Chip Smith has been active in anti-war, labor and community movements for more than 40 years. As a volunteer in Laos from 1964-'66 he gained a first-hand understanding of U.S. intervention gone wrong -- and then worked to end the war in Vietnam. Influenced by the Black Panther Party and Students for a Democratic Society, Smith left medical school in 1969 to better ground himself in the social movements. He worked as a hospital lab tech and then ran a metal lathe for ten years -- serving as a departmental steward and representative to the Philadelphia Central Labor Council for his local of the International Association of Machinists.

Smith was the main care provider for his two sons while his wife, Kim Eng Koo M.D., trained to become a neurosurgeon. He also began pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at this time, authoring a dissertation (Temple University, 1994) on the impact of Philadelphia's de-industrialization on low wages, African Americans and unionization. A long-time advocate of community-labor alliances, Smith drew on his decades of activism in 1999 to staff the start-up of Philadelphia's Jobs with Justice coalition.

After moving to Fayetteville, N.C. with his wife of 30 years, Smith co-initiated the formation of Fayetteville Peace with Justice in the fall of 2001. He holds a third-degree black belt in Shotokan Karate and assists his wife in running their twice-weekly karate club at the YMCA. Smith practices a secular form of Zen Buddhism and attends from time to time a sangha in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.

About the White Privilege Working Group, which assisted Chip Smith:

Michelle Foy was introduced to organizing as a student at the University of Colorado during the 1994 struggle to create an Ethnic Studies Department. With Critical Resistance she worked to defeat Proposition 21, California's youth criminalization initiative, and helped found the California Prison Moratorium Project. Currently she is the coordinator of the Bay Area Center for Political Education.
 

Badili Jones was a founding member of In the Life Atlanta, the largest Black LGBTQ pride celebration in the U.S. He joined the black liberation movement as a 14-year old in Newark, New Jersey - and has written about and fought against racial privilege, patriarchy, and class oppression from an intersectional standpoint ever since. He is currently a core team member of Queer Progressive Agenda.

Elly Leary served as national co-chair of the New Directions Movement - a caucus in the United Auto Workers - and has written about the U.S. workers' movement for Monthly Review and other publications. As a worker, rank and file organizer, union officer, and labor educator, she has struggled against white supremacy in U.S. labor unions for 35 years.

Joe Navarro, a teacher, writer, and community activist, recently earned a Masters degree in Mexican American Studies at San Jose State University - researching racist educational practices in California's public schools. Active in the Chicano movement since the late 1960s, he is the author of seven chapbooks of poetry - including Ambidextrous In Two Languages - and is also a member of Apoyo Tarahumara.

Juliet Ucelli, a New York City public school social worker, helped initiate Italian Americans for a Multicultural U.S. (IAMUS) - an organization that joined native peoples and others in opposing the 1992 Columbus commemorations. She has written on Eurocentrism, school reform, and Italian-American identity and is a co-founder of the New York Marxist School.

Art and graphic design

Malcolm Goff is a painter, printmaker, and graphic designer, who combines abstraction, African motifs, and social realism in his art. Goff's work appears in numerous private and corporate collections - and his murals, in the halls and on the walls of public buildings in the South. He teaches art in the public schools of Durham, NC.

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