Tampa Bay online January 17, 2011 Retired FAMU Leader Keeps History Alive with His Library Like Theresa Manuel, Florida's first female Olympian. And Minnie Wharton, who taught at the Harlem Academy, Tampa's first black public school, before becoming a principal for the school district. And the library's namesake, Walter Smith Sr. The retired Florida A&M University president came home to West Tampa a decade ago and set about renovating an old house on Albany Avenue. He filled it with his worldly collection of books, videos, photographs, art, proclamations and awards, all with one purpose in mind. To set an example. "I feel I have lived a good life,'' said the 75-year-old great-grandfather, who helped set in motion some of the advancements commemorated today, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when he marched for Civil Rights in the '60's. Smith went on to help shape Florida's community college system and built schools in South Africa. But some of the kids in his community don't have two parents at home. Some barely have one. Now they have Smith. "My hope,'' he said recently while giving a tour of his library, "is that they will walk in this door and say, 'Dr. Smith, we would like to work with you in setting a direction for us to be all that we can be.'' Like many African-Americans in Tampa at the time, Smith was born in a boarding house, this one on Constance Street. One of three sons, he was raised by his mother and stepfather until he ditched school one too many times to swim in the Hillsborough River. Still a first grader at Dunbar Elementary, he was shipped off to Georgia to live with his grandmother. He still cut class to swim in muddy rivers, Smith said, but that stopped after his best friend drowned. He got serious about school and baseball, basketball and track. Still, trouble found him again when he punched a white boy. It was 1951 and Smith's relatives feared he would be lynched. He escaped to Tallahassee, where his grandfather oversaw farm maintenance at FAMU, the predominantly black Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. But he still wasn't safe, so his family put him on a bus to New York City, where Smith recalls sitting in the back seat all the way to an aunt's home. She couldn't afford to feed him, so Smith went to work pushing a cart in the garment industry. He tried to go to school at night but kept falling asleep. He dropped out in 1953. After several tries, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to the 39th Regiment of the 9th Infantry Division at Fort Dixon, New Jersey. Smith fancied becoming an officer, but couldn't without a high school diploma. Instead, he went to the Army Leadership Academy at Fort Lee in Virginia, where he was one of seven blacks enrolled. "And you know what?'' Smith said. "I went on from there.'' His quest for more knowledge led him from St. Petersburg to Tallahassee to Washington, D.C., to South Africa and beyond. He put himself on a path that led to a GED and several college degrees, including a Ph.D. from Florida State University. He eventually became FAMU's seventh president. When he stepped down in 1985, Smith was named a Senior Fulbright Scholar to the University of Malawi in Central Africa. The learning wouldn't stop. He traveled and studied throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean basin. In 1994, Smith served as a monitor for the election that made Nelson Mandela the president of the Republic of South Africa. Posters of Mandela and election rhetoric adorn his library walls. In 1995, Smith founded FUNDA Community College in South Africa, coming full-circle, he thought, in his efforts to make education even more accessible to young minds. Then he returned to live in his parents' old house on Cypress Street, where boys walked around with their pants down to their knees and girls were having babies. Smith realized he had more work to do. Some of his neighbors seemed oblivious to all the sacrifices their predecessors had made on their behalf. They knew about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but they didn't know of contributions from Manuel or Wharton. Or Smith. He opened the nonprofit library in 2004 and has steadily added to it ever since with books about nutrition, cooking and literature. Local chapters of the National Black Nurses Association and the Veterans of Foreign Wars meet there regularly. Other community groups are welcome, too, for conferences or research. You can call (813) 254-0605 for hours of operation. The library is at 905 N. Albany Ave. With the help of one of his three sons, Walt Jr., Smith is fulfilling his mother's dream of expanding the library by turning her house into a STEM center for science, technology, engineering and math studies. Students from the nearby Mount Pleasant Standard Based Charter Middle School come weekly to use the library's computers, watch videos and read magazines. Father and son also want to use the library to help make documentaries about the people in their neighborhood, the community and Tampa who made history in their own quiet way. "There is so much we can do,'' said Walt, a civil engineer and history buff who is in line to inherit his dad's mission. He points back to olympian Manuel, who just turned 85 and is receiving a proclamation tomorrow from the Hillsborough school board for accomplishments that include her legendary coaching career at Middleton and Hillsborough high schools. "That's something girls ought to know about,'' Walt said. But most of all, the elder Smith said, they want to see children of every race step inside. "I want to give them a strong history of black achievement." sackerman@tampatrib.com (813) 259-7144 SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 Skype:sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.