A Steward of the Community
 |
| Bob Smith, Executive director of Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council. Photo: Urban News |
For more than 26 years Robert G. (Bob) Smith has been Executive Director of Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council.
By Johnnie Grant
Smith, a native Ashevillian, is a graduate of Western Carolina University with a bachelor’s degree in Social Work and a minor in sociology and psychology. As both a community leader and an activist, he has served on numerous national, state, and local boards, including the National Association of Human Rights Workers, the State of North Carolina Association of Human Rights Workers, The Mediation Center, Helpmate, WCCJ, United Way, NAACP, WRES Radio, and Habitat for Humanity.
Last month Smith was awarded the 2010 Evan Mahaney Champion of Civil
Liberties Award in recognition of decades of work as an effective,
though always humble, volunteer for the causes of civil liberties and
civil rights. Among the recent efforts for which he was honored was his
support for two important causes pressed by the local chapter of the
ACLU: the historic NC Racial Justice Act, signed into law by Governor
Perdue last August and the Civil Liberties Resolution first drafted by
the local ACLU chapter, supported by several other local organizations,
and now being advanced by Asheville City Council member Cecil Bothwell.
The NC Racial Justice Act was developed in response to decades of
unbalanced application of the death penalty; the law allows defendants
awaiting trial and convicted inmates already on death row to use
statistical studies to raise claims—which prosecutors have the right to
rebut—of racial bias in a prosecutor’s use of the death penalty. If
proven, a judge could overturn the death sentence or prevent prosecutors
from seeking the death penalty.
About the Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council
Following more than a decade of racial turmoil in the 1950s and
’60s, a group of African American ministers formed a Human Relations
Council comprising volunteers in the community. City and county elected
officials, recognizing the need to improve race relations, engaged the
Chamber of Commerce, local industry leaders, school officials, to work
together to alleviate racial tensions.
In 1968 the Buncombe County Planning Council created the position of
Human Relations Coordinator to help bridge the gap between blacks and
whites in the community. Asheville was the second city in North Carolina
to employ a full-time Human Relations Coordinator. In these early
years, its primary focus was on the tension resulting from school
desegregation laws.
About the Evan Mahaney Award
The Evan Mahaney Champion of Civil Liberties Award is named for
the late Evan Mahaney, past president of the WNC chapter of the American
Civil Liberties Union. Before his retirement and subsequent move to
Asheville, Mahaney was a print and broadcast journalist and a crusader
for human rights and civil liberties. Mahaney was active on both the
state and WNC regional ACLU chapter boards before his death in 2004.
Past recipients of the Mahaney Award are Deborah Miles, founder
of the Center for Diversity Education; Women in Black, who protest war
in a quiet demonstration on Pack Square each Tuesday evening; Rev. Joe
Hoffman of First Congregational Church/UCC, Rev. Mark Ward of the
Unitarian-Universalist Church of Asheville, and Rev. Howard Hanger,
founder and ritual leader of the Jubilee! Community on Wall Street, for
their support of equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian citizens; and
the now-defunct Asheville Global Report, which built a reputation for
independent local reporting.
