Ferdinand Smith was a Jamaican-born Communist labor activist. A prominent activist in the United States and the West Indies, Smith co-founded the National Maritime Union with Joseph Curran and M. Hedley Stone. By 1948 he was wanted by the U.S. Immigration Service for deportation, and is remembered as one of the most powerful black labor leaders in U.S. history.
In 1937, Smith emerged as vice president during formation of the National Maritime Union, which itself reflected a rise in union activism among seaman in the wake of the 1933 Scottsboro Boys Case and the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike, following the demise of the International Seamen's Union and the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1920s. Ironically, Smith's name came to the fore because he was tried internally by an NMU committee for failing to support the 1934 strike but later cleared the union. Smith supported non-discrimination. He pushed through a non-discrimination plank in the NMU constitution. In 1944, he had a non-discrimination pledge added to contracts with more than 100 ship companies. He supported civil rights more broadly by partaking in the National Negro Congress and Negro Labor Victory Committee. In 1940, Smith joined Chicago Alderman Earl B. Dickerson to meet with Donald M. Nelson, Chair of the War Production Board. In 1943, during a race riot in Harlem, local and federal officials asked Smith to come help ease tensions. He was also involved with maritime unions in the Caribbean and South Atlantic. In 1944, Smith had at least one major speech written for him by Frank Marshall Davis during the presidential campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Also in 1944, it became public knowledge that Smith had British, not American citizenship. In 1945, he resigned as vice president left the country. He soon re-entered as a legal immigrant and became NMU secretary In 1948, the NMU expelled Smith, Paul Palazzi, and Howard McKenzie for mis-use of union funds. Also 1945, the NMU gave more money than any other union for the re-election of Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. for New York City Council.
Deportation
In early 1948, NMU president Joe Curran bowed to pressure and fired known communists from the NMU, including Smith. In February 1948, U.S. Immigrations arrested Smith as an illegal alien. In March 1948, Smith found himself lumped into a group of Communist party and labor leaders, headed for deportation. Lee Pressman, who had just left the CIO as general counsel, joined a group of lawyers to defend them. Pressman represented all five, at least some of whom had their own attorneys: alleged Soviet spy Gerhart Eisler, Irving Potash of the Fur and Leather Workers Union; Smith, secretary of the NMUM ; Charles A. Doyle of the Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers Union, and CPUSA labor secretary John Williamson. Pressman went on to join Joseph Forer, a Washington-based attorney, in representing the five before the U.S. Supreme Court. In April 1948, Pete Seeger partook in a benefit concert for Smith's defense. By that time, according to congressional hearings in 1955, Smith was no longer vice president. On May 5, 1948, Pressman and Forer received a preliminary injunction so their defendants might have hearings with examiners unconnected with the investigations and prosecutions by examiners of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Last years
Smith was deported. He went to live in Vienna, Austria, where he worked for the World Federation of Trade Unions. In 1951, Smith found himself deported to Jamaica. He remained involved in union activism by organized sugar works and leading a union federation until his death in 1961.
Through his position at the NMU, he gave money and spoke out on many issues: the racist hiring practices of New York City employers, the election of the black Communist Ben Davis to the NYC city council, the effort to oust notoriously racist senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, etc. Other struggles were anticolonial--as when he pushed for the independence of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, India, South Africa, and Ghana. In 1944, Smith was one of the most prominent labor or black leaders campaigning for Franklin Delano Roosevelt until being "red-baited." Smith embodied the ideal of the sailor as a working-class intellectual and cosmopolitan internationalist.
