There was a moment, back in 2016, during the 50th anniversary celebration of The Bar-Kays, the venerable Memphis singing group, when an interviewer, soliciting video comments at random from attendees at the event, happened upon Bernal Smith — man-about-town, civic luminary uber alles, and publisher of The New Tri-State Defender — and started pumping him for reactions.
What’s called for in such circumstances and what the lady with the mic got, for the most part that evening, were obligatory variations on the themes of great night, great group, great contributions to music, etc. But then she pressed Smith with one of those questions, meant innocently enough, that constitutes a put-up-or-shut-up moment and places the interviewee irrevocably on the spot.
“What’s your favorite song by the Bar-Kays?” she asked. The fact is that not one person in 50 could give an easy answer to such a question. The Bar-Kays had started out a half-century earlier as the house band at the then-fledgling Stax-Volt, playing behind such greats as Otis Redding. Most of their original members perished along with Redding in a plane crash in 1967 (see page 34). Re-formed by two surviving members, the Bar-Kays went on to a long and industrious history, experiencing one of those busy chronologies familiar to durable music groups.
A favorite song? The question’s degree-of-difficulty was palpable, and Smith’s first reaction was that of a Candid Camera victim. “Aw, you’re not going to do that to me, are you?” Such, however, was not the fate of Bernal Smith on that night in 2016. After a few seconds of hesitation, he not only answered the question with several possibilities, each corresponding to a different phase of the Bar-Kays’ lengthy existence, but he re-enacted each of them in sequence, complete with appropriate dance moves and lyrics crooned more or less on pitch. It was a tour de force of performance art and, simultaneously, a brief course in an important moment of Memphis history.
By the time Bernal Smith passed in late October at the age of 45 — like the original Bar-Kays, way, way before his time — he had himself become a part of Memphis history. A Rhodes graduate but a true son of the city’s coming-to-dominance African-American community, he moved as easily in one culture as the other and was often one of the few dependable bridges between the two. His Rhodes degree, coupled with a later master’s in business administration from Union University, allowed him the prospect of entry into Memphis’ hard-core but still overwhelmingly white business community. After operating a financial-services business of his own, he would go on to become an assets manager at the Bank of Bartlett and a vice president of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. But “making it” was not the be-all and end-all of Bernal’s heart’s desire. He meant to elevate not only himself but the people he sprang from, and, beyond even that, the city itself, the whole of it.
He was a prime mover in the re-creation of the Memphis Boys and Girls Clubs, an up-by-the-bootstraps complex of neighborhood organizations which Smith characterized with the Darwinian phrase “survival of the fittest.” Those clubs would produce a cadre of future community leaders who would be fit indeed. He continued in that vein as the president of 100 Black Men of Memphis, Inc., and ultimately, for the last four years, as the enterprising publisher of the Defender, which, through his aegis and for the first time in the history of that venerable news outlet for African Americans, became fully locally owned thereby. Smith launched crusades in his newspaper that will long survive him, such as a determined call for more black-owned businesses and initiatives on Beale Street, that end of the rainbow for so many authenticity-seeking tourists to Memphis.
His death occasioned not only an outpouring of grief but a general recognition, via a host of seriously proffered encomia from the city’s Who’s Who, among all parties that he was on a course that would eventually entitle him to membership in that group of Memphis pioneers who belong on the Mt. Rushmore of local memory, a leader who would become one of the logical answers to the red-carpet question of the future: Who really mattered here and made this city what it is?
Maybe he’s already one of those answers.