10/10/2026
North Carolina law barred him from school as a boy. In 1888, he presented his credentials in Liberia as the United States Minister Resident and Consul General. 🌍
Ezekiel Ezra Smith was born in Duplin County in 1852 to free Black parents, Alexander and Caroline Smith. NCpedia says he had no formal schooling as a child because the law barred it, and that he learned from white playmates. NCpedia adds that he later worked in naval stores and attended a Freedmen's Bureau night school in Wilmington. He earned a bachelor's degree from Shaw University in 1878.
In 1883 he took over the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, a school founded in 1867 as the Howard School, succeeding Charles W. Chesnutt as its head. NCpedia credits him with saving it. Smith had been a Democrat since the early 1870s, which NCpedia says helped win legislative support for his school. President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the Liberia post on April 24, 1888. He left it on May 20, 1890, and later returned to Fayetteville. He died on December 6, 1933. đź“š
A boy kept out of the classroom grew up to keep a school alive and to represent the country abroad. What do you think it takes to keep a school alive when the law once barred you from its door?
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