Barbara Smith, born on November 16, 1946, in Cleveland, Ohio, is an alumna of Mount Holyoke College, graduating in the spring of 1969. Smith was raised in a womanful household with her grandmother, two aunts, and her twin sister, Beverly. Her family had migrated to Ohio from Georgia. Unfortunately, the untimely demise of her mother, Hilda Beall Smith, occurred when the sisters were just nine years old. Education was a priority in the household, as their mother was a college graduate of Fort Valley State University in Georgia. The passing of their mother at such a young age had a profound impact on Smith’s life, but her mother’s academic achievements, along with the encouragement and support of her Aunt LaRue, galvanized both sisters to attend college.
Barbara and Beverly Smith attended John Adams Senior High School in Cleveland, Ohio. As a result of school overcrowding and the normalized practice of mid-year graduations, they graduated in January 1965. Before starting college in the fall, Smith and her sister held jobs with the Ohio Bell telephone company as information operators and volunteered with the Cleveland chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, providing clerical work toward school desegregation and conducting fieldwork assessing public housing adequacies via surveying.
Because of their academic success in high school, Smith and her sister Beverly were inaugural recipients of National Achievement Scholarships administered by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. This scholarship was initiated specifically to identify promising Black American youth and encourage their pursuit of higher education. Smith entered Mount Holyoke College when women were excluded from admittance to Ivy League institutions. Like many prospective students at this time, Smith did not travel to the East Coast to visit potential colleges. It was through attending a holiday season tea with local Seven Sisters alumnae chapters that Smith decided Mount Holyoke was “the nicest.”