Archie Smith, Jr. papers

1962 - 2013 [bulk 1978 - 2002]

Archie Smith, Jr. was born on August 4, 1939, and lived most of his childhood in a mixed-race neighborhood in Seattle. He received Master's degrees in Divinity (1964) and Sacred Theology (1966), an MSW (Social Welfare, 1973), and a Ph.D. (1973) all from Brandeis University. Smith became the first tenured track African-American faculty at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) in 1975. He was the James and Clarice Foster Professor of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling at PSR and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, until 2011. In 1964, Smith was ordained as a minister and worked in New York City. In 1966, he was appointed Minister-to-the-Community at the historic First Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts. This social gospel-oriented ministry enabled him to make connections between poverty conditions, individual experiences, and the workings of the larger society. Concerns with personal, inter-personal and systemic causes of poverty, oppression, and discrimination led Smith to study at Brandeis University. His Ph.D. dissertation was an analysis of drug use on College Campuses in a New England city during the early 1970s. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, his work and sabbaticals in London combined intercultural and interfaith issues with mental health practices and different family structures. He explored and developed methods for teaching and practicing therapy with a variety of families that took into account the interreligious and systemic difficulties they faced. Smith's first book, The Relational Self: Ethics and Therapy from a Black Church Perspective (1982), made important connections between ethics, social psychology, social science, and theology. He argued that care of persons and care of environments are interrelated. Therefore, churches were challenged to help change structures of discrimination and oppression in order to help individuals. Smith also addressed the Jonestown mass murders and suicides of 1978 in his writing. Smith's second book, Navigating the Deep River: Spirituality in African American Families (1997). The book established a systemic, cross-cultural, and historical approach to understanding African-American families in society. His third book, Tending the Flock: Congregations and Family Ministry (1998) was co-edited with K. Brynoll Lyon. The book was a series of case studies of different kinds of congregations—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; liberal and conservative—with family ministries in different parts of the United States. His fourth book, written with colleague Ursula Riedel-Pfafflin, was Siblings by Choice: Race, Gender, Violence (2004). This book explored case studies and pastoral care challenges across international and intercultural borders. Smith resigned from the PSR faculty in 2011 due to longstanding concerns about racial discrimination and failing academic standards within the institution. His teaching, religious leadership, and mental health practice continue to this day.