Dr. Robert C. Smith—A Tribute Available to Purchase

It is very difficult to write about a scholar like Robert C. Smith. As a graduate student at the University of Southern California (USC), I was part of the cohort of emergent Black scholars that was deeply impacted by the scholarship of Robert Smith, Manning Marable, Adolph Reed Jr., Mack Jones, Hanes Walton Jr., Charles Henry, Ronald Walters, Paula McClain, Patricia Williams, Katherine Tate, Michael Dawson, and Georgia Persons. As with the others here, under Dr. Michael B. Preston, I was introduced to the writings and thinking of “Dr. Smith,” as I always called him, and understood that he was an important scholar for those students seeking to understand Civil Rights/Black Power politics and ideologies and the emergent post–civil rights era of Black politics. The widely read May 2021 American Review of Politics article, “The Politics of the Black Power movement” which I wrote, turned out to be the culmination...