The late pastor of a North Brentwood church led a group of Freedom Riders in 1961, ultimately getting arrested in Tallahassee, Fla.
A native of Mississippi, Rev. Perry Smith III enrolled in Howard University at age 15, intending to study medicine. Instead, he felt a religious calling, and in 1958 he became the pastor of the First Baptist Church of North Brentwood, at 4000 Wallace Rd., a post he held for 52 years until 2010.
He was also drawn to the civil rights movement, including the historic Freedom Rides that mark their 60th anniversary this month.
At the suggestion of his grandfather, Smith traveled to Montgomery, Ala., in 1956 to take part in the bus boycotts, befriending Martin Luther King. In 1961, he became head of the Prince George’s County NAACP.
In June of that year, at the age of 27, while serving as the pastor at First Baptist Church, Smith led a group of four rabbis, eight White ministers and six Black ministers on a Freedom Ride to Florida.
According to a newspaper article from the time, the group was refused service at restaurants in two small towns in South Carolina, but had no trouble in Charleston, and members all used a Whites-only bathroom at the Jacksonville bus station without incident.
Smith was eventually arrested when the Freedom Ride reached Tallahassee, Fla. He later said he was arrested a total of 13 times during civil rights protests, many of which were in Prince George’s County, but no charges were ever filed.
“I was never put behind bars,” he recalled in a 2015 interview. “I was always released without anybody saying a word about it.”
Smith, who died last month at the age of 86, had a long career in the civil rights movement. He made headlines when he tried to join the White-only Citizens Council of Hyattsville, helped force Suburban Bank to hire its first black tellers, and used the church to pay bond fees for activists arrested while trying to desegregate the University of Maryland. In the early 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on his church’s lawn.
When Martin Luther King was in the D.C. area, Smith would often drive him around, although he said they were often late because King would stop to talk with people. He was at the March on Washington and was in Memphis with King the day before his assassination.
In a twist of history, Smith’s former church is across the street from the Gwendolyn Britt Senior Activity Center, a county building named for another former Freedom Rider who spent 40 days in a Jackson, Miss. jail and later served as a state senator.
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