Bob Smith, Executive director of Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council. Photo: Urban News

For more than 26 years Robert G. (Bob) Smith has been Executive Director of Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council.

By Johnnie Grant

Smith, a native Ashevillian, is a graduate of Western Carolina University with a bachelor’s degree in Social Work and a minor in sociology and psychology. As both a community leader and an activist, he has served on numerous national, state, and local boards, including the National Association of Human Rights Workers, the State of North Carolina Association of Human Rights Workers, The Mediation Center, Helpmate, WCCJ, United Way, NAACP, WRES Radio, and Habitat for Humanity.

Last month Smith was awarded the 2010 Evan Mahaney Champion of Civil Liberties Award in recognition of decades of work as an effective, though always humble, volunteer for the causes of civil liberties and civil rights. Among the recent efforts for which he was honored was his support for two important causes pressed by the local chapter of the ACLU: the historic NC Racial Justice Act, signed into law by Governor Perdue last August and the Civil Liberties Resolution first drafted by the local ACLU chapter, supported by several other local organizations, and now being advanced by Asheville City Council member Cecil Bothwell.

The NC Racial Justice Act was developed in response to decades of unbalanced application of the death penalty; the law allows defendants awaiting trial and convicted inmates already on death row to use statistical studies to raise claims—which prosecutors have the right to rebut—of racial bias in a prosecutor’s use of the death penalty. If proven, a judge could overturn the death sentence or prevent prosecutors from seeking the death penalty.

About the Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council

Following more than a decade of racial turmoil in the 1950s and ’60s, a group of African American ministers formed a Human Relations Council comprising volunteers in the community. City and county elected officials, recognizing the need to improve race relations, engaged the Chamber of Commerce, local industry leaders, school officials, to work together to alleviate racial tensions.
In 1968 the Buncombe County Planning Council created the position of Human Relations Coordinator to help bridge the gap between blacks and whites in the community. Asheville was the second city in North Carolina to employ a full-time Human Relations Coordinator. In these early years, its primary focus was on the tension resulting from school desegregation laws.

About the Evan Mahaney Award

The Evan Mahaney Champion of Civil Liberties Award is named for the late Evan Mahaney, past president of the WNC chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Before his retirement and subsequent move to Asheville, Mahaney was a print and broadcast journalist and a crusader for human rights and civil liberties. Mahaney was active on both the state and WNC regional ACLU chapter boards before his death in 2004.