08/22/2026
The Board of Directors and staff of the Amistad Research Center extend our deepest sympathy to the family of Jerome "Big Duck" Smith. Smith lived a life devoted entirely to others. As a Freedom Rider and member of the Congress of Racial Equality, he was arrested and beaten for his role in lunch counter demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, he sat before Robert Kennedy, in a meeting organized by James Baldwin, and refused to soften the truth about the violence he and his fellow activists endured.
That same fearless love for his community led him, in 1968, to found Tambourine and Fan. The organization works to instill culture, history, and tradition in New Orleans youth through classes modeled on the Freedom Schools of the 1964 Freedom Summer. Smith spent decades teaching generations in Tremé and the Seventh Ward to choose education, pride, and purpose over the social ills stacked against them. Known and beloved as "Big Duck" for the “children who always trailed behind him,” he spent his whole life proving that one individual can affect real change by being of service to others in their communities.
Rest easy, Big Duck. You will be missed, but your legacy lives on in all the lives you touched.
Credit:
- Photograph of young men holding hands, singing freedom songs after a rally in Jonesboro, Louisiana; second from left is CORE Field Secretary Jerome Smith, March 17, 1965, Ronnie Moore papers
- Photograph of Jerome Smith from the New Orleans CORE protests at Woolworths and McCrory's on Canal Street, April 1961, Constance B. Harse Papers
- Photograph of Tamborine and Fan sign, verso reads: "Marie C. Couvent Grammer School," undated, Christopher Porche West papers
