Maria Smith interview, 12 August 2024

Abstract

Maria Smith recollects her early life growing up in Jefferson City, Missouri, attending Catholic schools and later studying Political Science in college. Smith decided to go to law school soon after, later reconnecting with her faith. Smith highlights the need to find community in her life, which eventually led her to Cleveland’s Near West Side. Smith and her husband were involved in the Witness for Peace where they lived and worked in Nicaragua during the Contra War. They would eventually live in Brazil for a period of time before returning to Cleveland where she was involved in various community organizations like West Side Community House, May Dugan Center, and Cleveland Nonviolence Network.

Interviewee

Smith, Maria (interviewee)

Interviewer

White, Bali (interviewer)

Project

Near West Side Housing Activism

Date

8-12-2024

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

92 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Maria Smith interview, 12 August 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544015.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1336

Related Resources

Near West Side @ Cleveland Voices

Transcript

Bali White [00:00:00] To hit record. Hi, everyone. I’m Bali White, here with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Today I’m here with Maria Smith. We are at the IRTF offices, which is the InterReligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia. It is August 12, 2024. How are you?

Maria Smith [00:00:21] I’m fine. Thank you for interviewing me today.

Bali White [00:00:24] Of course. So, could you introduce yourself, when and where you were born?

Maria Smith [00:00:29] Sure. My name’s Maria Smith, and I was born July 15, 1958.

Bali White [00:00:37] Okay. Are you from Cleveland originally?

Maria Smith [00:00:41] No, I was born in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Bali White [00:00:44] Okay. And what was your hometown kind of like? Was it, like, a small suburban area?

Maria Smith [00:00:49] So, Jefferson City is the capital of Missouri. [crosstalk] It’s one of the hardest ones for school kids, and it’s right smack in the middle of Missouri. At the time that I grew up, it was much smaller than it is now, and it was basically a lot less diverse than it is now. There’s a historically Black school there called Lincoln University. So it was– Lincoln University was going through a pretty significant transition when I was there, but I was fortunate to still be able to experience the richness of the intelligentsia that was teaching. There was a lot of very talented, super intelligent African American professors that couldn’t go anywhere else because of segregation. So there was basically- There were the white people, there were the Black people, and the Black people, basically were the faculty and their family at Lincoln University and then the townies. I think there’s a lot in literature about that kind of dynamic of people that are those that aren’t part of the intellectual class in a setting where there’s a university. But fortunately, Lincoln was– Everything they had was open to the public. So I was able to experience probably a richness of cultural events that people in a small town like that could never experience. So I saw Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Leroy Jones, saw tons of music groups, James Brown, Fifth Dimension, Temptations, Ebony magazine, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it was like the magazine, Black magazine. It used to have its fashion show there. Every year or so, my mom would take me to the Ebony fashion show. So, yeah, it was interesting because it was- I was born there, then my parents moved away. My father was in the military. And so I think when I was two, they lived in Washington, DC. When I was three, my dad was stationed in Panama. So from the time I was three to the time I was five, I lived in Panama. We came back kind of mid school year. So I finished. I did half of kindergarten in Panama and half of kindergarten at Lincoln University’s lab school. And then my dad got stationed to Leavenworth, Kansas. And so we left, and I did first grade almost the entire year of first grade in Leavenworth. And then because the US was involved in the conflict in Southeast Asia, my dad got stationed in Asia, and he couldn’t take family. So my mom chose to not stay on the base. You could wait for your spouse on base, but my mom chose not to wait for him to return on base. Instead, we went back to Jefferson City, where she had a sister. And so that was the beginning of me staying there. She decided that – my brother was six years older than I was – and my mom decided that she did not want to deal with him having to change schools over and over. And she thought there was a reason why people were called army brats. She did not want us to be like that. So she decided to settle down in Jefferson City. And as a result, my dad ended up spending from the time I was seven, like six and a half. When we moved back to the time that I was 15, he was stationed in various countries in Asia, including Vietnam. I later found out that what I thought was his second tour of Vietnam was actually, he was stationed in Laos. It was illegal to be there, and they whitewashed the record, so he wasn’t allowed to tell anybody. He told me, like, just a few days before he died that he was stationed in a Laos, not in Vietnam. The second time. And when he passed, I was able to go through his military documents. And the first time he was in Vietnam, it says Da Nang, Da Nang Province, Vietnam. The second time, it says Vietnam in quotes. So. And I found a Bronze Star in the back of his closet in a box. And so that’s what he meant by they whitewashed the record because it doesn’t say that he was in Laos, but they gave everybody that was in his company these Bronze Stars for their service because the government was lying. So anyway, that’s part of my family background.

Bali White [00:05:56] Could you kind of touch base a little bit on your religious background?

Maria Smith [00:06:00] Sure. My mom, my grandmother was a Catholic convert, my paternal grandmother. And she was, like all converts to something new, very zealous. And she wanted my father to convert. So my father started religious instruction, and my mother started religious instruction. My mother completed her religious instruction. My dad never did. So my mom raised both my brother and I as Catholics. And the first year that we were back in Jefferson City, I went to the lab school, Lincoln lab school. But the second year, because of things that were happening in Jefferson City, she sent me to Immaculate Conception, which is the Catholic school. So for most of my life in Jefferson City, when I went to school, I was the only black kid. So when I was in immaculate Conception, Jefferson City very segregated, like any city, any town, any place, I would walk home from Immaculate Conception, and 900 kids, literally 900 kids would all go one path, and then there would be this one fork in the road where I would go the other way, and because it was into the black neighborhood. But anyway, yeah, I was raised Catholic, and it always had a lot of meaning to me, and. But I was always very critical of it also. So, like, when I was ten, I realized, wow, if I were male, I could be a priest. I would like to be a priest. But I realized that was not going to be an option. When I was 16, the religion class that I had, I went to Catholic high school, the religion class that I had, one of the things that we had to do was to visit the Carmelite nuns. I don’t know if you know it. I don’t know if you’re Catholic, but Carmelites are a cloister. And so we would visit the Carmelites, and we would take them food or whatever offering, and they put it on their lazy susan, and you can’t see them right there behind the screen. And I decided that I wanted to be a Carmelite, and I told my mom that, and literally, she blew a gasket. She was like, I’m not sending you to Catholic school to be no nun. She was very angry, so I kind of put that to the side.

Bali White [00:08:54] So what year did you graduate high school?

Maria Smith [00:08:57] 76.

Bali White [00:08:58] 76. And did you, you go to college after, correct?

Maria Smith [00:09:01] Yep.

Bali White [00:09:01] Where did you attend?

Maria Smith [00:09:03] University of Missouri.

Bali White [00:09:04] Okay, and what were you studying?

Maria Smith [00:09:07] Political science.[crosstalk] Originally, I was going to be a journalist, and I had gone to a program for minority students to study journalism. Mizzou. The University of Missouri has a huge journalism school that would attract students from all over the country, very, very competitive, on par with Columbia, whatever, Northwestern, any of the schools that are known for journalism. And I realized that I did not want to have to deal with the deadlines the journalists deal with. And I also realized that I was interested in the content of the news, not writing about the content of the news. So my second interest was wanting to be a lawyer. So I changed my major to political science. What I didn’t know was being a lawyer means that you have multiple deadlines every day,[both laugh] all kinds of things. But what you know, you never know what you don’t know. So.

Bali White [00:10:15] Where did you attend law school?

Maria Smith [00:10:17] University of Virginia. Which is also kind of an interesting story. So I went to Mizzou because that’s what I could afford. I had been accepted. No, I had applied to, you know, I was getting all these mailings from all these schools, Mount Holyoke, Northwestern, all this other stuff. My brother, who’s six years older than I am, was like, mom and dad can’t afford this. They’re old now. They were younger than I am now. So I ended up at Mizzou. I don’t ever remember applying for it. I think the college counselor, At Helias High school is going to, which is Helias High, they changed the name of it. Now it’s Helias Catholic High School. But I think they applied for me because I really don’t remember that. But Mizzou is huge, and it was really big to me. I think at that time, it had probably about as many people as were in Jefferson City. So it was a big, big experience to go to school. That biggest, 25, 26,000 students. There were only about 400 black students at the time. There were more internationals than there were blacks. And so again, even though I wasn’t the only black, I still was in a significant minority because of the history of racism in, in Missouri and education.

Bali White [00:11:52] So did you, did you feel like you had, like, a sense of community there?

Maria Smith [00:11:57] No, I didn’t. I had a childhood friend who was my roommate. She wasn’t my roommate my first year, but she was my roommate my 2nd, third and fourth year. No, it was a big, it was a big, big place. I was student government senator one year, maybe two. It’s been a long time. I’m not trying to embellish. I know it was one year, and because Tim Kaine was the president of the student body at that time, and someone who’s become a good friend of mine, Jim Fander was the vice president. The next year we had a clown government, and I don’t remember the name of the guy who was the president. But the University of Wisconsin also had a clown student government, and they declared war on University of Missouri. It was really funny. Lots of pranks back and forth. But this part of what factors shape who I am today? They definitely my parents. My mother was a force to be reckoned with, and she has a much more interesting story than I am and won’t try to tell it. My father also much more interesting story. But because racism in the United States had impacted their lives so severely, it also impacted mine. And, you know, it’s kind of like, I’m trying to think of an analogy. I can’t really think of an analogy, but all the major things in watershed things happened during that period of my life that you could see the macro and the micro kind of working in sync with the Civil Rights movement and the changes that were going on and the war, the Vietnam War, the whole articulation against the Vietnam war. Doctor King being assassinated. I was nine. I would have been ten that summer. And Doctor King assassins, April. So I hadn’t had my 10th birthday. And then that summer in June, again, I wasn’t yet ten. Bobby Kennedy was killed. So there was just a lot of outside things that I was able to observe, and they all became a part of, you know, my curiosity, my wanting to be engaged in the making of my own world, not just having it made for me.

Bali White [00:14:54] Absolutely.

Maria Smith [00:14:55] Yeah.

Bali White [00:14:56] So after you graduated college and you went on to law school, what area of law did you focus on?

Maria Smith [00:15:05] So I don’t know what law schools are like now. I can only kind of get an inkling from the law students at clerk at the Legal Aid Society. But you don’t really focus in law school.

Bali White [00:15:14] Okay.

Maria Smith [00:15:14] It’s just a general curriculum. The first two years, you’re trying to take all the kind of courses that are going to be on the bar exam and things that you need to know in order to practice law. And I really– When I went to law school, I was– I remember saying to one of my history professors at Mizzou, brilliant guy, had gone to Harvard, told lots of interesting stories. He’d also, I think he had gotten his PhD from American University. And anyway, he would tell stories about– Because, you know, the DC, that DC area, Maryland area is so hyper South, really, that people would– He would need rides, so Black people would allow him to drive their car so that they could get where they were going, and then he would get the benefit of a ride. But anyway, I remember asking him, when I was applying to law schools, I only applied to three or four. It’s all I could afford, which was going to be my biggest handicap, that I was Black or that I was a woman. And anyway, he was like, they’re both pretty bad [laughs] because now law schools are more than 50% women. But at that time, it was Mizzou. Had I applied to Mizzou, Northwestern, and the University of Virginia– The only reason I applied to Virginia was because one of my professors wouldn’t write my letter of recommendation unless I added another law school to it. And he recommended Virginia. I wanted to go to Northwestern because that’s where I wanted to go as an undergraduate. My brother had crossed that out, and obviously applied to Mizzou because I was there. Kind of lost my train– Sorry. So, yeah, you don’t– You just– You take general– It’s just– It’s three years general classes and, you know, I took some civil liberty classes and stuff like that. The lawyer that had represented [Fred] Korematsu in the famous Korematsu case, Washington. I took one of the seminars. I took a Women in the Law seminar. I took an environmental law class. I did abysmal. And it was all about these scrubbers and everything like that. Probably the lowest grade I’ve ever gotten in my life. It was very hard. It was hard because I’d never been– I don’t know if you know anything about the University of Virginia, but University of Virginia, basically, are the kids of the aristocracy of the US. And it’s probably worse now, but it was bad then. Goody Marshall was Thurgood Marshall’s son, was the head of BALSA [Black American Law Students Association at UVA]. My first year was his third year. Bobby Kennedy was in the second year. He was the second year. He had taken off a year to work on his uncle Ted Kennedy’s campaign. So he would have been in Goody’s class, but because he had taken off that year, he was the class ahead of me. And then when I was a second year, Michael Kennedy was in the class behind me, and Janet Rehnquist was in his class. I had a roommate. Well, I had two roommates and suite mates that kind of knew who all these people were. And one of my roommates, who wasn’t at the law school, she was at the Darden, the business school. She would read the Sunday New York Times. They had this, like, wedding section on Sundays. And so you can see at that time, it was like, who’s who in the US getting married to who’s who. So she would point out these people that were in my class, and they’re engaged and stuff like that. And my other– My other roommate, who had gone to UVA as an undergraduate, grown up in a really, really impoverished part of Virginia, in the coal-mining part they called the Tri-state area. She also, even though she had grown up in this very deprived background, she also was in tune to, like, who was the senator’s kid and who was it? So I got kind of an education of that labor law class with Bobby Kennedy, that was never there. I had a seminar class with him. Again, he. No, no, no. He was in my friend’s seminar class. And again, she said he was never there. But we were definitely in the same labor law class. The year that he was in the labor law class, the labor law class that I took semester, he wrote an article about whitewater rafting. So he was whitewater rafting when we were labor law class. [laughs] Anyway, I diverged. Sorry.

Bali White [00:20:30] So can you— What year did you take the bar exam?

Maria Smith [00:20:34] So I took three bar exams. I took Virginia right after I graduated in 1983, and I took the Missouri bar in February of ’84, and I took the Ohio bar in October of, July of 1984, and the results came out in October of ’84.

Bali White [00:21:00] And then I guess that leads me to the next question of what brought you to the Near West Side?

Maria Smith [00:21:06] Yeah. God has a weird sense of humor. When I was in law school, I had terrible depression. It was horrible kickback depression. And I basically was– I had had the depression as a child. I didn’t know what it was called. I didn’t know what it was called, depression. And so I was basically one of my roommates who– Washington psychology major as an undergraduate. She told me my first year, she said, you know, you could go to the counseling center here. So I went to the counseling center, and I had this counselor, psychologist, PhD counselor named Chris Reppucci. She’s still alive. I’m Facebook friends with her. I saw her in October of 2001. But anyway, I told her my story and she was like, you have depression. And I’m like, I just thought I was worthless. I mean, I had no idea, you know, I didn’t know anything about that stuff. And so anyway, so I struggled with this depression the whole time. Never go to law school if you’re depressed. Not the way to make your way through law school. But I didn’t want to let my parents down. We were all working. It was really hard. It was expensive. I had given up a three-year full ride at University of Iowa that had gotten offered to me. Another long story that I’m not going to go into. But I knew that I just had to make it through. I couldn’t drop out for a semester and get my head straight. So I was on the verge of just committing suicide. I was studying for the bar. I was in Charlottesville. Charlottesville is super hot during the summer, and I didn’t have a car, so I was walking everywhere. So there was a table out in the lobby in Charlottesville, where everyone’s studying for the bar at the law school. And basically, I hadn’t been able to be involved in anything since law school was so hard. But in undergraduate, I had been involved in anti-apartheid demonstrations and stuff at information on campus, at Mizzou. And so there’s a table of people out with inviting people to go to the Catholic Church for a talk on Nicaragua. Catholic Church was St. Thomas Aquinas. And so I was just like. I was very angry. I was like, what are we talking about, Nicaragua? We should be talking about South Africa and apartheid, Indian apartheid. So anyway, I said, I’m gonna go. I’m not gonna study for the bar tonight. I’m gonna go up there. So I walked up this talk, and I realized that it was the first time I had been in a Catholic church. I went to Catholic grade school and Catholic high school. So, basically, as a Catholic, I don’t know what Catholic schools are like now, but in those days, you went to mass, at a minimum, three times a week at school, plus with your family. And I realized that, like, I hadn’t been to Catholic mass in almost seven years, when it had been such a part of my life before, and I wanted to be this nun and all this whole thing. So I’m sitting in this church, and, you know, I’m contemplating whether I should commit suicide or not. And I basically had planned I was gonna put my head in the oven and turn the gas on. And so I’m like, well, before I do that, I may want to just check out whether there really is a God. And so I had such anger at the Catholic church. I saw this Dominican. His name is Jack Rossi. I’ve also been in contact with him a couple of times over the years. But anyway, I saw Jack Rossi, and I said, I’m going to come back the next day. I’m going to sit in the back of church during mass, and after mass, I’m going to talk to him. So I did that. And he actually was the one saying the mass, which, you know, does not always work out that way. Never occurred to me that I could make an appointment to see him, talk to him, nothing. I just, like, kind of buttonholed him. And so we go over the rectory to talk, and he says, I tell him always, basically an argument that Sigmund Freud puts forth in Civilization and Its Discontents about God being all of religion, being anthropomorphic and the whole bit. And he says to me, I have a little book for you, equally small. And it was “Thoughts and Solitudes” by Thomas Merton. So I took the book, and I said, okay, yeah, I’ll read it. So I went back. It’s like, 99 degrees in Charlottesville. Walk back, suffocating, hot, get home, decide to study for the bar a little bit before I go to bed. I decide I’m going to read a little bit of this book that he gave me. So I started reading this book, and I feel these, like, weird sensations, like someone had taken a bucket and they’re just pouring something inside my head. So it’s like, wow, this is way too strange for me. I’m gonna go to bed. So I go to bed, get up, get ready, go to the bar review. In between, I’m reading this little booklet that he’s given me because it’s broken up into courses. So, like, you do contracts, you do evidence, whatever. So in between these transitions, I’m reading this little booklet, and again, I had this sensation, and I was like, it really feels like that priest is praying for me. So I decided again to march up to this church and ask him, like, are you praying for me? What’s going on here? And so I see him, and he’s like, well, you know, no one can tell you what you’re experiencing, so you have to answer that yourself. On my way back from church again, it’s like a hundred degrees, suffocating, humid. I’m almost at my, where I was staying, it’s like a townhouse. I’m almost there, and I feel this, like, whoosh, this very, very strong, as if it were a strong wind gonna knock me down. And I say, God, here? I have on a skirt. [laughs] And after that, I had had eczema on my face since I was, like, 15. My eczema healed. I decided I wasn’t going to kill myself, and I just decided to dig deeper into Thomas Merton. So Thomas Merton was a contemplative. And so I started reading, like, Desert Fathers. All of his writings about being contemplative renewed my wanting to be a contemplative. Went up to see Jack Rossi again, and he was like, you know, I told him all the things I was mad at the church about how they treated me as a child, the whole bit. And he gave me a book by Dorothy Day. Hadn’t really heard of Dorothy Day. You would think after a Catholic education, I would have heard of both of them, but I hadn’t. And so that’s how I learned about Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. I learned about them at the same time. And so both of their writings are about community, which at the time, I felt like I had not experienced. In retrospect, I realized that I had experience not in, not at Mizzou, not in the Catholic school, that I had gone to a certain extent of community, but community. But yet I was marginalized within that community. But then within my– The Black, again, in the Black community again, I was marginalized because I was like the only Black kid that was going to these white schools. So I had a sense of what community was like. I had had an experience of community, but my experience was always, always kind of on the margin for one reason or another. I’m sure that’s how trans kids and LBGTQ kids feel like they’re never quite in the center because the dominant culture is different than where they are. But their writings, like Merton’s writings, resonated with me because he’s talking about the major issues of the day, the militarism, particularly, he writes about. But yet he’s contemplative, which told me that I could follow that path of being a contemplative and still be engaged with the major issues of the world, which was important to me at the time. And Dorothy Day’s writings were important to me because she was just out there critiquing everything that was wrong with what, you know, all the critiques that she had known. She was a little weak on the racism stuff, but she’s not terribly off the mark in the societal critique. So those were the things that kind of braided my experience. So when I had this mystical experience, which happens to so few people, I mean, so many seekers want something like that. And I. I don’t know why it happened to me and not to somebody else. I’m grateful that it did save my life and probably the lives of my parents, because they would have been devastated, you know, my brother. Everybody would have been like, why? But when I had that experience, I decided that I did want to be a contemplative. To join a religious order, you have to pass a battery of emotional psychological tests, and you also have to show that you know how to live in community. So I figured that I wasn’t going to be able to pass this emotional test real soon after having clinical depression for most of my life. So I was trying to get my head straight. And I also didn’t know what to expect in terms of living in community. I had this friend. She was a– I had been her aide. She had contracted polio in the 1950s. Her name was Cornelia Kelly. Her husband was Hubert Humphrey’s lawyer. She was the reason why I ended up going to Virginia, which I won’t go into that. Anyway, I was talking to Cornelia. She was a devout Catholic. And so I told her what I experienced, and she said, I think you need to get this little booklet it’s called The Response, meaning God calls, you respond, right? And in that booklet, the response, it was all these Catholic organizations that you could volunteer for a year. She was big on that. So I got the little booklet. I didn’t know that one of my high school classmates and a high school teacher had moved to DC and they were the ones publishing this little booklet. I didn’t know that until much later. But anyway, I get the little booklet, and I’m flipping through it, and I find there’s an organization. I think it’s The Daughters of Charity in San Antonio. They have a volunteer service organization. There was a Franciscan retreat house in Malibu, and I had written to both of them. They were all willing to take me. And then as I was looking through, trying to find things about community, there was a Marianist voluntary service community that had its little paragraphs, had a lot about community, what it means to be community. So I said, God, I really want to go to Malibu. San Antonio would be great. I’m a freeze bunny. I wanted to get away from winter, but I’m going to go to Cleveland because I want to make sure that I’m doing this for you and not for me. Now, I had a law school classmate that was from Cleveland, and he had spent his whole time in law school talking about how great Cleveland was, and I never even heard of it. I was like, oh, my God, what’s this about Cleveland? You go someplace else? He had an offer to go to a law firm in Atlanta, which was the happening place for African Americans at the time. Andrew Young was the mayor. He had kind of a midsized law firm. He could have made partner. And, you know, snap finger. And he was like, nope, nope, nope. I’m going back to Cleveland. So when I got here, I called him, was like, hey, Craig, I’m in Cleveland. He goes, I’m like, where are you working? He’s like, I forgot a little part. But he used to say, I’m going back to Cleveland. Work for the people. And so I was like, where are you working? Well, he was at one of the largest law firms in the country, probably the world. And I’m like, oh, those people. [laughs] You had to go back to Cleveland, work for those people. He’s really cool. He understood. But one of the things he told me was like, where are you? And I said, I’m on the west side. He goes, well, I won’t come visit you. I was like, why? He goes, I don’t cross the river. And I’m like, what’s that about? And he goes, it’s not safe. When I started dating Charlie, he was like, I hear you’re dating this white guy, but you better pay attention to where he takes you because it’s not safe for you to be every place in Cuyahoga county with that guy. He’s like, don’t go to Little Italy. Don’t go to Parma. And I’m like, I have no idea where I’m going [laughs] in any of these places. But anyway. So Cleveland’s changed.

Bali White [00:36:16] Oh, yeah. So what would you say your first impression of the Near West Side was when we got here?

Maria Smith [00:36:22] How dirty it was. I never lived any place that was this dirty. It’s a lot cleaner now, but in those days, the buses were dirty. The exhaust was black. Sooty. It was– The houses were raggedy. Yeah. I never seen anything quite like that before. I lived in that house back there. There were long lines, people for the meal here. People would urinate out behind the window. We would be washing the dishes, and someone would be in the backyard urinating. I had never seen anything close to urban poverty. I had been to– My dad was from Boston. I’d been to Boston and seen a little bit of it, but it’s different when you’re visiting than when you’re living in the middle of it. And I was older also. I was a little bit more aware of the disparity between wealth. I liked the neighborhood. I liked it a lot better then than I like it now. I mean, they had all kinds of Puerto Ricans. And the library, it still was a remnant of some of the immigrant communities. So the library had a big section on Hungarian literature because there was still, like, a little pocket of Hungarians that lived in the neighborhood or had contact with the neighborhood. They had a church that’s now the Walsh Academy, and it had been turned into– Trying to think of the name of it. San Juan. San Juan Batista. And it had been kind of a Mexican-American parish and then Puerto Rican parish that had transferred from being Hungarian. I think that most of the Hungarians went to St. Emeric after that church kind of transitioned. But, yeah, it was poorer. A lot poorer, but a lot more activists, a lot more. You know, I think what I compared it to was– And I think I wrote this in on the email. It was like being in Seneca Falls. There were all kinds of people coming back from Central America. There was just a lot of, lot of– It was epicenter of activism in Cleveland.

Bali White [00:38:59] So that kind of brings me to the next topic, is Cleveland’s Catholic Worker. So could you kind of talk about when and how you got involved with that?

Maria Smith [00:39:11] I got involved with that through my husband, who was part of the– Charlie Hurst, who was part of the kind of little core group that was like, wouldn’t it be cool to have a Catholic Worker? He had been involved in antiwar protests and anti-nuke protests at other places that had Catholic Workers either in them or had organized it. And so that’s how I got involved. They were starting to articulate. They would have meetings on Friday evenings at the [Catholic Worker] Storefront. Somebody had given Bob Begin that building. And so I would go to every Friday. It was the same conversation, what it means to be community. It was like everyone was trying to explore, like, how can we be community together? And that’s what I was looking for, like, how to be community. And so, yeah, it really spoke to me. Just a lot of really super committed people. Ralph Delaney. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned Ralph. Ralph Delaney had been a Marianist, so I knew about him, but he would whiz through there. The Corrigans. I had met Bill Corrigan, who was– I kind of idolized Bill Corrigan. He always said the right thing. Very provocative kinds of things to say, very push the envelope kinds of things to say, and then walk away. And, Judy, I mean, they were– You know, there were kind of people their door’s always open. There was always enough food, you know, if you wanted. If you needed a place to go. You knew the Corrigans were always there for you. Patty and Jimmy. Jim was married to Patty at that time. They had little kids, George and Stephanie. They had little kids. So it was– They were all kind of an example of what I wanted my life to be like when I decided not to be a nun. [laughs]

Bali White [00:41:14] So were you– You were practicing law also while you were–?

Maria Smith [00:41:19] Yeah. So I worked at the Institute for Child Advocacy, and I wasn’t, like, practicing law, but I was a staff attorney. So I was analyzing laws and legislation. And I think I wrote in amicus brief very poorly, but I wrote it and it got filed. And I engaged in a project that John Mattingly had started. It was– There’s a requirement that you had to, if you called 696-KIDS, which is the report abuse number, they were supposed to, by statute, investigate within 24 hours. And the West Side Community House had this group of neighbors saying that, you know, we’re reporting these situations of abuse and neglect, and you all aren’t investigating them. So they had started this kind of like a campaign, and I was supplying them with statutory size, little stuff, nothing. No big legal briefs. And so I was involved in that kind of organizing effort. And John had sent me to talk to Carolyn Carter, who was the head of the affirmative litigation unit at Legal Aid. And so Carolyn helped me brainstorm a little bit about asking for a meeting with the legal department for the county welfare department. And, you know, we worked on this project together. She pulled together some other lawyers. I didn’t know anybody because I didn’t go to law school here, so I didn’t have any contacts. So she pulled together some of the lawyers to kind of push the legal envelope of that and get some commitments from the department to obey the law. And when the Institute for Child Advocacy, my year was ending, decided that they didn’t have the funds to fund a staff attorney. Carolyn asked me if I wanted to work at Legal Aid, and that’s how I got connected with Legal Aid.

Bali White [00:43:26] So, I guess, kind of switching gears again, another question I do have for you is your experience with Witness for Peace. Could you kind of talk about what that is and how you got involved?

Maria Smith [00:43:39] Yep. So, like I said, in this building, there was an Isaiah Center. I don’t know if people told you about that. So the Isaiah Center was like an umbrella social justice organization and had a lot of nuns involved, a lot of faith-based. They had– Have you ever heard of Clergy and Laity Concerned?

Bali White [00:43:59] Actually, someone has mentioned that, yes.

Maria Smith [00:44:00] Okay. So they had an office here. I don’t know. Probably a couple other groups that I’m not thinking of right now, IRTF, which was only on Central America at that time, not Colombia. And anyway, so because of the two of the four church women being killed in El Salvador were from Cleveland, and because the Diocese still had their team in El Salvador, there were a lot of people. And because of the overground railroad to Buffalo coming through here, there were a lot of people that were in Central America that were coming back, telling the stories. There were people from Central America coming back, coming through here, trying to get to Canada so they could get asylum. And so I learned about that, the movement. And I don’t know if you remember, I told you that when I first had this introduction to the problems in Nicaragua, it was in Charlottesville. And I was like, what are we doing talking about Nicaragua? And we should be talking about Apartheid. But I was a little bit more open-minded about the need to be in solidarity with the people of Central America because of what I was hearing here. My husband had been part of one of the first delegations, short-term delegations that went to Nicaragua. We weren’t married at the time, but we were dating, and so he knew a lot about what was going on. So I was getting a very, very fast, intense education about Nicaragua. I was also still trying to commit my life to surrender it totally to God. And I knew that a lot of people that were involved in the movement were not able to just pack up and go to be a part of the Witness for Peace team. So we spent about a year discerning whether we were going to do that. It was a bigger sacrifice for my husband. He left his church. He was pastoring a church on West 65th Street called Bethany. His mother had just passed away. Anyway, so with the support of this community, we decided that we would be the representatives of the long-term team, for Witness for Peace in Nicaragua. And our job was to document contra attacks against civilians and to show short term delegations through the war zones of Nicaragua. So we were assigned to La Quinta region. It’s the fifth region, Chontales, in Zelaya de Sur. And so we went four months we did language study in Guatemala, and eight months we did the long-term team in Nicaragua. So we wanted to do– We wanted to do longer than a year. But with Witness for Peace, you couldn’t live in a community. You had to travel wherever there was attacks, so you really– You couldn’t be rooted. And we had just gotten married, so we wanted to just find one community that we could live in Central America. So at the same time that we applied for Witness for Peace, we applied with Mennonite Central Committee. So we applied with Mennonite Central Committee because, one, they had been supportive of my husband’s war tax resistance, and they are Anabaptists, so they oppose military service. And so when we were about to leave, to go to Nicaragua, MCC said, well, we have a position for you. They were all over the map. They were going to send us to Somalia and all kinds of places. And we were like, no, we don’t want to go to Lesotho or Botswana. We want to go to Central America anyway. You don’t want to go to refugee camp in Kenya. So they said, well, what about Brazil? And my husband was like, yes, that’s, you know, all the liberation theologians are, you know, not all of them, but many important voices of liberation theology are coming out of Brazil. We could go there, we could see what they’re doing, and we could learn, and then we could bring it back here. All this sounds so naive now. [laughs] Anyway, so we said, but we’ve made this commitment to go to Nicaragua for a year, and Mennonite Central Committee was like, oh, go to Nicaragua for a year. It takes forever to get missionary visas in Brazil. It will take us a year to get your missionary visa, so it’s no big deal. So we kept our commitment. We went to– We went to Nicaragua for a year. The discernment to go to Nicaragua wasn’t easy. I mean, it’s easy to talk about it, but it wasn’t easy. The day that we got our letter from Witness for Peace saying that they would accept us was the same day that Ben Linder was murdered in Nicaragua. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Ben Linder, but he was a US engineering student that had gone to Nicaragua to help. He was building a dam. We actually were in the community where he had started building the stand where he was murdered. It wasn’t the community we were assigned to, but at a certain point in Witness for Peace, you had to serve on the mobile response team. So you had to, like, cover all of the places in Nicaragua with this truck. When you’re assigned. When we were assigned to our little region, you didn’t have a vehicle. You had to hitchhike like everybody else was hitchhiking. But anyway, we went up north to where Ben Linder was killed the year that we were, the eight months that we were there. But there had been a group of women. They were women who had lost their husbands. Two were from. Well, one was from the US. The other woman was– Her name is Chantal Bianchi. I think you can find stuff about her online. Her husband Mauricio was murdered. He was killed in a clay board mine that the transport he was on, those are mines made in the US. And then the other woman was Florentina, who a friend of mine still is in contact with her. Florentina Perez. Her husband was killed by the Contra. So they had done a tour. And they were these two people that were really active in the peace community. Marilyn and Dale Withers. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned them, but Dale was a Presbyterian pastor, my husband’s Presbyterian pastor. They were really active. And they had a house, and so they would host people that were coming outside the community. So they had hosted these three widows. So when I decided to do this, I knew that there was a chance I had only been married, like, less than a year, that I could be one of them, you know, come back without a husband. But we went. We prayed. When we were in Guatemala, I became friends with Dianna Ortiz, who was abducted and tortured in Guatemala. And after her torture, she had like, no memory of her the time before her torture. She didn’t even recognize her family when she got off the plane. So one year she did a witness. After we came back, she did a witness in DC as silent witness, asking for the US government to declassify the documents so she could see who her torturers were. They were people that were trained at School of the Americas. So I went. My son was little. My husband said, no problem, you go. Because we couldn’t both go. I went and a friend of mine who had just come back from Cambodia, we were both. We’re a mess. It’s very hard to see what your country’s doing, the violence that your country is perpetrating. See people that are oblivious to it, family members who are supporting people that are doing it without them understanding the connections and be normal. This is very hard. So anyway, I went to be the memory for Deanna because she didn’t have that memory anymore. And Brazil was. We finally did go to Brazil, and Brazil was an undeclared war. We were in the favelas of Brazil and there was a lot of death squad activity. And, you know, there are occasions where the kids would come running up to our house. We were kind of the center of gravity because we were a novelty. And the kids would run up to our house saying, “Mataron Nelli,” they killed him. “El Ladron” He was a thief, that kind of stuff. And. Yeah, so it was a lot of violence. A lot of violence.

Bali White [00:53:53] So after all of this, when did you come back to Cleveland?

Maria Smith [00:53:59] So we came back in ’92. We came back not with the intention to stay. Our son was born in Brazil, and we had wanted to go back to the community. We’re living in this little community on the south side of Recife called Villa dos Milagres. Just was an occupation. People had snuck on the land at night, put up their shacks, pirated the water and the electricity. But it was, like I said, it was violent. It was hard. And we had– Our son was born. None of our family had been to visit us. No one had seen him. He was two years old. And so we figured out that the only way anyone in our family was going to see this child is if we came back. So we came back. I mean, again, it was hard. We had been robbed at gunpoint in our house. It was– We just needed a breather. But the intention was to go back. When we came back, the Mennonite Central Committee decided to do an evaluation because basically all of our teammates that had lived down in the villa with us found it that they couldn’t– They couldn’t live in– They couldn’t live in that level of daily violence. And it’s not just the robbing and the killings and stuff. It’s a violence to have people live at that level of poverty. It’s just– It’s layers of violence. And so when you know that it’s someone else is being impacted by the violence, it’s not just, you know, robbing and shooting and domestic violence. The whole system is just this violence of human dignity. It wears on you. So no one on our team, our Brazil team, could stay in that little area. They all decided to move up where it was a little less intense and the poverty wasn’t as intense. It was a huge neighborhood. It had been planned as a planned neighborhood, but the occupations had gotten ahead of the planning. And so it didn’t seem quite as violent to us because we were coming from a war zone. But it still was bad. But people were loving and, I mean, it was just, you know, it’s just this juxtaposition of real community where people are really trying to be communal with one another. They’re not trying to get ahead of each other. They’re trying to all move together. Like, We’re going to improve this all together, not I’m going to take advantage of it and I’m going to get ahead and lord over you. Anyway, when we came back, the idea was just to come back briefly, but because of the situation, the Mennonite Central Committee decided to discontinue the project. So we didn’t have anything to go back to. So we started looking for other organizations and tried out a couple of things. And we went to Chicago with this one organization, the Cambodia Lay Missionaries, and they were gonna send us back to Brazil, but it wasn’t gonna be to Recife, and it didn’t work out. I’m not gonna go through that big long story. It didn’t work out. So kind of felt like, you know, the story of Jonah, where Jonah wants to, doesn’t want to go to Nineveh, but God is at every point spitting him back up on the shore. You know, you’re going to Nineveh. That’s how Cleveland. Cleveland became our Nineveh. Whatever happened, we ended up coming back here. So he just kind of. And it was. It was hard for me. It was really emotionally hard for me. I think it took me. It took me like six years to get back to center. And, you know, we raised Alexander here. Yeah.

Bali White [00:58:24] I mean, I’m sure, like, it’s very different living here than it was in Brazil. Like, it’s a lot to kind of process, like, how life was like there compared to here. So six years, it takes. It takes a while to truly, like, come back here and understand just the sheer differences. But which leads me to the next question, particularly about, like, housing justice and affordable housing work on Cleveland’s Near West Side. And I’m just curious on what your involvement is with that and what led you to—

Maria Smith [00:59:01] So that was like, you know how I said that on Friday nights, everyone’s talking about what it means to be a community? Well, when we came back from Brazil, that’s what the conversation was. It was like the air we breathe. Everyone was talking about housing justice, because to be community means everyone has to have a house that can afford. The neighborhood was transitioning. It was obvious that the vision that we had for having everyone’s needs met, everyone has what they need. No one has too much. That vision was not winning the day. So it was. It wasn’t like. It was like. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like brushing your teeth. It was just a part of everyday life. It was the question of the day, how are we going to do this? And so I basically was, you know, following in that path that lots of people were involved in. Bill Corrigan had become housing court judge, and so I hadn’t practiced law in, like, six years. So he offered me a job in housing court and as a magistrate, and it was again, I mean, I think that job was harder than documenting contra text in a lot of ways. Not really, but in a lot of ways, because the reason why it was different was because when I was documenting contra texts, I was following my heart. When I was evicting people, I was doing something against my heart. And I actually had this chronic dream that my heart had turned to an anvil. You know what an anvil is? And I would get off– In the dream, I was getting off the elevator at the Justice Center, and there would be this uniform bailiff that was yelling at me, Jeff City. Jeff City. And I’d look at my heart, and there it was, was this steel. Big piece of steel. [laughs] Anyway, so, yeah, I became involved in housing justice work because I saw the injustice firsthand, you know, and I was a part of it. It was a part of the injustice.

Bali White [01:01:26] So I guess, what would you define to be, like, some of the central issues at stake in the struggle for housing justice?

Maria Smith [01:01:35] Well, definitely affordability. Affordability. Lack of access to ownership. The segregation that we talked about before, the ability for those who have to push out those who have been. It’s kind of a– It’s a colonialization of a neighborhood. It’s because I have money, I can come and take what you have. You have to move because you don’t have money, you don’t have money, you don’t have power, you don’t have any agency, you don’t have any currency, you don’t have any political clout, you don’t have any visibility. So. Yeah.

Bali White [01:02:20] In what ways have you seen people displaced from this community?

Maria Smith [01:02:25] Yeah, well, like the Hispanic community is way far south, you know, and like in, I guess in the early 2000s when they knocked down– My chronology might be bad, but I’m thinking it was probably like 2003–2004 when CMHA had knocked down the low-rises next to the big Riverview tower. I mean, they had rehabbed that. They’d spent millions of dollars rehabbing that. And then they had these things called charrettes or something like that. It’s a french word. I don’t speak French. [laughs] And the people that were facilitating was like, oh, wow, you know, rich people live so well on top of one another. Too bad we can’t get that building. I mean, they were basically salivating over that building. And the other thing that had happened when I came to Cleveland in 84 was Mary Rose Oakar was the congressperson. She lives in this neighborhood. That’s why I’m pointing. Her house is that way. And there were some nuns that wanted to do transitional housing. So John Mattingly had helped them kind of coordinate their orchestration of getting the– There was some seedy motels that were next to the low-rises of CMHA. So they had gotten a hold of this motel and turned it into transitional housing. But there were developers that were salivating for Lakeview [Lakeview Terrace]. But there was enough political support from Mary Rose and some other people that could make a difference. That said, basically, hands off on Lakeview. So no developer got that. But the sad thing was that the national wave in support of public housing change. So, you know, public housing authorities don’t get the funding to keep their conventional public housing stock in good shape. So Lakeview is. I think it’s had some work, but probably not as much as it needs.

Bali White [01:04:49] So I guess that kind of brings me to the question you had mentioned earlier. West Side Community House. So how did you get involved with that? And could you kind of talk a little bit about your experience as a board member?

Maria Smith [01:05:10] So John Mattingly had been the executive director and he nominated me for the board or whatever. So I got elected to the board, and that was the first time I had ever served on a board, and I learned a lot. Learned a lot. Gloria Aron, who passed away, I think, two years ago, she was really involved in activists. She had been involved in school justice, desegregation, issues of schools. So, yeah, I basically learned kind of all the different pieces, part. So the West Side Community House had an organization that was modeled after welfare rights, but it was called Low Income People Together. And Doug Van Aken, who later became a physician, was really involved in that. I’m sure Jim talked a lot about Low Income People Together. He had been a part of that, too. And they just saw really, what– You didn’t have to have a law school education to know how to use the democratic process. Right? You just needed fearless organizers, people that wouldn’t compromise their principles. And they had fearless organizers and people that were rooted in their understanding of who they were. And again, they weren’t people that were trying to get ahead for themselves. They weren’t trying to get rich. They were just trying to get what their community needed. It’s too bad that there’s not more. You know, that’s really– That’s what’s missing in the housing justice piece in Cleveland right now, is an organization that can have that kind of impact. Now, NEOCH has some of that impact, but it’s covering up bigger territory. So Low Income People Together, because it was kind of concentrated, concentrated in this neighborhood, I think it was able to have a little bit more direct focus. Maybe my, you know, 2020 is, hindsight is always a little bit better, but I think that they were able to make a difference in a way that I haven’t seen any grassroots organization make recently. East Side Organizing Project. Maybe at the beginning of the foreclosure issues in Cleveland, which was before the national foreclosure crisis, they had sort of that impact, but still not the same kind of impact that Low Income People Together did.

Bali White [01:07:58] And so you mentioned Low Income People Together. What were some of, like, the issues you were working on with that?

Maria Smith [01:08:04] So I wasn’t a part of them. I was on the board. And West Side Catholic, I mean, West Side Community House housed the – and sponsored – Low Income People Together.

Bali White [01:08:14] Okay, got it, got it. And then just around housing justice in this area in general, a big layer of this is just the overall gentrification of the neighborhood. In what ways would you say you’ve seen this area become more and more gentrified?

Maria Smith [01:08:31] Oh, it’s like gentrified on steroids.[laughs] I mean, we don’t live in this neighborhood because unless we rented from a friend, we wouldn’t be able to afford this neighborhood.

Bali White [01:08:40] Oh, yeah, that’s what I’ve noticed. You know, prior interviews, they talk about what they had bought their house for, what their rent used to be, and then they’re saying the same house in this neighborhood is now, you know, $500,000, which is just mind-boggling. I couldn’t even imagine.

Maria Smith [01:08:58] Yeah, yeah. And it was $500,000, like when we lived on Clinton. We lived on Clinton until 2011, I think that’s right. The properties that were built across the street from us at that time, they were selling for $500,000. Yeah. So I don’t know how much they’re worth now. $2 million or something like that. But I mean, so the ironic thing was all the places I told you about when they knocked down the low-rises and CMHA was part, it was part of the supposed to be mixed-income kind of movement that had national dollars and legislation behind it. All the places that people wanted to put those projects that were knocked down back, almost every one of the places that was recommended at neighborhood meetings, and people were told, no, you can’t do it there. No, you can’t do it there. Every one of those places has some kind of luxury housing on right now. [crosstalk] Yeah. So across the street on West 25th Street, I don’t know if you know, like Detroit, there’s that Quarter. Okay, so that was a parking lot for a restaurant that was called Milano’s, Maximo de Milano’s. And no, we can’t put house in there. It’s just a parking lot. That’s not big enough. Yeah. Right. Now look at it. Now you know where Hoopples is?

Bali White [01:10:35] Maybe.

Maria Smith [01:10:36] Do you know where Merwin’s is?

Bali White [01:10:38] Yes.

Maria Smith [01:10:38] Okay, so Hoopples is, you can’t go down that hill right now, but it was behind the Riverview. You go down that curvy hill, and Hoopples is at the end of the street. If you go south of Hoopples, there’s RTA track. So people would say, well, maybe you could build, like, houses along that RTA track. No one would want that property. Oh, no. These are like four-story commercial townhouses that probably are like a million and a half dollars. So, no, you can’t have that. I think they call it Duck island. Every place that people mentioned for the people that returned to this neighborhood that got put out because they knocked down those buildings was a no. And now it’s housing that none of those people can afford. I can’t afford it. I don’t know how people pay $2,300 a month for rent or $1,800 a month for rent or nineteen hundred dollars a month for rent or they’re. They’re doing efficiencies for $1,200.

Bali White [01:11:55] Yeah, I. So I, you know, just being in this area, recording these interviews, like, I was curious about all the housing. So I’m looking around at all these apartments that I walk by and I drive by and I look online and see, you know, what their rent’s going for, for, like, a 400 square-foot studio apartment. And it’s just like, how– How does anyone afford that for such little space? And it’s just– It’s crazy thinking of that because I’m from the suburbs, right? So, like, even, you know, apartments are a bit pricey even where I’m from. But, like, coming down to the downtown location where you have all these hospitals and, you know, young professionals are coming to this area, it’s just like, I’m amazed how people can afford.

Maria Smith [01:12:41] Well, I was gonna ask you, because it’s mostly people, your generation. Yeah. I’m like, well, [crosstalk] Okay. Because I’m like, it’s a mystery. I’m like, they’re paying. Parents must be floating them. But who would do that? Who would float someone, if you’re gonna do that? Float them for a mortgage?

Bali White [01:12:55] Yeah. And, I mean, I see it with my generation quite a lot, actually. Like, a lot of people’s parents are paying their rents for these apartments, and it’s– I just– Like, I don’t have that luxury. And I know a lot of other people don’t either. [laughs]

Maria Smith [01:13:09] Don’t waste your parent’s money like that. [laughs[

Bali White [01:13:11] Yeah, it’s– And, you know, it’s all about the location. People want to be downtown. They feel like there’s more to do and whatnot, but I just can’t imagine.

Maria Smith [01:13:23] Yeah, I mean, I like the density. I think that that is important. The problem is that, like, in the ’90s and the early 2000s, when people wanted to build affordable housing and they, you know, they wanted to build, the designs are, you know, multistory. Oh, no, you can’t build that in this neighborhood because, you know, this is like a historical neighborhood. Everything has to look like this Victorian kind. Like. Yeah, right. Look at it. The design is, like, not Victorian. It’s not even. I mean, some of the stuff looks like it should be in Florida. Other places, I mean, it doesn’t even look like it fits our climate, some of it. But anyway, yeah, it boggles the mind. It really boggles the mind. But I do want to say one thing, because this last question, how would you define the central issues at stake in this struggle for housing justice? I do think that Cleveland could be more creative about reparations because it’s totally documented that Black people were not allowed to purchase properties. You can calculate the amount of money that people were excluded from in terms of wealth building. It’s just a matter of mathematics, not any big science. And there is– There– There are other programs where people have received reparations for. Not– For being excluded or being injured by government. And there are experiments. There’s Amherst, Massachusetts, and Evanston, Illinois. And I’m sure there’s others where people have done things around housing reparations. It would be really important to do that in Cleveland, maybe not this neighborhood, but because predatory lending was so severe on the east side and so many people lost their equity, Black people lost their equity another way that, again, the housing was taken from them, that I think it is important to heal that wound. We have basically children in this city that, you know, have not grown up in any semblance of anything that looks like safety in an affordable house. The lead crisis out of control. All kinds of other housing and health issues. I mean, the quality of the housing stock is so, so poor for people that can’t pay $2,300 a month. And then with all the investors from outside, you know, it’s really hard for tenants to hold outside investors responsible for the conditions of their property.

Bali White [01:16:27] So I also am curious. You were briefly a board member for the May Dugan Center.

Maria Smith [01:16:34] I was.

Bali White [01:16:35] I actually heard about the May Dugan Center a little bit from Maryellen Fiala. She shared a little bit about that. But, I guess, could you share your experience?

Maria Smith [01:16:46] Again, it was, you know, basically seeing how the– It’s kind of like that. The engine, you know, of keeping the parts moving, like, the board has to make sure that the budget works, the staff is paid, the executive director is doing what they’re doing. It’s not– It’s not the most interesting– It’s not the sexy part. It’s pushing papers and making sure that your numbers work so your organization doesn’t have to fold. So I was such a marginal part of that. But I know that a lot of people are critical of nonprofits and the nonprofit industrial complex and things like that, but for grassroots people, again, how do you gonna. How are you gonna keep it working? Right? You know, and they May Dugan and I have a lot of respect for them because they were one of the first organizations that I was aware of that was really doing trauma-informed care. Like, they put that those connected those dots together really well, and they’ve had a long-term presence. So now, at that time, they were newbies because there’s lots of neighborhood houses in Cleveland, West Side Community House is really old, trying to think. I think it’s Friendly, Friendly House or something [Friendly Inn Settlement]. There are other community houses because there was a movement at the beginning of last century for these community houses. So May Dugan was kind of newbie, new to the block, but they managed to keep it going, and they provide a valuable service to some of the poorest, marginalized people, a lot of service to women, a lot of service to the Spanish speakers that have left this neighborhood. And they’re really in another neighborhood, but they still kind of gravitate to May Dugan. So.

Bali White [01:18:55] Absolutely.

Maria Smith [01:18:56] Yeah.

Bali White [01:18:57] And then actually switching gears again, I have another question. So after 9/11, you kind of became like a driving force for the Cleveland Nonviolence Network.

Maria Smith [01:19:09] Yeah, I think that’s giving me too much credit. Jim Misak was the driving force. And so, I mean, I think Charlie and I have always been kind of a constant because of our war tax resistance. And so we continue to make that statement about how we don’t want to participate in the war machine of the United States government. And, you know, it came, I think people appreciated it because it comes at a personal sacrifice. Like, we were never bankable to buy a house because of the tax lien swing. When cell phones first came out, we couldn’t get a cell phone because we had all the kinds of tax, tax liens, and no one wanted to give us– You had to sign these contracts at the time, no one wanted to give us a contract for a cell phone and all kinds of things that were a result of our war tax resistance. We got garnished every time. It looked like every time we needed money for Alexander’s education, the IRS was garnishing us. But we managed, and the community was very supportive. But, yeah, so we were a part of that. I mean, after 9/11, well, September 12, 2001, Jim Misak and Marge Misak invited everyone to be in their living room. We lived upstairs. And to listen to, pretty sure it was Doctor King’s speech at Riverside Church. George Hrbek was there, Mitzi Wagner was there, all kinds of people that had come to the neighborhood, part of the Vietnam antiwar movement, and basically said, what are we going to do? I think that we must have had a meeting. Ten years. Ten years. We must have had a meeting once a week in the Catholic Worker trying to figure out how do we remain the remnant, the resistance to stupid wars. It didn’t have to be. And, you know, it was our attempt to be faithful. So. Yeah, and, I mean, I feel so bad because I feel like young people, like you probably, you know, you grew up not understanding that it didn’t have to be that way. I mean, it’s just like your whole childhood is the US involved in Afghanistan?

Bali White [01:21:42] Yeah. I was two when 9/11 happened, so I don’t have any, like, memories of it, but, like, there’s always the conversation of before 9/11 and after 9/11, and then you just see that the effects it really has, not only on the US, but just worldwide.

Maria Smith [01:22:01] Yeah, it didn’t have to be that way. And it was so contrived. I mean, there was all this, like, orange alert and red alert and all the– I mean, we’re still living through the search for bags and search for this and search for that, and, you know, they’re not really searching. I mean, so perfunctory.

Bali White [01:22:16] Yeah.

Maria Smith [01:22:19] But a lot of fear. There’s so much fear. But I will tell you one story about September 12, 2001, for the first time. Because being African American, I always felt like an outsider. No matter if I’m an insider or not, I always felt like an outsider. September 12, 2001. When I rode the bus, I ride the bus. And we didn’t have a car. At that time, I don’t think we had a car. We went, like, years without a car, basically because we were tax resisters and couldn’t get a car. And we were also planning on going back to Brazil. So anyway, so we didn’t have a car, so I was riding the bus, and it was the first time that I felt like other people thought I was not the enemy. And it was a totally weird experience. It was totally weird.

Bali White [01:23:23] Oh, yeah. So, I guess, are you currently still involved with the Cleveland Nonviolence Network?

Maria Smith [01:23:31] Yes. Now, I would say that I’m important in the– Because I’m like, keep trying to keep it alive. Right? Keep it alive. So we did the Peace and Justice convention, the People’s Peace and Justice Convention. That’s eight years ago. My favorite part of that was framing a new definition of nonviolence, I’m going to say. So it goes down the history. So basically what we decided, I mean, it was like 70 people were meeting once a week at a minimum, but we needed a scaffolding for nonviolence because it– It’s that non-word. It’s hard for people to wrap their minds around it. And if you use the Indian words again, then it becomes awkward because it’s not really our language. So. And we wanted to make it practices. So I spent a lot of time kind of meditating on what would those five, what would these practices look like? And so if they’re nonviolent. So we came up with five things. Radical amazement, which is a phrase from Rabbi Abraham Heschel, radical hospitality, which was kind of the Catholic Worker thing. Good stewardship to create shared abundance, compassion for every sentient being in ecosystem, which was a phrase from an Islamic scholar that said, duke and truth, reparations and reconciliation. And that can be all kinds of– At the time, I was thinking more of the racial reparations, but there are all kinds of reparations that need to be paid to people.

Bali White [01:25:17] Now, you mentioned the People’s Justice and Peace Convention. Was that kind of received well by the community or was—?

Maria Smith [01:25:25] We had a lot of activists. I think we had about 400 people. We had, it was great. We wrote a platform. We helped facilitate space for people to articulate all the stuff that they wish would be included in the convention. And I think we did a really good job and we helped mobilize. I don’t know. We must have had, I don’t know. We must have had, like 200 group sponsors, and we had, you know, people from outside. It was really well done. It really was. So I tried to keep that remnant going, and we did the Peace Show for ten years. That was part of the planning for that. I used to get the permit because I was downtown and I’m a lawyer. That was a big headache, but, yeah.

Bali White [01:26:24] Was this the People’s Justice and Peace Convention? Was it a multi-day event?

Maria Smith [01:26:32] It was started on the evening before the Republican Convention and lasted until the day, I think it was a Monday, Monday or something like that. Sunday afternoon that it finished. So it was like a weekend.

Bali White [01:26:51] Do you have any plans to do another type of convention like this?

Maria Smith [01:26:56] I had planned to do one this time, but everything got too hectic, and I figured, well, if we’re going to do it this time, we need to start, you know, like we need to start. We started, we planned that basically in six months. We started in December with a big assembly asking people what they wanted to do when the RNC was in town. And then, like, every Sunday afternoon, trying to pull it together until it happened in July. It’s really hard to plan things without funding, so. And a lot of people, were older. A lot of people are elderly now. We need a lot more youthful energy. [laughs] But, yeah, I wanted to do it this time, but my job is a lot more demanding now.

Bali White [01:27:48] Did this convention, did it get, like, any criticism towards it at all?

Maria Smith [01:27:52] Not that I’m aware of.

Bali White [01:27:53] Good, then that’s good.

Maria Smith [01:27:55] Yeah.

Bali White [01:27:56] So I have two questions that I tend to end the interviews with. I think that could be either really easy to answer or really difficult. But looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

Maria Smith [01:28:13] Well, I mean, that implies that I was wanting to decide my own fate when I was trying to say to God, I’ll do what you want me to do, God. So I think maybe I would try to be a little bit more faithful to that. I might have taken a lot more risk. It’s hard when you’re raising a child and you don’t really know how it’s impacting a child. So I’m not sure. I mean, I could tell you what I wish would have been different, but I’m not sure that I had control over that. I mean, I wish that we hadn’t returned from Brazil and that we had stayed longer, but I was really exhausted, and I kind of wish that we had found someone that wanted to live communally. But again, we were raising a child. It’s very difficult. You live in community. You have to have a lot of means. It’s like having another job.

Bali White [01:29:21] And then I– So, moving forward, what are some of the things that you believe necessary in the fight for affordable housing and overall housing justice in this community and Cleveland as a whole?

Maria Smith [01:29:35] Well, I really, the reason why I try to keep Cleveland Nonviolence Network going is because I really think that people need to wrap their minds around what nonviolence means because it’s more than just like no one’s shooting one another, you know, because it gives you a foundation of what you want to look like and how you want to get there. So if you’re really committed to nonviolence, then you’re committed to not vilifying anyone, even if they’re opposed to what you’re trying to do. And you’re committed to working for the good of other people. You’re committed to those five practices I was talking about. And so I think that we’re really not going to move ahead until people actually are committed to living in a nonviolent way, because nonviolence doesn’t seek to dominate. And again, if you have money and you want your way because I have money, then that’s a form of domination. That’s a form of violence, and that’s where the housing injustice starts.

Bali White [01:30:41] Absolutely. And then I guess my last question is, do you have any advice for the future generations hoping to get involved in, say, activism or just trying to be a part of a community like the one here in the Near West Side?

Maria Smith [01:30:58] Yeah. Repeat myself. I study nonviolence, practice nonviolence, because I think that that’s where everyone, you know, my violence is right, your violence is wrong. That’s where we miss– We miss loving our enemies. We can’t experience a transformation because we’re too busy wanting the way we want it. And that means ultimately excluding someone else instead of trying to continue to pull in people that you don’t agree with, that you don’t like, that you think are wrong. So it’s a challenge.

Bali White [01:31:37] Absolutely. Any last thoughts?

Maria Smith [01:31:41] No. My husband’s texting me, wants me to go. [laughs]

Bali White [01:31:44] Well, thank you very much for your time.

Maria Smith [01:31:46] Thank you. I’m sorry to talk so much.

Bali White [01:31:47] No, no, not at all. This is really great. Very beneficial. It is August 12, 2024. I’m here with Maria Smith. I’m going to end this interview. Thank you.

Maria Smith [01:31:58] Thank you.

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