Smith, B. (Barbara Elaine)

Impact on the world

Became the second Black model to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle magazine in July 1976 during a successful career with the Wilhelmina modeling agency, before opening her self-named restaurant in Manhattan's theater district in 1986, eventually building a lifestyle brand spanning three restaurants, a nationally syndicated television show, a magazine, and a home goods collection with Bed Bath & Beyond that became the first such retail line created by a Black woman; diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2013 after becoming visibly confused during a live cooking demonstration on 'The Today Show,' she and her husband publicly disclosed the diagnosis in 2014 and co-authored the 2016 book 'Before I Forget,' deliberately working to destigmatize the disease and raise awareness of its disproportionate prevalence among Black Americans and women.

Life & background

Born Barbara Elaine Smith in 1949 in Everson, Pennsylvania to a steelworker father and a mother who worked as a part-time housekeeper, Smith was raised in nearby Scottdale and barred from joining her high school's Future Homemakers of America club because of her race despite its supposedly integrated status, responding by starting her own chapter rather than accepting exclusion; she left for a modeling career immediately after graduating high school in 1967. After building a successful modeling career and adopting the professional name B. Smith, she transitioned into the restaurant industry, opening B. Smith's in Manhattan's theater district in 1986, a venue Essence magazine described as where Black Manhattan's most prominent figures regularly gathered, before expanding to a second location near her Long Island home and a third inside Washington, D.C.'s historic Union Station; she went on to host the nationally syndicated television program 'B. Smith with Style' for nearly a decade and author three cookbooks. Often compared to Martha Stewart as a lifestyle figure, a comparison she accepted without fully agreeing with, she once noted pointedly in a 1997 interview that Black Americans had been doing the domestic tasks Stewart popularized for generations already, observing that Stewart had simply gotten there first; she married her second husband, Dan Gasby, in 1992, and the couple built much of her later business empire together. After her 2013 Alzheimer's diagnosis, disclosed publicly the following year, Smith continued working and advocating as her condition allowed, partnering with the Brain Health Registry to encourage greater minority participation in Alzheimer's research, even as her husband's later, publicly disclosed decision to maintain a separate relationship with another woman while continuing to care for Smith drew significant public controversy and divided opinion among her supporters; she died at her Long Island home in February 2020 at age 70, having spent her final years working to ensure people facing the disease could do so without shame.

Sources

1. NPR (Code Switch); Alzheimer's Association blog; Being Patient; Richmond Free Press; Brain & Life; LTC News