Irene Hill-Smith, 85; held national, N.J. NAACP posts

The year 1965 was remarkable for Irene Hill-Smith.

She spent 50 days in a South Jersey hospital after a car hit her as she was getting into a parked car.

Her first hospital stint ended March 31, but she was hospitalized for complications from the injury Aug. 17.

Despite all that, The Inquirer reported at the time, it was a year of accomplishments.

She was elected president of the New Jersey NAACP, one of the first women so elected across the nation. And at the 1965 national NAACP convention, she was named president of the organization's Northeastern region, covering Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and all of New England.

Ms. Hill-Smith, 85, a national vice president of the NAACP from 1967 to 1979, died Sunday, March 27.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and chief executive officer of the NAACP, issued a statement saying she "was on the front lines during the civil rights movement."

"She believed in making a difference in people's lives, and through her work she helped entire generations of African Americans. Her legacy will live on, and her efforts will be remembered."

Ms. Hill-Smith was president of the Gloucester County NAACP from 1957 to 1963 and president of its New Jersey State Conference from 1965 to 1984.

A spokesman for Rowan University said its predecessor, Glassboro State College, had awarded her an honorary doctorate in humanities in 1988.

In 1969, the New York Times reported how she had put her activism into her day job. Besides leading the state NAACP, the story reported, "she is also office manager of the New Jersey Tongers Cooperative Association, a black-owned and operated organization now harvesting and processing some of the Delaware Bay oysters that once made" Port Norris, N.J., famous.

(A tonger is a person who uses tongs to gather oysters.)

"Asserting that the cooperative was the only black operation of its kind on the Eastern Seaboard, Mrs. Smith declared: 'This is what I call black power in action. It's building an economic base for the people, and it's building hope for the people.' "

From its founding in 1965 to the 1969 story, the tongers association had received grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the New Jersey Department of Conservation and Economic Development, and the state Department of Community Affairs.

"For the first time in my 43 years," Ms. Hill-Smith told the reporter, "I have seen government for the people, by the people, and of the people in action."

And her activism crossed racial lines.

In 1968, The Inquirer reported that the New Jersey NAACP, under her leadership, "went to the aid of a group of white parents picketing the Whitehall Elementary School to protest the Monroe Township school board's refusal to bus their children."

Urging state officials to withhold subsidies to the school board, Mrs. Smith said it was unsafe for the children to walk to school along Black Horse Pike.

"All children involved are white," she said, but "the safety of children transcends racial lines and should involve all people."

More than a few of the 1960s Inquirer stories reported about the state NAACP's investigation of living conditions of migrant farmworkers in New Jersey.

And Ms. Hill-Smith was not reluctant to be arrested.

In 1968, the Philadelphia Daily News reported, she was arrested "on disorderly-person charges growing out of a camp-in she allegedly staged in the office of the vice principal of the Paulsboro High School."

She and other protesters had "demanded the reinstatement of a teacher who had been fired."

There were no other stories about how the arrest and the protest were resolved.

Even at an advanced age, Ms. Hill-Smith had not lost influence.

The national NAACP statement noted that "later in life, Hill-Smith served as chair of the Gloucester County Office for the Disabled."

A 2002 Inquirer report about the New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority stated that she was chairwoman of its South Jersey project committee.

She appeared to be wearing down.

A January 2010 report stated that she had missed 17 of 34 monthly meetings, but "several board members said she had been ill."

Born in Mullica Hill, she graduated from Glassboro High School and attended Virginia State College in Petersburg, Va.

The Edwards & Son Funeral Home stated that she is survived by a son, H. Michael; daughters S. Terri Smith-Little and Michelle Newton; seven grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and a great-great grandchild.

The 1965 Inquirer story stated that she was married to Howard Smith, a special-equipment operator for Texaco Oil Co.

Services took place Friday, April 1, at Second Baptist Church in Paulsboro.