the opportunity to equip himself educationally.”

Smith drew the support of teachers with a platform that promised salary increases. White liberals volunteered to host teas and distribute his election literature. Julie Fisher, who would become both a fellow board member and later an outspoken foe of Smith, worked on his 1963 campaign. So did Tom Bradley, a young Los Angeles city councilman and now mayor.

The euphoria surrounding his victory had barely subsided, though, when Smith was vividly reminded that, at least in some places, color, not popularity or qualifications, still determined how a black man was treated. He and three other black school trustees took a break from a national educational conference in Houston, Texas and walked over to the Normandie restaurant for lunch. Before they could be seated, a waitress informed the men that the Normandie was a private club which provided dining facilities for blacks in a downstairs cafeteria. Smith and his colleagues followed the prescribed route to the "cafeteria." The last door they opened landed them back on the streets of Houston; it was a rear exit.

In San Diego, however, the recognition began to roll in. Smith was named one of the country's Outstanding Young Men by the national Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1964. was elected the first black president of the board of education by a unanimous vote in 1965. and saw his wife appointed as the first black teacher in the National City school district.

Politically, Smith became more outspoken. He still sidestepped blatantly racial questions, but nonetheless ventured into controversial territory. He pronounced the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott “the great trigger pulled in the (black social) revolution." and told whites that black church leadership was solidified, not intimidated, by the 1963 Birmingham riots in which police and firemen routed blacks with fire hoses “as if they were Harlem rats." Embracing the 1967 Civil Rights Act as the "second Emancipation Proclamation," Smith predicted the election of black mayors in large cities within a decade and urged the National School Boards Association in 1968 to support court-ordered desegregation of schools in Washington. D.C.

His views on education were similar to those of Booker T. Washington, the century’s first black leader, who favored improved, segregated education with an emphasis on vocational training. Smith's 1967 re-election platform included calls for “an intensive re-emphasis on occupational education.” He scolded the nation's press for its tendency to give coverage to black radicals at the expense of their more moderate counterparts, and promised all who would listen that the Rap Browns and Stokely Carmichaels would pass in due time.

Two years later, when the rhetoric of black militants had filtered down to high schools, and sixteen-year-olds began demanding black-studies classes, organizing black heritage days, and forming black student unions. Smith instructed his fellow administrators in the disarming of the uprising of black schools.

The trick to calming tensions on their campuses was to yield, but ever so slightly, to student demands. Don’t give too much. Smith warned the principals, but rather just enough to placate the disgruntled. “If they (the students) want hog chitterlings ... or tacos in the cafeteria, let them have them. Don't panic over a list of little things that don't really matter.”

Reverend Smith never participated in a civil rights demonstration, although, during the Sixties, he watched with respect as Martin Luther King mobilized and inspired masses. “If you assume I should have marched, then you're falling into the same trap as most white people — thinking black folks all got to be the same. I hate walking my ass up and down the street!

“One time a fella walked up on a stage where King was speaking and punched him in the stomach, and King, because he was nonviolent, just turned the other cheek. If that fella had struck me, I would have hit him in the head with my Bible. Some folks are built for nonviolent protest and some aren’t.”

George Walker Smith sits behind his desk and winces in frustration at his telephone answering machine. “Sometimes this thing is more trouble than it’s worth.” Hunching over, he leans across the desk and gives the machine a left hook, snapping the playback button. A flood of taped messages drives him back in his chair. He grabs the phone and starts calling as messages keep pouring out from school board members, political candidates, parents, and parishioners seeking spiritual guidance.

On the walls of his cramped, dusty church office are fifty-two plaques and awards, including a slogan he has taped over his desk which reads: “If you lead a good life, go to Sunday School and Church, say your prayers every night, when you die, you’ll go to Kentucky . . . .” The ceiling plaster is peeling in big strips above his head. One of the arms of his chair is shredded beyond repair.

Returning a call from someone he’s neither met nor talked to. the Reverend starts out by bellowing, “You still in bed? It’s eleven o’clock in the morning! What? I can’t hear you!” Realizing he’s still competing with the taped messages, he punches the machine out and concentrates on the woman who hasn’t gotten out of bed yet. He calms her down after his initial assault and proceeds to listen patiently. When he hangs up, he shakes his massive head and laughs. “Woman wanted to have the bus pick her kids up when it rains. Hell, she could take ’em to school on her shoulders one by one and still get back in bed and sleep ’til eleven.” His face puckers up and he chuckles.

From his office. Smith can hear the squeals of 120 children enrolled in his church’s Head Start school. Besides this, the church also sponsors a crisis clinic and a recently developed work program for parolees, which came out of a partnership between municipal court judge Robert Cooney and Smith, formed at a meeting of the Catfish Club. Cooney, the judge who indignantly refused to prosecute speeders after he learned that a highway patrolman had excused Governor Ronald Reagan from a speeding ticket, now sends some offenders to Smith rather than to jail.

Smith has also adopted — or been adopted by — San Diego's Iraqi community, which largely consists of merchants new to the country who are busily buying up the corner markets. One hesitant and shy Arab appears at Smith’s office door. The Reverend motions him in and keeps talking on the phone. The young man sits down in an oversized chair near Smith’s desk. He rubs his day-old beard, and his dark eyes rove across the wall of plaques; he puts his hands between his knees and waits. When Smith finally hangs up, the Arab begins a long story about how his wife made a practice of running around the streets naked after ingesting huge quantities of marijuana. Then one day the Arab came home from his job at the market where he worked twelve hours a day; his wife had sold their washing machine to a neighbor for a dollar, taken the kids, and moved to Texas.

“Next she’ll be selling one of your kids for a dollar,” Smith exclaims. Right now, though, her lawyers want half of the Arab’s income and a car.

“I’ve got two broken cars. She broke them both,” the young man sighs. He asks Smith for a letter of testimony stating he is capable of supporting his children. Smith shuffles through the piles of unopened letters on his desk to find a pen. and scribbles a message to the lawyer. “I’ll have this typed up tomorrow and I’ll drop it off at your market myself.”

The Arab leaves, glowing, and is immediately replaced by an old man who comes by just to sit and chat. “There’s a lot of these old folks like him,” Smith says later. “Wife’s dead; nobody to talk to. I’ve heard his stories a hundred times. I get a lot of pleasure from him.

“The door's always open,” Smith states. “There’s nothing I can’t stand more than some cat with two secretaries out front, especially if he’s black. Some of these black leaders are harder to get in to see than Carter.”

Smith has never stopped to wonder how much of his time is divided between school board business and church business. “The reason I can work so freely has to do with the traditional role of black preachers,” he points out. “They were always political and social leaders. If a preacher in a white church got as involved as me, his congregation would ran him out of town.” His own congregation, nearly all black, is unusual — the average family in Smith’s church earns in excess of $20,000 a year and the head of the household has between thirteen and fourteen years of education. Golden Hill Presbyterian, Smith says, is the most affluent black church in the county. The congregation does not live in the low-income area surrounding their church; they come from throughout the city. Smith, though, does not accept the thesis that middle-class blacks are now as far removed from poor blacks as are whites.

“A lot of people are confused about the nature of power,” he continues. ‘‘What the black community needs is real power, not the kind of Black Power the radicals were talking about, with a fist in the air and the other hand reaching for a handout, but real economic power. You have to ask yourself how many blacks. Chicanos, or even whites are in that position. Only a few families really have power in America, and the biggest one is headed by David Rockefeller . . . Smith laughs and looks away. “White folks have a trick they play on us. They pick the black folks' leaders. Any cat down on the street starts screaming ‘honky’ and they’ve got the cameras on him. They ignore the black leaders with the real power. I’m sick of whites writing about blacks.”

In January, 1970, Smith announced his candidacy for county supervisor. After appointing David E. Porter, a wealthy and influential businessman, as his campaign chairman. Smith attempted to gather conservative support by blasting teachers who were demanding cuts in class size and increases in salary and fringe benefits, a subject on which he has been outspoken ever since. It was the first time Smith, who endorsed teachers’ pay raises when he ran for the school board in 1963, had made such a statement. He breezed through the primary, gained the endorsement of the Evening Tribune, but lost the November election to Jim Bear by the slim margin of 1500 votes. His first and only campaign for full-time elective office left him resentful of his supposed Republican supporters. “He was bitter because the Republican machine didn't come out for him,” recalls Porter's wife, Kay. “In fact, I wonder why he’s hung on as a Republican as long as he has when the party has so often given him the cold shoulder.” Political interests aside. Smith's dedication to the school district has never lapsed. During his first years on the board he prodded fellow members to accept increased federal aid to start programs for handicapped students. He has since championed minority hiring, especially in the district's teacher’s aide program. Smith has also pushed the year-round school concept, supported career education centers, “open space” classrooms, and been a leader in establishing bi-lingual programs. In 1975 he was elected the first black president of the National School Boards Association. But one of Smith’s public pronouncements has stirred up more controversy than anything else. That is his consistent stand against busing to achieve racial integration, a position which complements the “go slow” integration order handed down last year by Superior Court Judge Lewis Welsh in the Carlin case. Smith, who in the 1960s was amenable to busing, turned around on the issue in 1971. “From now on,” he said in signaling a break with the past, “I’m for transporting youngsters for quality education, not merely for mixing. I’m convinced they can get as good an education right in their own community. Anywhere in San Diego — at any school where you have this kind of desegregation under the name of integration — you have the little black kids over here, the little brown kids over there, and the little white kids in a different place. That sure isn’t integration."

At loggerheads with Smith on this issue are the liberals — the League of Women Voters most recently; the Urban League for several years now. Not only do they feel that the board of education and the courts should push stronger programs, including busing, that guarantee integration, but they feel Smith is doubly responsible, as a black leader and a school board member, for leading the way on such programs.

Former school board member Julie Fisher, who says Smith refused to challenge the district's administrators during the years she was in office with him. offers another criticism of Smith that several other black leaders share. She claims Smith has not done enough to bring other blacks into positions of power within the district hierarchy. “When it comes to cabinet-level appointments (in the areas of deputy and assistant superintendents), blacks just don’t get them,” says Clarence Pendleton of the San Diego Urban League. “We’ve sent George lists of qualified names, of people he should be getting in, but he too often does (Superintendent Tom ) Goodman's bidding instead.”

Walter Kudumu, director of the youth self-help group Open Road, and a former vice-chairman of the militant political party US, also singles out Smith's failure to push harder for programs that would bring better services to minority schools. “He’s a political animal, and his political side has prevailed,” says Kudumu, who nonetheless noted Smith's willingness to donate the facilities of his church for a lunch program Kudumu helped organize

In his modest Valencia Park home Smith eats heartily and badmouths politicians. “Most of ’em are like the fellas during the Civil War who wore gray coats and blue pants and got shot up both ends." Congressman Lionel Van Deerlin, snorts Smith, “helped dethrone Adam Clayton Powell, once the most powerful black man in Congress, but he wouldn't do the same to Wilbur Mills or Wayne Hayes, ’cause he’s got racial intent. If I had to choose between Van Deerlin and a dog. I’d vote for the dog or abstain.”

Supervisor Jim Bates is a “nice, honorable, ambitious young man championing the right causes for the wrong reasons.” Supervisor Roger Hedgecock “already has his sights set on the Presidency. That man has an ego from here to Chicago. You be sure to quote me on that.” Governor Jerry Brown (who he insists on calling “Pat Brown, Junior”) “cons people.” and President Carter is “in over his head and should have left his Georgia boys at home.” City Councilman Jess Haro “is nothing but mouth”; deposed school board member Julie Fisher’s mouth “runs like a shattered bone up a wild goose's tail. . . she’s passed me since the election and hasn’t spoken to me. But I forgive her; I separate the sin from the sinner. She’s got to learn eventually that nothing is accomplished alone.”

Among the only politicians Smith has much admiration for are State Senator Jim Mills, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley (“who should be governor”), black city councilman Leon Williams, and Mayor Pete Wilson, who he is supporting for governor.

Smith won’t say how much of his bitterness toward politicians has to do with his own lack of success in that arena, but he insists he is not headed for elective office himself. “The political process is in such disarray that it’ll have to have a complete transformation before people respect politicians any more than they do garbage collectors. When people get into politics, something happens to them. It’s like what happens when a man puts on a police uniform and suddenly thinks he has authority. Makes you wonder how long the system will stand when people know they're being had."

As far as his future plans, beyond the school board. Smith, now forty-eight, says, “If I tell you white folks my plans, first thing I know, you’ll try to stop me.” However, it appears likely he will not seek his fifth term on the school board next year. Smith is leaning, of course, toward broadening his power base and focusing on the “real power" of economic development in the minority neighborhoods of San Diego, rather than what he considers “media-hype” and government handouts sought by liberals. He will probably push for bank development in Southeast San Diego. But the subject that seems of greatest urgency to him is unemployment among black youth. Indeed, with forty-seven percent unemployment among young blacks in San Diego (Pendleton of the Urban League says the actual figure is closer to sixty percent). Smith is genuinely frightened by the prospects of violence and is bitter at what he considers misdirection of liberal social programs he insists have been mainly cosmetic, often not even reaching the people most in need. “If we don’t get some jobs to these young folks, we're going to start seeing terrorism, crime, and rioting that’ll make Watts look like nothing." Other than this dark warning, though. Smith doesn’t articulate any broad solutions.

Finishing lunch, he hugs his grandchild, waves goodbye to his wife, and climbs into his car. He drives slowly through his black, middle-class, neighborhood and stops the car suddenly. “There, look at that.” He points to a house in need of painting, with trash scattered around the backyard. “White people live there,” Smith says without a trace of humor. “Bringin down the property values.”

In the school board auditorium he strolls to his seat at the middle of the dais and sits down. Legs spread, he puts on his oversized glasses, which make him look more amphibious than usual. He spies around the room in search of an unsuspecting“hypocritical liberal “Susan Davis, the president of the League of Women Voters, approaches the microphone and criticizes Smith and the voluntary busing plan; she is in favor of mandatory busing. One of Smith's tricks is to nod off in the middle of anything he considers "rhetoric." He says he awakens immediately when the rhetoric stops. Up on the dais, he hunches down and the folds of his cheeks make it impossible to tell if he’s asleep. Suddenly ... he nearly hops! Sitting bolt upright, he demands a poll of all the League members present who plan to enroll their own white children in the voluntary busing plan. No one raises a hand. He dismisses them. “You come back and report on that to me, will you?” Then he settles back in his chair and appears to sleep.