It was not a story Wayman F. Smith III told of himself, but his sister, the former news anchor Robin Smith, tells it. Each time she tells this story, she weeps.
One day her parents told her that her brother was leaving the house and she should go tell him that she loved him and tell him everything else that she had to tell him.
Her brother was carrying his things to his car, but he came back to his little sister, 15 years younger than the young man. She told him that she loved him and that she hoped he would come back and play with her and her dolls. She was 4 years old.
When her brother drove away, her parents, Wayman F. Smith Jr. and Edythe Meaux Smith, embraced in a burst of emotion. Later, their daughter would understand why. At that time, the Ku Klux Klan was killing people who drove South to register Black voters, as this young Black man from North St. Louis was doing that day.
“He was willing to risk his life and they were willing to risk their first-born to make sure people registered to vote,” Robin said. “That shows what commitment to civil rights they had. You can’t be willing to stand up unless you’re willing to die for it.”
Wayman F. Smith III would live to risk his life and career for his people many more times after that fateful morning. He passed September 15, 2020, at the age of 80.
“He was a very brilliant man, a great warrior, a great leader and politician,” said Byron Glore, who grew up with Wayman as boys and later worked with him at Anheuser-Busch. “He taught a lot of the young Black politicians in St. Louis how to gain control of their destiny, and he showed them how to implement policies that affected their constituencies.”
Wayman and Glore helped the beermaker, then headquartered in St. Louis, to raise $165 million for the United Negro College Fund. As vice president of A-B’s Corporate Affairs Department, Wayman founded a Minority Purchasing Program Initiative valued at $200 million. He directed support of minority-owned media including minority-owned magazines, newspapers, television stations, radio stations and events across the nation including the Essence Jazz Festival, the Budweiser Superfest, The Gateway Classic and the Lou Rawls Parade of Stars.
Wayman also initiated the first major corporate sponsorship of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. State Celebration Commission of Missouri. Serving on the executive board of the Congressional Black Caucus, he was instrumental in raising the funds that helped to make the caucus a political powerhouse.
“He helped raise the millions of dollars that supported the foundation’s important projects that helped Black members of Congress establish, broaden, and elevate the influence of African Americans in national and local political, legislative and public policy arenas,” said retired Congressman Bill Clay.
Wayman helped to found the most successful African-American giving initiative at any United Way agency in the country. Victor Julien, who worked alongside Wayman in A-B’s philanthropic efforts, was there at its inception along with Donald M. Suggs, publisher of The St. Louis American, and Charmaine Chapman, who would become the namesake of the initiative.
“He was the first chairman of the Charmaine Chapman Society for the United Way of Greater St. Louis,” Julien said. “That spread to other United Ways around the country. That was the forerunner for an African-American giving initiative that has since gone national, and Wayman should be given a lot of credit for that.”
Wayman’s leverage of philanthropy to benefit the Black community was exemplary, both nationally and locally.
“Wayman Smith not only leveraged his broad corporate, political and civic influence to benefit the Black community,” Suggs said, “but he also encouraged fellow African-American leaders to engage in philanthropic efforts and activities.”
Wayman became synonymous with corporate support for Black communities.
“You could argue that Wayman was to Corporate Affairs what Louis Armstrong was to jazz,” said Mike Jones, who served with Wayman on the St. Louis Board of Aldermen and was one of many Black politicians influenced by him. “He may not have invented it, but you can’t talk about it without calling his name.”
At no Black institution was his influence more transformative than at Harris-Stowe State University, where he served on the Board of Regents for 21 years (1989-2010) and chaired it for 12 of those years. Wayman’s service to Harris-Stowe was quite personal; when he was a boy, Harris was a teachers’ college for white students and Stowe was a teachers’ college for Black students. All four of Wayman’s maternal aunts and his beloved cousin Marion Meaux “Snookie” Robinson all earned their college degrees from Stowe Teachers College.
During Wayman’s tenure as chairman of Harris-Stowe, according to Dr. Henry Givens Jr., the university’s president emeritus, “the college expanded from one building and one degree to a status of university with six buildings, a new business school campus in South St. Louis, 14 degree programs, with doubled full-time faculty and tripled student enrollment.” He helped to raise $345 million for the university and was one of the founding members of Harris-Stowe’s African American Business Leadership Council, chaired by David Steward.
Wayman also served as a member of the Board of Directors of his alma mater Howard University from 1989 until the end of his life, chairing the board from 1991-1995. His dear friend Earl Graves Sr. partnered with Wayman’s daughter Kymberly Smith Jackson and his sister Robin and raised $250,000 to create The Wayman F. Smith III Scholarship Foundation. The foundation, which continues to be managed by his daughter, works closely with Howard University and the St. Louis Chapter of the Howard Alumni Association to provide scholarships for students of Howard and Harris-Stowe universities.
Between his efforts to fund the UNCF, his foundation, Harris-Stowe and Howard, Wayman was a one-man endowment for Black institutions of higher learning.
“If you went to an HBCU or UNCF college in the 1980s and 1990s, chances are Wayman Smith had something to do with your education,” said Johnny Furr Jr., who succeeded Wayman in corporate leadership at A-B. “He’s helped so many people that they don’t even know that they’ve been helped by him.”
His support for Black education was somewhat ironic, given his pioneer status as a student desegregating schools. Wayman became one of the first students included in the St. Louis Public School system’s effort to desegregate (even before Brown v. Board of Education). As part of that plan, Wayman transferred to and graduated from then all-white Soldan High School. He finished his undergraduate work at Monmouth College in West Long Branch, New Jersey, where he again faced the challenges of integrating a predominately white school.
However, when Wayman joined the Howard Law School Class of 1965 – a graduating class of 10 – his future and the fate of thousands of Black college students not yet born was set in motion.
Wayman’s commitment to civil rights deepened during his time in Washington, D.C. He attended the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. and volunteered with the St. Louis Chapter of the NAACP under the leadership of Pearlie Evans, which led him to take that trip down South that his sister still remembers with tears.
Wayman returned to Missouri to work on housing legislation for the Missouri Commission on Human Rights in Jefferson City in 1966. This legislation was successful in designating the real estate office as a place of public accommodation. In 1968, following the death of his father, Wayman moved back to St. Louis to support his mother and to make sure that his younger siblings pursued post-secondary education and later to support their professional goals. He would be Robin’s first agent in the broadcast media business.
Wayman was invited to partner with iconic civil rights attorney Margaret Bush Wilson; they remained law partners until he joined the executive staff of A-B in 1980. During their partnership, he served as a municipal judge in St. Louis from 1970-1975. He was still Wilson’s law partner in 1975 when he was first elected 26th Ward alderman and he would serve on the St. Louis Board of Aldermen until 1987, including a stint as president of its Black Caucus.
A number of people who would become St. Louis political legends in their own right were schooled by Wayman while serving alongside him on the Board of Aldermen.
Virvus Jones – who had been Wayman’s client as a Vietnam War protestor and would become St. Louis’ most transformative comptroller – said Wayman’s influence was definitive. “He was a mentor to most of the young Black aldermen,” Jones said. “He helped us develop, for the first time on the board, a strategy to get things done.”
Jones was amazed that, even as Wayman continued to serve on the board while working for a local corporate giant, he maintained his independence. “August Busch never told him how to vote,” Jones said. “He recognized that Wayman would lose his value in both of his roles if he was just seen as doing whatever August Busch told him to do.”
After he left the board, Wayman was appointed to the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners by Governor Mel Carnahan, serving for four years, including a term as board president.
Wayman’s impact on Black communities spanned from street outreach registering voters to transformative C-suite philanthropy as one of the first homegrown Black corporate executives in St. Louis – and just about every point in between.
“I think about all the careers he had,” said Furr. “He was a lawyer, he was an alderman, he was a judge, he was a corporate executive.”
And, he was a father – a single father, when that was a rarity – and the single father of a girl, at that.
“Not everyone was kind to either of us because of that,” said his only child, Kymberly Smith Jackson, now an attorney and college professor. “It’s not like there weren’t whisperings; this was not usual. For a young lady to be alone with her dad, that was definitely not what he signed up for. He definitely expected there to be a traditional mom who raised the kids. I’m sure he was terrified, but he was always there for me.”
Jackson remembered how her father shrugged off adversity and ill will. “He had this quote that he got from his dad,” she said: “‘Ain’t nothing but a step for a stepper.’”
The calm that hid the fear and provided a safe space for a young girl growing up alone with her father defined the man in his public life as well.
“Wayman was easily the most even-tempered person I’ve ever met, especially in politics,” Mike Jones said. “No matter what the situation, he was always – and I mean always – under control emotionally. His patience was like watching a great apex predator, one of the big cats. He never moved or struck till he was ready and had the optimum position possible.”
He fought, not to hurt others, but to defend and advance his own people and the downtrodden.
“I remember Wayman Smith as a guardian and protector of the rights of the poor and the oppressed,” Bill Clay said. “He especially devoted time to promoting the just causes of minorities, women, and lowly paid workers.”
“He was a giant and a renaissance man beyond compare – especially to the people of St. Louis,” Victor Julien said. “They never saw anything like that before.”
“Wayman’s legacy is like a giant iceberg,” Mike Jones said. “No matter how much you’re looking at, most of the iceberg is below the surface.”