Frank and Alberta Smith raised their six children in this house, built in 1948, and through the family’s activism and participation in two landmark suits, members of the Smith family played critical roles in the Civil Rights Movement. The family attended St. Jude Catholic Church, and the children were all graduates of the St. Jude Educational Institute. After Alberta Smith died in 1952, Frank Smith worked multiple jobs to provide for his family and never remarried, while the eldest daughter, Janie Smith James, became a surrogate mother to her siblings. On October 21, 1955, weeks before Rosa Parks’s arrest, Mary Louise Smith was jailed for violating Montgomery’s segregated bus ordinance after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Months later, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Frank Smith consented for his teenage daughter to become one of four named plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, a federal lawsuit brought by the Montgomery Improvement Association that challenged the ordinance as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. On June 5, 1956, the U.S. District Court sided with the plaintiffs, and the U.S. Supreme Court later affirmed the ruling, ending two generations of law upholding the constitutionality of segregation and bringing about the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Members of a younger generation of the Smith family later played an important role in another landmark civil rights case. In 1969, Mary Louise Smith and her sister Annie Ruth Smith consented for their young sons, Edward and Vincent, to serve as plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the Montgomery YMCA after the two cousins were denied admission to a summer swim program at an all-white YMCA branch. The origins of Smith v. YMCA dated to the late 1950s, when the City of Montgomery closed its public recreational facilities to avoid court-ordered integration. Afterward, local branches of the YMCA, a private organization segregated since its founding in the 1860s, provided activities to an increasing number of the city’s white residents; there were three all-white branches and only one for African Americans, which did not offer the same array of services. In 1972, the U.S. District Court ruled for the plaintiffs, finding that a secret non-compete agreement between the organization and the city, along with a series of in-kind public services, effectively made the YMCA the de facto recreational arm of the city. The ruling desegregated the Montgomery YMCA and ended the remaining segregation ordinances in Alabama’s capital city.

Photo: Mark Hilton

Photo: Mark Hilton

Montgomery, Alabama · USA