Review: From the Bayou to the Bay: The Autobiography of a Black Liberation Scholar, by Robert C. Smith

Abstract

Robert C. Smith’s autobiography, From the Bayou to the Bay, is revelatory. It is a primer on the requirements for becoming a first-tier Black intellectual in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Black scholars share time and space with a wide range of colleagues, but they inhabit a different world from scholars who are not Black. Black scholars have created a world that is sui generis, distinct from the intellectual mainstream. Black political scientists deliberately created an organization unconnected to the American Political Science Association (APSA). Its name is the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS).Before the creation of NCOBPS in 1969, APSA had no panels, no conferences, no courses, and no concentrations on Black politics. The subject did not exist. That absence did not deter Robert C. Smith’s intellectual curiosity. He was born and raised in Louisiana, one of thirteen children. After he graduated from high school, he moved to California, where he lived for a year with his elder sister and became a California resident. At that time, California afforded residents with a free college education, provided by the finest public college and university educational system in the country—indeed, in the world.Smith attended classes at Los Angeles City College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He received his PhD from Howard University because at that time it was the only university in the country that offered PhD courses in Black politics.Smith calls his book a conversation with himself. One reason he calls it that is because few scholars in the world have the same breadth of reading, study, research, and publications on Black politics as Smith; he has few if any peers. He would never say that himself, but it is true. Indeed, Smith faults himself for being unable to learn a foreign language (although he did have to pass a foreign language course—French—to graduate from Berkeley. Smith says he passed because of a student strike that caused Berkeley to give credits to all students enrolled and in good standing when the university shut down and ended the semester). That’s what he says. The real reason is he is simply not interested enough in a foreign language to learn one. His scholarship doesn’t require it.Smith sees himself as a kind of common man who is brainy. He talks frequently with both scholars and lay people. He enjoys conversations—with almost anyone who is not an ignorant racist. He enjoys eating and drinking a vast range of cuisines and beverages, and smoking cigarettes, though he has cut back on them.Smith sees himself as a person on a mission. That mission was deeply instilled in him by his own experiences, and by his friend and mentor, Ronald Walters. Walters had a simple mantra that influenced all of his teaching and scholarship. Robert C. Smith took it to heart. When evaluating the significance of any scholarship brought to his attention, Walters said, “What does that have to do with the liberation of Black people?” Smith’s subtitle for From the Bayou to the Bay is “The Autobiography of a Black Liberation Scholar.” He is, in Ron Walter’s understanding (and his own, as his subtitle announces) a Black liberation scholar. His scholarship is dedicated to contributing to the liberation of Black people.From the Bayou to the Bay is in part a seminar on the depth, breadth, and concentration a scholar must expend to be ranked as a pre-eminent thinker in a major academic discipline. This book lays bare the distinction between talking the talk and walking the walk. Robert C. Smith, for the good of us all, has mastered both.