Ferdinand Smith

Ferdinand Smith (5 May 1893 – 14 August 1961) was a Jamaican-born Communist labor activist. A prominient activist in the United States and the West Indies, Smith co-founded the National Maritime Union with Joseph Curran and M. Hedley Stone. Hounded by 1948 by the U.S. Immigration for deportation, and one of the most powerful black labor leaders in U.S. history.

Ferdinand Christopher Smith was born on May 5, 1893, in Savanna-la-Mar in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica. His father was a teacher.

Smith was first a laborer (porter), then waiter in a local hotel. He left to live in Panama, where he worked as hotel steward and salesman: he first experienced Jim Crow conditions. At the end of World War I, he left to live in Cuba as a migrant laborer. He left Cuba for Mobile, Alabama, as a sailor. He worked for two decades as a ship's steward.

During the 1920s, he joined the Communist-created Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU). In 1936, he supported the 1936 Gulf Coast maritime workers' strike and joined its national committee.

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 (led by Harry Bridges's International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union or ILWU and the West Coast Marine Cooks and Stewards or MCS), following the demise of the International Seamen's Union (ISU) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies") 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.Schwartz, Stephen (January 2008). "Red Pleas". H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences. </ref>

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