In the fall of 1953, Sidney Randall Smith Jr. left his home in Washington, D.C. to enroll as a freshman in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UConn.
His mother had instilled in him the importance of a college education, and the counselors at his high school – the renowned Dunbar High School (which at that time was recognized by both the black and white communities of D.C. as a pinnacle of academic excellence) – helped him select UConn and win the financial aid that would allow him to attend.
But no one could prepare him, a student from a segregated high school, for being one of only about 50 black students in the student body.
“My only contact with people who weren’t black is that I was a paper boy in a white neighborhood of Washington,” he says. “And that was hardly social contact.”
He was especially nervous about coming to Storrs because he had previously been sent to a church camp in Blairstown, N.J. On the bus trip north, a restaurant on Route 40 in Delaware refused to serve the campers, because there were a few non-whites in the group.
But the climate on the UConn campus was not a problem, he recalls. “I was nervous about things, but there were no problems.”
He lived – with the other men enrolled at UConn – in North Campus, while the women lived in South Campus.
Soon, he was accepted into a fraternity, Beta Sigma Gamma, one of two on campus at the time that accepted non-white students. “Today, we would say they were multicultural,” Smith says.
“The fraternity was apprehensive about taking me at first,” he adds. “Some of the people thought that I didn’t like white people. But one of the brothers told them I was from the South [he chuckles at the idea that Washington, D.C. is the South] and that I was not used to being around them.”
Smith says the fraternity made all the difference: “It was a nice environment.” He quickly made friends.
His roommate and fraternity brother, William Brown, Jr. was another reason for his success, Smith says. Brown, now a physician in Washington, D.C., was from New Haven and he invited Smith home for weekend activities and holiday celebrations – particularly important, since Smith could not afford to return to Washington except for the Christmas break.
“It really does take a village,” he says, “I needed that support.”
Life after UConn
Smith’s original goal was to become a physician, and he planned to major in zoology. But he also took a lot of philosophy courses, as he was interested in the academic discourse concerning the apparent divergence between religion and the natural sciences.
His grades were not good enough for medical school, however, and financial aid was non-existent. So after graduating from UConn, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in zoology at Howard University, and later went on to hold a post-doctoral fellowship in endocrinology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Those days were lean, he recalls. While he was still a student, his wife Katherine kept him and the children – who started arriving in 1960 – fed, even if there wasn’t enough food for her to have a full meal.
“She was certainly very supportive,” he recalls. “We had nothing in those days.”
Today, they have been married for more than 52 years, and live in a house in Ridgewood, N.J.
Smith left his post-doc to teach at Morehouse College for a couple of years, but in 1966, he returned to UConn on a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in the biochemistry department, where he studied with Professor Frank Vasington.
That experience led him to a job at the drug company Schering Plough (now Merck), where he was hired to start an immunology research group. There was only one problem – he knew little about immunology. So the company arranged for him to attend the New York University Medical Center for a year before he assumed leadership of the immunology section of the company.
His career was devoted to developing drugs for allergies, autoimmune diseases, and inflammation. “I loved doing research,” Smith says.
A new career at 70
But in 2003, he retired and headed to the Drew University Theological School, a United Methodist Seminary from which he received a Master of Divinity degree, magna cum laude, at the age of 70. He was ordained into the ministry in December 2007.
“When I went to Howard University, I had had one foot on the steps of the theology school, but I realized then that I was not ready,” he says.
A member of the Grace Congregational United Church of Christ in New York City, he remains interested in the discourse on the doctrines of Christian theology and the differences between Christianity and other world religions. He also enjoys preaching occasionally.
Smith’s background might have predicted that he wouldn’t go to college at all. His mother was divorced, the mother of three, and both her ill mother and her mother’s brother, who had had a couple of stokes, lived with the family.
But she would not put up with bad grades, and emphasized higher education, Smith recalls. All three children attended college and graduate school. His brother did his undergraduate work at Yale, while his sister attended Tufts. Both of his siblings attended Yale Law School.
And Smith’s four children? Three are attorneys and one is a physician.
“I always say that our success goes back to my mother. She was a staunch believer in education and she inspired us all to work very hard,” he says. And support from the Brown family and the fraternity at UConn helped, too.
