Clyde Johnson Smith, who became the first Black academy instructor with the Baltimore City Fire Department, died May 7 at the age of 84. The cause was cancer and he died at the Gilchrist Hospice in Baltimore, surrounded by family and friends.
Smith was born December 5, 1932 in segregated Greenwood, South Carolina. He was the oldest of three boys and at an early age he moved to Baltimore and lived with an aunt in the Cherry Hill community.
Clyde Johnson Smith (Courtesy Photo)
Smith attended Frederick Douglass High School where he played football and ran track. He later entered the United States Army and served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. He was honorably discharged in 1955.
After leaving the Army, Smith attended what was then Morgan State College, but interrupted his time at Morgan to join the Baltimore City Fire Department in 1959, just a few years after the department was officially integrated. In addition to becoming the department’s first Black academy instructor, Smith was also the BCFD’s first Black battalion chief, and the first Black assistant chief.
According to his wife, Barbara R. Smith (the couple was married more than 50 years), Smith, along with 10 Black colleagues, traveled to a conference about discrimination throughout the United States Fire Service, in New York City in 1969. Those men were instrumental in creating the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters (IABPFF), an organization that has grown to over 95 chapters throughout the United States, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. When Smith and his colleagues returned from the conference in 1969, The Vulcan Blazers, which represents Baltimore’s Black firefighters, was born.
Smith is survived by his wife Barbara; son Clyde William Smith; daughter, Lori Slade; brother, Ronald (Hattie) Smith and many other family members and friends.