Dean Smith was a drum major for justice

The first time I interviewed Dean Smith was in 1989. I was covering Carolina athletics for The Chapel Hill Newspaper, and it was exciting to interview the famous North Carolina basketball coach. It wasn’t until I got to know Smith better that I realized he was far more interesting as a person than as a coach. Smith was always more liberal than most of his team’s fan base, but most conservatives just overlooked Smith’s “character flaw” as long as the Tar Heels kept winning 20 games a year and going to the Sweet 16 and beyond.

As a coach, Smith was actually a tough study. After home games, he would allow me to go with him into a private closet-like room at the Smith Center for a few extra questions. He did this as a courtesy to the “hometown newspaper.” However, because Smith rarely gave straight answers to questions and often spoke in incomplete sentences, I would listen to the recordings of my “private” interviews, and most often his quotes were not usable.

In the 1980s, I also got to know Smith’s first Binkley Baptist Church pastor, the Rev. Robert Seymour. Seymour told me great stories about Smith’s devotion to civil rights, to abolishing the death penalty and to social justice. However, I rarely got Smith to speak about any of these issues on the record. Once he made a critical comment about then-U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, but he added, “That’s off the record.”

In January 1991, when the first Gulf War broke out, I asked Smith if he was going to speak out against the war. He declined, but he mentioned that he had stood in front of the Franklin Street Post Office as a young coach to protest the Vietnam War. Later, in the 1980s, he agreed to sign a letter supporting the Nuclear Freeze Movement that asked the U.S. and the Soviet Union to “freeze” their development and production of nuclear weapons at current levels. Smith said the letters he received opposing his stance on the nuclear freeze were “too heavy” for the postal workers to carry.

Still, Smith made an effort to take the road less traveled. When college basketball teams started sewing U.S. flags onto the players’ uniforms, Smith lagged behind, though other coaches like Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Wake Forest’s Dave Odom jumped quickly onto the flag-patch bandwagon. When fans started to call in to his radio show to complain that UNC uniforms were flag-less, Smith capitulated. Those flags have now become an ever-present part of the UNC uniforms since the War on Terror started 14 years ago.

Smith also took a unique approach to losses. At news conferences afterward, it was not unusual for Smith to keep things in perspective, noting that world hunger and homelessness and such were far more important than a college basketball game.

Smith was often apologetic for the amount of money he made for coaching a game. When the UNC athletic department signed its first contract with Nike, Smith was given a $500,000 bonus. At the news conference, I asked him what he had to do to earn that bonus. “It’s a lot of money. I’m embarrassed,” Smith said. He eventually donated those funds back to the university. To my knowledge, Smith was never paid for doing a commercial advertisement of any kind, although he did do free public service announcements for many nonprofits.

It was in his opposition to the death penalty that Smith was unwavering. Each year, he would take his players on a trip to Raleigh’s Central Prison that included a visit to death row. Smith also visited death row inmates as a personal ministry. In 1998, he urged Gov. James Hunt to commute the death sentence of John Noland, a man Smith had befriended on The Row.

Carrboro-based People of Faith Against the Death Penalty asked Smith to attend a delegation of clergy for a clemency hearing for Noland. The group’s executive director, Stephen Dear, said Smith led off the discussion by pointing his finger at Hunt and saying: “You’re a murderer.” Smith then pointed his finger at each person in the room, calling each a murderer, ending with his finger pointed at himself and saying, “The death penalty makes us all murderers,” Dear said. Hunt refused Smith’s request, allowing Noland’s execution to be carried out.

One of the last times I saw Smith in public was at an anti-death penalty gathering a few years ago. He was with his daughter, Kristen Smith, who also worked for PFADP. In a news release, Dear wrote that Dean Smith “was always so humble and kind toward us. ... When North Carolina and the rest of the United States abolish the death penalty, it will be another major victory in which this exemplary human being can share.”

In their dreams, some Democrats wanted Smith to run for governor, but Smith knew better. In his own private way, Smith was a drum major for justice, and we were all blessed by his well-lived life.

Patrick O’Neill is the co-founder of Garner’s Fr. Charlie Mulholland Catholic Worker House.

This story was originally published February 15, 2015 at 8:00 PM with the headline "Dean Smith was a drum major for justice."