Smith was first a laborer (porter), then waiter in a local hotel. He left to live in Panama, where he worked as hotel steward and salesman: he first experienced Jim Crow conditions. At the end of World War I, he left to live in Cuba as a migrant laborer. He left Cuba for Mobile, Alabama, as a sailor. He worked for two decades as a ship's steward.[1][2][6]
Smith supported non-discrimination. He pushed through a non-discrimination plank in the NMU constitution. In 1944, he had a non-discrimination pledge added to contracts with more than 100 ship companies. He supported civil rights more broadly by partaking in the National Negro Congress and Negro Labor Victory Committee.[1][2]
In 1943, during a race riot in Harlem, local and federal officials asked Smith to come help ease tensions. He was also involved with maritime unions in the Caribbean and South Atlantic.[6]
Also in 1944, it became public knowledge that Smith had British, not American citizenship.
In 1945, he resigned as vice president left the country. He soon re-entered as a legal immigrant and became NMU secretary In 1948, the NMU expelled Smith, Paul Palazzi, and Howard McKenzie for mis-use of union funds.[5] Also 1945, the NMU gave more money than any other union for the re-election of Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. for New York City Council.[2]
Deportation
In early 1948, NMU president Joe Curran bowed to pressure and fired known communists from the NMU, including Smith.[1]
In April 1948, Pete Seeger partook in a benefit concert for Smith's defense. By that time, according to congressional hearings in 1955, Smith was no longer vice president.[3][10][11]
On May 5, 1948, Pressman and Forer received a preliminary injunction so their defendants might have hearings with examiners unconnected with the investigations and prosecutions by examiners of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.[12] (All attorneys were members of the National Lawyers Guild.)
Last years
Smith was deported. He went to live in Vienna, Austria, where he worked for the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU).[1][6] In 1951 (or 1952), Smith found himself deported to Jamaica.[5][6] He remained involved in union activism by organized sugar works and leading a union federation until his death in 1961.[1][2]
Through his position at the NMU, he [Francis Smith] gave money and spoke out on many issues: the racist hiring practices of New York City employers, the election of the black Communist Ben Davis to the NYC city council, the effort to oust notoriously racist senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, etc. Other struggles were anticolonial--as when he pushed for the independence of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, India, South Africa, and Ghana. In 1944, Smith was one of the most prominent labor or black leaders campaigning for Franklin Delano Roosevelt until being "red-baited." Smith embodied the ideal of the sailor as a working-class intellectual and cosmopolitan internationalist.[6]