Daniel R. Smith (c. 1960)

This is a portrait of Springfield College alumnus and trustee Daniel R. Smith (class of 1960).Smith was born in Winsted, Connecticut, and graduated from Gilbert High School in 1952. He served with the US Army during the Korean War, where he served as a medic, operating room technician, scrub nurse, and Red Cross Swimming Instructor. When the war ended, he enrolled at Springfield College and ultimately graduated with a BS in general studies. Following graduation, Smith accepted a position at Norwich State Hospital, a three-thousand bed state mental institution, where he was a social worker covering the geriatric unit and the maximum security ward in the Salmon Building. There he met Barry Fritz, a Jewish psychologist and Civil Rights advocate from New York working toward his PhD. They became good friends and participated in Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic March On Washington. Subsequently, Smith moved to Alabama and became a student at Tuskegee Institute School of Veterinary Medicine, but left to work in the Civil Rights Movement. He served as associate director of Tuskegee’s Summer Education Program (serving disadvantaged students in twelve counties of rural Alabama). Smith later became the executive director in Lowndes County, Alabama, of a Sargent Shriver anti-poverty program battling Governor George Wallace. During this time, he nearly lost his life to the Ku Klux Klan. He subsequently went to Washington D.C. and accepted a position in federal government in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)