To many at his alma mater, Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., he is known simply as “Gabe.”

But at the June 6, 2021 commencement ceremony for the oldest boys’ school in the nation’s capital coinciding with the bicentennial of its founding in 1821, he was officially recognized as Dr. John Gabriel Smith, as the school presented an honorary doctor of humane letters degree to that member of its class of 1954 who has the distinction of being its first African American graduate.

Jesuit Father Stephen Planning, Gonzaga’s outgoing president, read the citation for Smith’s honorary doctorate, saying, “An inspiration to all Gonzaga students, he has been a particular source of motivation and pride for the legions of African American Gonzaga students, for it is upon his shoulders many hundreds have stood while following a path he so courageously paved for them.”

Gonzaga was founded as the Washington Seminary that was then part of Georgetown College and separated from the college in 1858, when it was reincorporated by an act of Congress. Gonzaga stopped awarding college degrees around 1900, focusing on its high school program, but that act of Congress chartering it as a college gave it the authority to bestow the honorary degree.

On the commencement day, the honoree posed outside for a photograph at a portal, a gateway to Gonzaga’s football field that was dedicated and named in his honor in 2017, and he stood beside Father Planning and Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the speaker at Gonzaga’s commencement who himself was a trailblazer, having been elevated by Pope Francis to the College of Cardinals in the fall of 2020, becoming the first African American cardinal in the history of the Catholic Church.

The man standing right beneath the portal with the updated wording “Dr. Gabe Smith 1954” has himself been a gateway at Gonzaga. Since he graduated, 1,217 African American young men have followed him as graduates of the Catholic high school.

After graduating from Gonzaga, Smith studied pharmacy and graduated from Howard University in 1959, and began a long career as a pharmacist. Now retired, he lives with his family in Fort Washington, Maryland. He married his wife Jeanette in 1968 and they had five children.

In a Catholic Standard interview, Smith – who is 84 – reacted to his honor with the humility he is known for, and he reflected on his unlikely journey to Gonzaga and the impact his education there has had on his life.

“When Father Planning told me that they were going to give me a doctorate, it almost knocked me out of my seat,” Smith said. “…All I could say was thank you to the Lord!”

He added, “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this doctorate. I tell you, a couple people called me ‘doctor’ the other day, and I just walked by like I didn’t hear them, (like) what are you talking about?” he said, laughing. “But it’s such a great honor. I have so much to be thankful to Gonzaga for.”

The native of Hermanville in Southern Maryland grew up as a member of St. Peter Claver Parish in Ridge, the son of Benedict and Marie Smith, with two brothers and three sisters. His father worked in maintenance at the Patuxent Naval Air Station and farmed.

Remembering the entrenched racism and segregation then in St. Mary’s County, Smith said, “Growing up in St. Mary’s County was almost like growing up in Mississippi. There was a lot of racism, and after a while, you get to the point where you expect to be excluded from things, or not included in things… I don’t know if we experienced any more segregation or exclusiveness than anyone else, but it was almost like, okay, you can go here but you can’t go here, and it was a horrible way of living as far as I was concerned. You stick to your group, the people in your community and what not. In other words, you didn’t have the liberty to go and do the things that you wanted to do. The movie theaters were segregated, you’d go in one part, and the other people would go in the other. It almost gets to the point where you expect this.”

As a student at St. Peter Claver School, Gabe Smith was inspired by the example of the white Jesuit priest serving as the pastor at that African American parish, Father Horace McKenna. Later in Washington, Father McKenna became well-known as a priest for the poor, as a founder of the SOME (So Others Might Eat) soup kitchen and its outreach to the homeless and poor. 

“Father McKenna was absolutely fantastic,” he said. “The things you read in the Bible, you could almost see them in him. He always treated everyone like a child of God, and they deserved respect and dignity.” 

Then came a pivotal moment for Smith’s life.

“I got to know Father McKenna very well,” he said “I served Mass for Father McKenna for the eight years I was in elementary school, and I always thought, wow, the way he lived is the way I would like to live, so one day after Mass, I asked him, I said, ‘Father McKenna, is it possible that I could become a Jesuit?’ And Father McKenna said, ‘Sure, Gabe, but you need a good Latin background.’ I guess he saw the look on my face, and he said, ‘Look, I know exactly where you can get that type of background. There’s a school in Washington, D.C., called Gonzaga College High School, and you can really get that background there.’”

Smith said he was astonished at the priest’s suggestion, because the family lived about 75 miles from Washington. But Father McKenna and Smith’s father came up with a solution – the student would stay with his older sister and her husband, who lived a few blocks from Gonzaga.

Meanwhile, changes had been underway in the Archdiocese of Washington. After accepting the shepherd’s staff as the first resident archbishop of Washington in January 1948, then-Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle began his pioneering work of integrating local Catholic parishes and schools. Archbishop O’Boyle would later offer the invocation at the March on Washington in 1963, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Smith, who entered Gonzaga in 1950, said, “There were two guys ahead of me who never finished. I was the first (Black student) to graduate.”

The citation for Smith’s honorary doctorate noted what happened when Smith entered his new school: “At Gonzaga, the young man discovered a new world where no one else looked like him. He would discover, too, that at Gonzaga he did not stand alone.”

In a 2019 talk to Gonzaga’s Fathers’ Club, Smith noted, “The atmosphere inside of Gonzaga really changed my perception about race. At Gonzaga instead of being excluded from everything, I seemed to be included in everything.”

Elaborating on those experiences, Smith told the Catholic Standard that, “The first day of school, I walked in, and all I saw were white faces, and I said, ‘Wait a minute, Father McKenna didn’t tell me that this was an all-white school.’”

But he remembered the priest’s respect for all people, and thought that wouldn’t be important for the priest to bring up to him.

Smith added, “Getting to Gonzaga and seeing all these white faces, I said, “Wait a minute, I’ve got to go through this again.’ But something happened. I learned the difference between love and hate, because at Gonzaga, there was a lot of love there. When we would go out to play, the guys would say, ‘Come on Gabe, you’re on this team.’ And I went to the cafeteria, and rather than sitting at a table all by myself, the table was full… Really, the guys treated me like you’re just another student, no big thing about you… That’s one of the things that began my love for Gonzaga, was that I wasn’t singled out as ‘hey, this guy’s different. We need to treat him a different way.’ Nuh-uh. I was just another student, and I really liked it that way.”

At Gonzaga, Smith played on the junior varsity football team and participated in the speech and debate club.

At the school, he would also grow to admire Coach Joe Kozik, one of the most beloved figures in Gonzaga’s history, who over his 50-year career served as athletic director, coached football, baseball and basketball, and taught history, biology, religion and physical education. In the early 1950s, Kozik fielded D.C.’s first integrated football team, and when local segregated schools refused to play his Gonzaga team, he scheduled games against integrated teams in Pennsylvania.

Remembering Coach Kozik, Smith said, “Joe treated everybody the same. Joe told it like it was… Joe would ask me to come up to his office sometime and talk to him, and I did, I went up to his office. We would sit around and talk, because where we trained in football, his office was right in the building down there.

“Then one day, I went into his office and I saw the football schedule on his desk, and I said, ‘Mr. Kozik, why are we playing all these teams out of town?’ And I said, ‘Where are all of the teams that we usually play?’ And he got up out of his seat, came around the desk and put his arm around my shoulder, and he says, ‘Gabe, we start football practice the latter part of August. I want you at those practices. And if you make this team, you’re going to play football for Gonzaga.’”

Eventually, Smith understood what was happening with Gonzaga’s out-of-town football schedule for that season. “The thing that hit me when I found out about this football situation was that these schools didn’t want to play Gonzaga if they thought that I was going to be on the team. Rather than capitulate to what they wanted, Gonzaga said, ‘We don’t think it’s right. If you don’t want to play us, forget it. We will play some other team. But we’re not going to do wrong just because you tell us to do wrong.’ That really resonated with me.”

Smith said Gonzaga’s principled stand about integrating its team despite opposition from other schools reminded him of something that his father had emphasized to him, “Don’t ever let someone else tell you to do something you know is wrong.” He added, “This is what my dad told me a long time ago, and here they are doing it, showing me it’s the right thing to do. Man, I really loved Gonzaga after that.”

As it turned out, Smith injured his knee in practice and didn’t get to play varsity football after all, but his participation in the program and his role in integrating its team later led him to being named to Gonzaga’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

Asked about his graduation from Gonzaga in 1954, Smith said, “When we graduated, the racial overtones had sort of settled to such a point that I just felt that I’m just another one of the students. Nothing crossed my mind that you’re the first Afro-American to graduate from Gonzaga. I was just another student that graduated. So it really didn’t come into my mind that hey, you’re doing something that no one else has done.” But he said later he came to realize, “This is really something I should be proud of.”

Reflecting on how the school impacted his life in college, and later as a father and husband, as a pharmacist and community member, he said, “Gonzaga not only gave me a great education, but it gave me a lot of good life principles to live by… The biggest life principle that I learned from Gonzaga was don’t let anyone else change your course (and) tell you to do something that you know is wrong. You do what you know is right.”

Over the years, Smith has said that God has put “angels” in his life, like Father McKenna and Coach Kozik. 

“In my heart, Father McKenna was the closest thing I think to a saint on Earth that I will ever see. And that’s not because of getting me into Gonzaga. If you could have seen him at the parish down at St. Peter Claver, if you could have seen him react to the people down there and how much they loved him,  and how much he would go to almost any expense to do things for those people. All I have is love for him,” Smith said. “And for Joe Kozik, oh my! Joe was such an inspiration to me.” 

Smith noted how the Bible emphasizes that “God has a plan for your life… I think it was all in His plan that I meet Father McKenna, that I meet Coach Kozik, because each one of them brought something into my life that I needed to carry on through my life.”

Gonzaga’s pioneer African American graduate believes that God used him and Gonzaga “to bring about His purpose.” The member of Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Maryland, continues to lean on his Christian faith. He added, “I thank God for everything that’s happened to me.” Reflecting on his lifetime of blessings, Smith said, “It all comes from God.”

The year 1954 when Gabe Smith graduated from Gonzaga was also the year that the Supreme Court in its Brown v. Board of Education decision declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

“That might be what some people call one of those coincidences.  I think the timing that came out was right on time, because when I got here, Archbishop O’Boyle had just declared that the churches and schools in the archdiocese would be desegregated,” said Smith, who added, “God’s time is not our time, and He makes things happen just at the right time.”

Asked what his advice would be for the African American graduates at Gonzaga who have followed his path, Smith said, “I would tell them to stay true to the principles of the school… The life principles that this school has taught are something that every young man should have. If they stay true to Gonzaga, their life will be pretty good.”

Addressing the division and racial tensions that remain in this country, he said, “I think one of the main things is for white and Black students or people to have integrity. Know what’s right, and have the courage to do it.”

Gabe Smith has been recognized at Gonzaga with an honorary doctorate and a portal named for him, and a special display in the school’s Ruesch Hall includes an enlarged senior year portrait of him wearing a bow tie and white jacket, a purple T-shirt labeled “Gabe 54,” and photos of him with Gonzaga students and staff members along with the program from the portal’s dedication ceremony in 2017.

That year, Maryland Senator Ben Cardin offered a tribute to Smith that was recorded in the Congressional Record, saying, “John Gabriel Smith was the first of over 1,100 African American students to graduate from Gonzaga College High School so far. He will leave an outstanding legacy for the State of Maryland, the halls of Gonzaga and for the United States as an example of what happens when we seek inclusion and love for humanity. He shows us that living by faith and love, everyone can succeed.”

As for what he hopes his legacy will be at Gonzaga, Smith said, “That’s something God will take care (of). God will leave my legacy the way he wants it… the plan that God has for your life is what’s important… I’m just happy that I was able to help somebody and to help these students get a good education. I don’t need any accolades hung over me. I’m just a regular person like anyone else who feels that as a person, as a human being in this world, I deserve no more respect or dignity than anyone else.”