Sandra Neely Smith: From Bennett to Morningside Homes

Sandra Neely Smith was twenty-nine years old when she was killed on November third, nineteen seventy-nine.

She had grown up in Whiteville, North Carolina, and earned a scholarship to Bennett College in Greensboro, the women's historically Black college four blocks from the Woolworth lunch counter. At Bennett she was elected president of the student body. She graduated in the early nineteen seventies with a degree and a determination to keep organizing.

Smith trained as a nurse. She joined labor organizing efforts in North Carolina's textile towns, doing the methodical work of building union support in mills where management actively suppressed it and where the racial stratification of factory jobs gave Black workers every reason to distrust any organization dominated by white leadership. Smith organized differently. She was one of the people who made the Communist Workers Party's biracial textile organizing credible in communities where credibility was hard-won.

Smith had personal ties to Greensboro that ran back to Bennett. She also had ties to Bennett that ran forward into labor history, because the college that she attended was the same college that had, nineteen years earlier, sent women to plan and join the sit-ins at the Woolworth. She was not unaware of that through-line.

She was killed two blocks from the campus where she had served as student-body president. The students at Bennett that year would have been roughly the same age she was when she sat in those student-body meetings. The thread from nineteen sixty to nineteen seventy-nine in Greensboro is not a metaphor. It runs through specific buildings, specific women, specific choices made in specific rooms.