The tragic, painful death of legendary anti-war and community activist Damu Smith is compounded by the likelihood that his early demise from colon cancer was preventable.
Smith, a St. Louis native, said he was inspired to become an activist at age 17 at a Black Solidarity Day rally after speeches by poet/activist Amiri Baraka, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Julian Bond, Nina Simone and Jesse Jackson during a visit with his high school class to a racially tense Cairo, Illinois. He later changed his name to Damu Amiri Imani Smith, which in Swahili means “blood, leadership and strength.”
Smith was deservedly respected, even revered, by those who knew him and his self-sacrificing work. He touched the lives of many and his life will continue to inspire.
Smith succumbed to colorectal cancer, the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. African Americans have the highest rates of sporadic colorectal cancer in this country, and African-American women are the most likely of their gender to die from this cancer. African-American men are even more likely to die from this malady than African-American women.
Yet regular screening of adults over 50 years can reduce deaths by detecting and removing pre-cancerous colorectal polyps or growths, as well as detecting and treating cancer found in its early stages. Importantly, colorectal cancer can be prevented by removing pre-cancerous polyps found in the colon before invasive cancer can develop.
Smith’s risk factors included his age and his father’s death from colon cancer in 1989 at the age of 53, as well as his paternal grandmother, who had been stricken with colon cancer.
However, Smith, like millions of others in the country, had no health insurance. He was without health care coverage for the last four years of his life. Although he was very health-conscious, Smith didn’t make seeing his doctor a high priority. He may not have been aware of the absolute necessity for an African-American male of his age with a family predisposition to colon cancer to have regular screenings. The American College of Gastroenterology has issued guidelines urging African Americans to be screened for colon cancer beginning at age 45 – five years earlier that others.
The death of this impassioned human rights activist should serve as a reminder of the importance of community-based education and health promotion. Colorectal cancer screening should be encouraged and made more widely available and accessible. Damu Smith’s untimely death is a great loss, but it would be honored by efforts to achieve this goal.