Barbara Smith

Barbara Smith
Born	December 16, 1946 Cleveland
Occupation	Scholar, writer, activist, essayist
Nationality	American
Literary movement	Black Feminism

Barbara Smith (born 1946) is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in building and sustaining Black Feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s she has been active as a critic, teacher, lecturer, author, scholar, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities over the last twenty five years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. Barbara has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.

Barbara’s parents, Hilda Beall Smith and Gartrell Smith, met while attending a historically black college in central Georgia, Fort Valley State University (then Fort Valley State College), in the mid-1940s. Employed by the armed services, Gartrell Smith was possibly stationed in Cleveland when he and Hilda Beall Smith eloped. Wanting to find better economic opportunities and escape from Jim Crow racism, moved from Georgia and settled in Ohio.

However, Beall Smith’s relatives did not approve of the marriage, and the relationship fell apart, forcing a then-pregnant Beall Smith to return home to her family in Georgia. Their children, Barbara and Beverly Smith, identical twins, were born prematurely. Beall Smith died from complications of rheumatic fever when Smith was nine, and the siblings were brought up by Smiths’ extended family, with her grandmother as primary caretaker. The Smith siblings grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, living in a two-family house inhabited by her grandmother, two aunts, the husband of an aunt, and (formerly) their mother.

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