An Interview with Thee Smith ’69

By NAHLA OWENS

Guest Contributor, President of the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society

The Exonian is indebted to Afro-Exonian Society co-founder Thee Smith ’69 and current Afro-Latinx Exonian Society President Nahla Owens ’21 for their leadership. Owens interviewed Smith for Since 1878 on Nov. 14, 2020. Smith is a retired professor at Emory University and an Episcopal priest.

Nahla Owens: I'll just start by saying that I was really excited when I saw that you had a (404) number. I actually grew up over in College Park, just outside Atlanta.

Thee Smith: Oh, good for you.

Nahla Owens: It's cool to see that Southern connection there. I think it's very rare at Exeter. To get into our conversation on the Academy, I'm the current President of the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society (ALES), which was called the Afro-Exonian Society (AES) when you founded it. For me, it's been really interesting to step into this role of leadership on campus. And I can only imagine what that was like when you first founded the organization. What challenges did you face in founding AES?

Thee Smith: Well, [English Instructor] Mercy Carbonell sent me a link to one of your previous Since 1878 productions. You showed a photograph of the Elting Room—you showed a group of African American students meeting about starting the Afro-Exonian Society. That was in the context in the early to mid-sixties of, the Black Power movement in the United States, Black Panthers. And lots of us, of course, were aware of the various social change movements going on in the United States, including the Black Freedom Movement and of Dr. [Martin Luther] King's work. In fact, I had unsuccessfully invited Dr. King to come give a Chapel speech. I have a letter from his staff responding, saying he just didn't have the time but thanking me for the invitation.

So, Dr. King was still alive, the Black Panthers were active. The Black Freedom movement was picking up in the South—the Black Consciousness Movement with popular culture, songs like James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I'm Proud.” Or Nina Simone's “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” which became a movement song celebrating new opportunities for African American youth to come of age, to step out of stereotypical ways of feeling Black in the United States and to embrace the possibility that everything is possible, that you could have a future different from the past of your parents in this country. That was the big context.

I had arrived at Exeter in the fall of 1966, when, out of 800 Exonians, there were eight African American students. Eight out of 800. And the following year, ’67, there were thirty of us. In one year, we went from eight to thirty. That made an incredible difference in terms of a sense of solidarity and lack of isolation. There was less of a feeling of being marginalized and targeted, which might be a useful word.

It was out of that energy that we had enough solidarity to push back against so-called microaggressions, where you feel that you're being insulted or discriminated against in ways that the dominant culture wouldn't even be aware of, but which we were aware. They occurred in terms of exams and various behaviors in the dining room or in sports, in dances, social events—which were still all male.

For example, female students were bused to campus for dances, and there were various ways in which, as you can imagine, Black male students encountering white, prep school girls could have interactions that were not always comfortable, equitable or respectful. And, of course, you can imagine also the gender discrimination that those white female students encountered—very few Black female students at boarding schools in the mid-sixties, as you can imagine.

So that's the cultural, social swirl in which we said, ‘Oh, we've got to do something here about announcing equity, equality and diversity initiatives on behalf of Black students.’

I'll also just say that the Academy had not thought through what might be called culture shock for Black students. Now, I believe, and I know it's been documented, that all students arriving at the Academy experience culture shock. No one was raised in a New England boarding school, even if they're from New England. We were all in various states of homesickness. Even if you were bred to go to prep school, there's something about getting to Exeter, when you're going through this transition, this orientation, you need a counselor, you need a counseling office. There was none for Black students in the mid-sixties. We were on our own, going through culture shock. Of course, faculty and staff did their best to be humane, aware and alert, paying attention and being supportive. But you need professionals with some skills in this area, and the Academy and the culture had not caught up to that yet. Exeter did have a kind of ethic of sink or swim for boys back then, either step up or ship out. It was rugged, and we found ways to build solidarity with each other.

I should say one last thing. I was very fortunate to have—I think this would be unique on planet earth—two other students that I knew in grade school, church and high school, Black students, who were at the Academy with me at the same time. That made a big difference.

Nahla Owens: Thank you for that. There are a lot of things that come to mind when hearing that. The first of those things being that the current board, the 53rd Board, just released a statement on some of the burdens that come along with being a student leader of color on campus. I think you spoke to this, to the support systems available to Black students—particularly in terms of adult leadership and counselors.

A lot of younger students still feel that they don't really have the access they would like to adult members of the community that they can relate to. A lot of the time, that falls on older student leaders. Was that dynamic something you experienced as a student? Was that something that was challenging for you to navigate as well? I think a lot of student leaders now are finding ways to adapt to taking on that role. But I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Thee Smith: I think we had not come of age in that regard yet. I think the cohort of Black students was not such that you had senior, elder statesman students—or even what you might call a residence hall advisors: senior students who had been initiated. There wasn't a formal structure of appointing residence hall captains among students. Perhaps there was, but I don't remember it. And I don't remember experiencing it. It really felt like we were on our own in a lot of ways.

I know that would have changed significantly with the advent of women students at the Academy. I've talked with faculty who were aware that when women were admitted the kind of nurture, care, compassion, concern for students having challenges—mental health challenges, personal growth and development challenge challenges—all of that became heightened and accentuated. People just got more savvy about what adolescents need at this stage of development as young people growing into the Academy.

Let's put it this way: if there were seniors, if there were students, older students, who had a sense of mentoring and taking younger minority students under their wing, caring for them, then the depth of my own personal isolation was such that I did not experience it. It could have been happening, and I just missed it, which is a sad commentary. So I'm delighted to hear that there's progress in that regard. That's what I'm gathering from what you’re telling me.

Nahla Owens: I think that's due largely to your creation, ALES. I think a lot of younger students find their way to these older mentors because there is a space for us to come together and have these discussions. I am beyond grateful for the work that you put in 53 years ago—which is insane—to make that happen for us. I think that’s a sentiment shared amongst the members of the Black and now Latinx community as well, that kind of gratitude and almost indebtedness to the work that you and your classmates put in. I just personally wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for that. My experience has really been made more positive because of ALES. And I think that a lot of students can relate to not having so much of that isolation.

Thee Smith: Well, thank you. Thank you for acknowledging it. By the way, I experienced something like that from African American trustees when I attended some of the recent alumni anniversary events. I did not expect that alumni of color would have this elder mentoring—the capacity, even, to say, ‘This is what it was like for us. This is what I hope you're not having to go through. If you're going through this, here's some ways to think about it or to reach out and get some help with it.’ You're right, there—we have since then forged a culture of mutual support and care and solidarity. That's really awesome. Thank you for noticing that and naming that.

Nahla Owens: Another thing that came to mind in talking about the context of the creation of ALES is these external factors in the moment in history that you were in, which was an incredible moment. I think that a lot of students—especially with the recent instances of police brutality, which of course are not new—have been spurred to action or spurred to something in the face of this point in time. I'm imagining one of those moments of being spurred to action, for you, was not only the creation of ALES, but also delivering “I Am a Black First” in the Assembly Hall, which I imagine took a lot of courage. You were one of only a few students who might really have that message resonate and have people feel what you were saying, so I was curious about how you felt when you were preparing and delivering that Assembly. What was going through your head? Were you afraid of what people might say? Were you afraid of how the administration might respond?

Thee Smith: Thank you for asking. The two students who accompanied me at the Academy from Atlanta were William Walter Bennett Jr.—Bill Bennett. There was a nationally noted white, neoconservative statesman named William Bennett, not to be confused. This is my African-American brother, William Walter Bennett Jr., here in Atlanta, a reverend and a lawyer. He went on and did Harvard law and so on. My second buddy was Alva Tabor. He went on to Stanford engineering and is now here in Atlanta.

And what I recall is that—in those meetings where we met to discuss the founding of an Afro-Exonian Society, a Black student organization, and where I was writing this inaugural speech in that process—what I recall most vividly was a sense from my friend and fellow Atlantan Bill Bennett that I had, in some ways, hijacked the energy of all of us.

There were twenty or so of us putting this together, this kind of perspective of ‘We are the new Blacks.’ We won't—we don't need to—be your Uncle Toms or Jim Crows, yield to Jim Crow stereotypes of our intelligence or of our behavior and mannerisms. We don't have to act white, act preppy in order to belong. We can be ourselves, insist on Black cultural music, dance and speech and so on and push back on cultural assimilation. I remember writing that Chapel speech as a way of summarizing all of those perspectives.

I think part of what Exeter helped me to hone was the ability to write lucidly and articulate perspectives that were both my own and part of a larger cultural community of discourse. I think I brought some of that with me from growing up in Atlanta in public school and Latin classes. I learned, but it got filtered and magnified and sharpened both in English classes at the Academy and in this public discourse that we were engaging in.

What I remember, though, was that there was a sense of shock from some fellow Black Exonians that I had taken the voice, the collective voice, and made it my own personal, Thee Smith voice in that Chapel speech. That was on the one hand. On the other hand, there was a spectrum of both shock and discomfort: ‘Why are you making this about you, or isn't there some way you could have been more collective and expressed it as our voice and not just the Thee Smith voice? Are you grandstanding or self-aggrandizing? Are you exploiting this for your own sense of popularity or ego fulfillment.’

On the other hand, I got from other Black students a thank you of gratitude. ‘Thank you for figuring out a way to say this for all of us, on all our behalves.’

Then, another sense from other students that I had actually put them all at risk for being targeted as Black radicals and as subversives, as anti-Exeter and anti-white, and that they would get a lot of pushback, a lot of racist reactions—because I had stepped out in that way and dared to say these kinds of things. There was a full spectrum, if you will.

And that's just among Black students. Of course, among white students and some faculty, I got, ‘Does he like us anymore? Does he hate us? Why are the Black students getting so negative and hypercritical, as Thee Smith has just articulated in this Chapel speech? Is this the beginning of a lot of racial tension on campus, or is this something we can work through together? Can we still be a community together?’

Was I fearful because of that? I don't remember being so much fearful as exhilarated, frankly, that we were part of something that was national. That we were doing our part to belong to that national movement for Black consciousness. Coming out of Atlanta, I had a sense that this was the right thing at the right time, and it was great to be coming of age and in the midst of it.

Nahla Owens: That's incredible. And I think you'd be proud of knowing that the legacy of using spoken word and language, deliveries in Meditations, in Assemblies, that has lived on. I think it’s especially vital to the community that lives in ALES. We admire that courage and that ability to say what needs to be said and doing the right thing, even if it's not the easy thing. That brings me to my next question, which is that you've inspired so many student leaders on campus through your legacy. We look back and say, ‘If there were kids that could do it in the sixties, I think that we can do it now.’ Do you have any advice for current student leaders in the Black community and current student leaders of color kind of in general?

I think a lot of people are, again, on the precipice of something and being moved into action. But it’s scary for a lot of people, and it's challenging to seek that change or seek that action in the face of assignments and college applications and extracurriculars. It feels like a lot for many students. I was wondering if there's anything that you had to say to those students?

Thee Smith: Thank you for asking. Looking ahead to the future, here’s what's at stake.

By the way, I definitely want to recommend reading some of my mentors, people who are preparing our future generations for what's coming next. And I want to call to your attention, if I only called one name in that regard, Vincent Harding. Vincent Harding passed maybe five years or so ago. He was my mentor.

He was Dr. King's speech writer for the Riverside Church speech and the year before he was assassinated, when Dr. King came out against the Vietnam War. Vincent had always felt that that was what got him assassinated—because he expanded the purview of his activism from so-called civil rights to human rights, to Vietnamese people being targeted in our Vietnam War. Dr. King became this global spokesman for human liberation, across all the ethnic groups.

Vincent Harding was an African-American history scholar, of Mennonite heritage, who wrote books on American democracy, which he called advanced democracy, and on Dr. King’s legacy. Two books I will mention of his are Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement and America Will Be!: Conversations on Hope, Freedom, and Democracy, a dialogue between Vincent Harding and [Daisaku] Ikeda. In that book, they also talk about what's coming down the road for young people in the United States, the future of this American dream as a project.

So, I think, here are the challenges and risks: artificial intelligence; fake media and fake news, disinformation propaganda on a massive scale that we've not seen or ever experienced or are even minimal mentally prepared for; human developments in genetics, in kinetics and in cybernetics, creating various different ways of being human that are not guided by ethical rules or norms that we've inherited from our traditions and our classical heritage through the centuries. We're going to be challenged to figure out ethics and behavioral norms in the context of artificial intelligence that will be 'off the chain,' I think, in terms of our ability to keep up.

And so the project of what it means to be a human being, to be in solidarity with all other human beings across ethnic differences and gender—that I think will be all at risk and at stake and under assault. We're going to need our young people to come of age in a way that allows them to know what the prehistory, what the previous history has bequeathed to our species: human values and norms. The classical injunctions: not to kill, to do no harm unto others, to hold onto life as infinitely valuable.

There are going to be all kinds of quality of life differences, too. This will also be accentuated by climate change, which is going to pit us against one another for resources, even basic resources like water—rights to water and clean air. We're going to see populations of people turning against one another. And because this, of course, is a survival issue, we're going to have to maintain standards of human dignity and a respect for life. The worth of human life is going to be under attack because of those pressures.

Economic systems, whether capitalism will continue on or whether it will morph into something that's more compatible with socialist forms of economic growth and development, I think that's all in question. We're going to need a lot more smarts than we are exhibiting in the current era around how to merge economic systems that are more humane.

Disease and pandemics—all of that—are waiting for us. I mean, you can't even get people to wear masks in their own interest, in the interest of their own communities and family members. E. O. Wilson has said that we've got paleolithic brains, we're living in this technocracy as if we were still, you know, cavemen. There’s a way we have not grown up as a species. We have not kept up with the technology in terms of our personal growth and development. We're not just talking about people learning science, we're talking about cognitive development, the ability to be mature, to make critical decisions in one's own interest, in the interest of the democratic project. That's a lot for you all to do.

Part of what that means is that the liberal arts project is at stake. Are people being educated around human values, or simply around technical expertise and professional self-interest? Will young people be able to help foster a culture in which artificial intelligence can grow, where developments are infused with human values? It's Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Will we be able to keep human life valuable in the midst of what's going on, the three pressures we're going to be under—again, ecological, economic and scientific-technological? Will the human project, the project of being genuinely humane, having a genuinely humane culture in solidarity with all humans, all forms of human life—will that survive?

Nahla Owens: As student leaders, one thing that we do consider a lot are the values that you're talking about and how we can keep those founding values of the organization alive in this ever-changing world. I was curious about your vision of where you thought that this would go, as contrasted with what we have today. Are you proud of the way that the organization has evolved? Do you have hopes for the future of ALES?

Thee Smith: Well, I was certainly pleased when I first understood that you could have a gospel choir that included other people who were not African Americans. That you’re going to have Hispanic people in a gospel choir, and it could sound even better.

One of the things I remember in the speech “I Am a Black First” was that we're not here to learn how to act white. In fact, I said, you all need to learn how to act Black. It was a kind of vision, a repertoire—there are various ways of being culturally diverse or multicultural. We all ought to be learning each other's culture, each other’s cultural norms. As an African American, I could live out Jewish cultural norms or adopt Native American or Asian American or Hispanic cultural norms as a way of exploring identity. White students, then, could be doing that—they could also be acknowledging, re-embracing their own ethnicity: Scottish, German, Spanish, whatever, as well as the ethnic identities of people of color. None of us would have to be under the norm of any other cultural group; there would be no dominant cultural type that we all had to assimilate into.

As I've come back to alumni anniversary events at the Academy, I've seen aspects of that vision coming into reality. The challenge is to have more of that, where people are, again, exploring each other's cultural backgrounds and diversity and sharing with reciprocity and mutuality. I think I've seen that in the arts: theater and music productions at the Academy that span different norms besides Eurocentric or Euro-American norms of what counts as culture. That seems to be a project that's underway, and all that remains is to get better and better at doing what is already underway in that regard, expanding it even further.

I do have an anxiety, as a retired college professor, that what's always at stake in the multicultural project is whether there's some classical heritage, whether it's Western or Asian—as in, you know, Confucianism and Buddhism—whether there's a classical heritage that you forfeit. I worry you’re at risk of missing out on certain kinds of core achievements from our past: like the Hippocratic oath to do no harm or the Socratic, platonic virtue of never living an unexamined life: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Whether there are these core deposits of wisdom, whether they're Eastern or Western, that people no longer cherish and pass on. The democratic project under the British Magna Carta and Bill of Rights and Jeffersonian principles of free governance—whether that doesn't also get valued because of the emphasis on multiculturalism. There’s anxiety about that from many of our neoconservative brothers and sisters. They have this anxiety that we may lose some things that are so crucial for the human project, that we need to be cautious and careful about.

I'm a college professor. I have that anxiety too. Here’s the question: in the four years that students get to be an Exonian, how much expansiveness, diversity, innovation and inclusion can be experienced, in a way that also retains, conserves—to use that word conservative—and retransmit in the future what has been precious about our heritage coming from different world systems? Again, Western and Asian, African and indigenous. That’s an open question. How much can you really do in those four years?

I am also wondering: do you know if there is any discussion at the Academy around reparations to native peoples or to enslaved peoples, in terms of the founding of the Academy or the history and growth of it?

Again, my fellow student, fellow alum, Bill Bennett recalls being accosted by a Native American man on the streets of Exeter in the 1960s. “Your people can get in. You got to go to this school before my people could,” he said. That's a part of the context in which I asked that question.

I'm also an Episcopal priest here in the diocese of Atlanta, and we just voted this morning in a Church Council to to acknowledge the history of First Nations peoples here in Georgia, to push back on genocide and to celebrate our solidarity and connection with them. I'm glad we get to invoke that at the end of our talk today, too.

As a faculty advisor to student groups engaged in activism on the Emory University campus, I've often been in the position of advising students to build a relationship with faculty allies. Students who find faculty allies have someone who can mentor and guide them through the process of advocacy, of reform, of transformation through the kind of bureaucratic maze way of the administration.

One imagines that you could start in coursework, with history projects, where students do historical research and write essays on that racial history, as a kind of staged project over two to five years. We did something like this at my university, the history of race at Emory University. The Ford Foundation funded so-called difficult conversations, projects around the country at academic institutions, along with community organizations, to have difficult conversations about the history of race. In addition to the research, you would have people come together with the descendants of enslaved people who had actually done construction work, built the building, the buildings on the campus. For example, Brown University did this as well and tallied how much it would cost to repay those enslaved workers if they had been paid instead of being under slavery.

There's some precedents of how you can do this in a way that an administration would experience as respectful and not as a critical attack on the integrity of the institution. I hope you hear all the political dynamics that could ensue. There are ways to do it thoughtfully and make it quite a bit of an act of an educational experience. I'd love to, as an alumnus, be part of it.

Nahla Owens: There are so many opportunities to take advantage of now—and a wonderful community that you've helped build with ALES. How much we can do with that in four years is a great question. I've really enjoyed hearing about your experience.

Thee Smith: Thank you. More to come.