Smiley, Tavis

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Tavis Smiley

1964—

Radio, television commentator

In a preview to its 1994 list of fifty future American leaders, Time magazine observed, "As surely as there are forces organic to today's America that stifle leadership, there are forces within some Americans that cause them to lead nonetheless. Ambition plays a role, as does a desire to do good, but doggedness is essential, as is a sort of questioning curiosity." In the years since he was named to that list of emerging leaders, Tavis Smiley has lived up to that promise and then some. Smiley has emerged as one of the most active black presences in American media, with a resume that includes high-profile slots on television and radio, bestselling books, and his own publishing company.

Smiley has been running on a political fast track since he was in college, when he served as an intern for Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles. After graduating from Indiana University, he worked for three years as an administrative aide in the Bradley organization, hosted radio talk shows, served as a guest commentator on several network television shows, and created his own sixty-second syndicated radio commentary, The Smiley Report. He reached an even broader audience in 1996 with the publication of his liberal manifesto Hard Right: Straight Talk about the Wrongs of the Right, which was into its third printing a mere month after first hitting the bookstores.

The third of ten children, Smiley was born on September 13, 1964, in Gulfport, Mississippi, the son of Emory G. and Joyce M. Smiley. When he was two, his father, a non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Air Force, was transferred to Grissom Air Force Base in Bunker Hill, Indiana. After arriving in Indiana, the Smiley family took up residence in a crowded mobile home in Kokomo. Smiley observed in the introduction to Hard Left: Straight Talk about the Wrongs of the Right (1996) that "while we never had a lot of what we wanted, I can't say we ever went hungry, either." His father often worked several part-time jobs to support his large family, and Smiley wrote of him, "I've never known anyone with a stronger work ethic." Smiley's mother was an associate minister at their church, the New Bethel Tabernacle, which was part of the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. Smiley recalled for the Washington Post that he was in church every day when he was growing up.

Acutely aware that Indiana had once been home to the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan, Smiley nevertheless described his youth in Hard Left as "a typical midwestern small-town life." He was one of only a handful of African-American students in an otherwise all-white high school, but he did not allow this to become an obstacle. He was elected class president and voted "most likely to succeed." Smiley observed in Hard Left that "although I lived in a nearly all-White community, I never felt ‘less than’ simply because of the color of my skin. I learned that people of different races can and do get along. Which says to me that we don't have to buy this race-baiting, divide-and-conquer technique the radical Right is pushing."

Began Politics as a Teenager

Smiley's love for politics began at the age of thirteen, when he attended a campaign speech by the U.S. senator Birch Bayh at an American Legion hall. That night, he abandoned his dream of becoming a professional baseball player when he realized that politicians were in a unique position to motivate people and positively affect their lives. After graduation from high school, Smiley attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where he landed a spot on the debate team and became active in student government. He also got involved in local politics by working for Tomilea Allison, the mayor of Bloomington. Having achieved "everything I wanted to do in college except graduate" by the end of his junior year, Smiley told the Los Angeles Times that he considered dropping out. However, a friend persuaded him to stay in school and seek work as an intern. After repeated telephone calls and letters to the office of the Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, Smiley was eventually granted an internship.

After graduating from Indiana, Smiley worked for three years as an administrative aide in the Bradley camp. At the age of twenty-four, he was the youngest member of Mayor Bradley's executive staff. In 1991 Smiley left Bradley's staff to run for the Los Angeles city council. Running against the incumbent Ruth Galanter, Smiley finished a respectable fourth in a field of fifteen challengers.

With no clear plan for the future, his defeat forced him to reassess his interests and options. He wrote in Hard Left, "I realized I was most fulfilled when I was helping educate, empower, and encourage people who live in the indigenous community." Undeterred by his election loss, Smiley was already planning to run again in four years. To keep his name before the public and maintain a political image based on current issues, he decided to tackle talk radio. "It's a high-profile job that allows you to say whatever you want—and keep in constant contact with the public," he wrote in Hard Left.

At a Glance …

Born Tavis Smiley on September 13, 1964, in Gulfport, MS; son of Emory G. Smiley (a U.S. Air Force noncommissioned officer) and Joyce M. Smiley (an associate Pentecostal minister). Education: Indiana University, bachelor's degree, 1986.

Career: Assistant to Bloomington, IN, mayor Tomilea Allison, 1984-85; aide to Los Angeles City Council president Pat Russell, 1987; special assistant to the executive director of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Los Angeles, 1988; administrative aide to Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, 1988-90; The Smiley Report, radio/television commentator, 1990-2001; BET Tonight, commentator/host, 1996-2001; Tavis Smiley Foundation, founder, 1999; Tavis Smiley, host, 2004—; The Tavis Smiley Show, host, 2005—; Smiley-Books, publisher, 2007—.

Memberships: Los Angeles' Young Black Professionals, operations committee, chairman, 1988-90; United Way of Greater Los Angeles, steering committee, 1989-90; Inner City Foundation for Excellence in Education, advisory board, 1989-91; Challengers Boys and Girls Club, board of directors, 1989—; LA Black College Tour, board of directors, 1991—; Kappa Alpha Psi; Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonniolent Social Change, advisory board, 1992-93.

Awards: Time, List of Fifty Future Leaders, 1994; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Image Award, Best News, Talk, or Information Series, 1997-99, 2006; Time, Fifty Most Promising Young Leaders, 2004.

Addresses: Office—The Smiley Group, 4434 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90043.

Created His First Talk Radio Show

Smiley developed a sixty-second daily commentary called The Smiley Report, which dealt with various social and political issues of the day. He gradually obtained sponsors, and the African-American-owned radio station WGFJ in Los Angeles agreed to broadcast the commentary. The Smiley Report became an over-whelming success and was eventually syndicated in markets nationwide. As his reputation grew, Smiley received air time on larger Los Angeles radio stations as well as KABC-TV, Southern California's number-one news station. In 1993 Smiley published Just aThought: The Smiley Report, 1991-93, a compilation of his one-minute commentaries.

In 1994 Smiley was working as a commentator on KABC-AM's morning drive show, The Ken and Barkley Company, when he was asked to cohost an evening talk show on KMPC-AM with Ruben Navarrette. The show, Twentysomething Talk, was aimed at a younger "twentysomething" audience, a demographic group not widely targeted for talk radio. "We want to get young people thinking and talking," Smiley told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. "I think too often we go through life in our younger stages not thinking that social or political issues are going to impact us."

Smiley was included in Time's 1994 list of fifty future American leaders based on his record of "ambition, vision and community spirit." Time also praised Smiley as "a young black man unafraid to take on the white establishment," and noted his success in "engaging both blacks and whites on sensitive issues." Smiley wrote in his introduction to Hard Left that even though he was "humbled and honored" to have been so distinguished by Time, he noticed that most of the other political honorees were "from the Right." It spurred him to write Hard Left: Straight Talk about the Wrongs of the Right in 1996. "We'd better raise our voices quickly," Smiley wrote, "before the rhetoric from the Right overwhelms us all. It's not that the country has gone conservative, it's that those of us who are left of center have allowed the Right to take control of the dialogue." As a result, he argued, the Right has managed to promote the idea that it is the only group that believes in God and family. Smiley also discussed in Hard Left the political beliefs of the Left, the unrestrained bigotry of talk radio, and many other topics. Publishers Weekly called the book a "partisan, thoughtful political statement" and a "hard-hitting intellectual counterpunch that liberals will endorse."

Became Host for Nationally Syndicated Program

In the summer of 1996 President Bill Clinton introduced Smiley to Tom Joyner, the host of a nationally syndicated show on WABC Radio. Two months later, Smiley was doing commentaries for The Tom Joyner Morning Show. In the fall of 1996, he was selected for an on-air slot at Black Entertainment Television (BET) in Washington, D.C. Smiley's audition was so impressive that he was offered the job as host of BET Tonight even before the other applicants had a chance to interview. He soon began an exhausting bicoastal schedule that brought him home to south-central Los Angeles every week. In 1998 Smiley published On Air: The Best of Tavis Smiley on the Tom Joyner Morning Show: Thoughts on Culture, Politics, and Race, and he traveled overseas to cover President Clinton's trip to Africa in March of 1998.

As his media profile grew, Smiley became a much sought-after public speaker. In 1999 he established the Tavis Smiley Foundation, whose purpose was to encourage and empower youth and help them build leadership skills. Smiley parted ways with BET in 2001 after a falling out with the network, but later that year he landed a sweeping multimedia deal that included work for ABC News, ABC Radio Network, CNN, and National Public Radio (NPR). In 2004 Smiley became host of his own Public Broadcasting System talk show, the self-titled Tavis Smiley. Later that year he left NPR, announcing that he was doing so because of public radio's perceived lack of commitment to diversity in its programming. Smiley's absence from public radio was short-lived, however. In March of 2005 he announced a deal with NPR to air The Tavis Smiley Show, a two-hour talker that debuted in April. The following year, Third World Press published the Smiley-edited book The Covenant with Black America, a collection of essays by high-profile black scholars and professionals that rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Smiley was in the news again in 2007 when none of the leading Republican presidential candidates saw fit to participate in a presidential debate organized by Smiley. Later that year, he launched his own publishing company, SmileyBooks, whose initial list of authors included well-known African American writers such as Cornel West and the Reverend Iyanla Vanzant. In 2008 Smiley incurred the wrath of many of his long-standing audience members by making a series of critical remarks about the presidential candidate Barak Obama. He reacted to the negative response to his position on Obama by quitting his job as commentator on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. By that time, however, Joyner's show represented only a small piece of Smiley's burgeoning media empire, collectively called the Smiley Group. As of 2008 the Obama flap showed no sign of slowing down the communications force of nature that was Tavis Smiley.