"Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was.""Even during my youth, I can recall very few black people living on any kind of public assistance. People were working, doing some kind of job that was useful to the community.""I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.""Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.""One of the prices that we pay for integration was the disintegration of the black community.""People should have the choice to be able to live where they want to live, go to school where they want to go to school, marry whoever they want to marry regardless of what their complexion is and so forth.""Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects.""So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.""The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress.""The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges.""There's a way in which you can look at clothing as your outer skin. And because you were discriminated against because of your complexion, the way in which you could overcome that was through the way in which you presented yourself with your clothing.""What is wrong with George Bush? What is his problem?""When you say that you are a race man, it means that you embrace the entire black community regardless of the hue, whether somebody is very light and could pass for possibly white or someone is very dark.""When you were growing up in the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s, all black people at least in the Washington, D.C., area were required to live among themselves."
He is the son of the novelist Jonathan Smith. He was educated at Tonbridge School (where he was in the dayboy house Welldon House) and he read History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he obtained a double first, despite devoting much of his time to cricket. He made a century on his first-class debut in 1996, for Cambridge University.
Smith has played three home Test matches for England versus South Africa in 2003. He made 64 on debut, but put together 23 runs in his next four innings, and was dropped for the subsequent tour of the subcontinent.
Smith is a tall right-handed batsman with a penchant for the drive and has represented England, Cambridge University, Kent and Middlesex.
During thirteen seasons of first-class cricket, he has scored 34 centuries. He hit a peak in 2003, when he had a Bradmanesque July for Kent: 135, 0, 122, 149, 113, 203, 36, 108, 32. He averaged 72.99 for the 2003 first-class season when he was selected for England.
He left his native county following the 2004 season and joined Middlesex for 2005. He captained the county for two seasons during 2007 and 2008. After missing most of the 2008 season due to an ankle injury, Smith announced his retirement later that year.
Smith has written a book titled Playing Hard Ball which describes his interest in the game, psychology, history and mythology of American baseball and compares it to cricket. His diary of the eventful 2003 season, On and Off the Field was highly praised, and shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and The Cricket Society Book of the Year Award in 2004. He has also contributed cricket book reviews for the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack and history book reviews for the Sunday Telegraph. His most recent book, published in May 2008, is titled What Sport Tells Us About Life, a discussion of the role of sport in society, and its moral and ethical lessons.
