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TI: So, today is August 13, 2004, we're in Seattle at the Densho studios. On camera we have Dana Hoshide, and I'm Tom Ikeda, the interviewer, and today we have Justice Charles Z. Smith to do an interview. So, welcome, and thank you so much for doing this.

CS: Thank you.

TI: So, we're going to do a, a sort of simple, life history approach, and we're gonna start from the very beginning, Justice Smith, and then just kind of walk through and talk about your life. And so I wanted to start off and ask you: where and when were you born?

CS: I was born February 23, 1927, in a little town in Florida, Lakeland, L-A-K-E-L-A-N-D. I am the son of a Cuban immigrant father and an African American mother. That was the beginning of my life, now, seventy-seven and a half years ago.

TI: Well, how was it that your father and mother got to Lakeland, Florida?

CS: My mother was a restaurant chef, and worked for a tourist home in North Carolina, where she was born, and was taken to Florida -- where the same people operated a facility -- as their restaurant chef in Florida. She was relatively young, in her teens. My father was twelve years old when he and his parents left Cuba after the Spanish-American war, that very, very short war, around 1895, and ended up in Key West, Florida, where most of the Cuban refugees settled. And from Key West, Florida, he ended up in the central part of Florida, where the town of Lakeland is located. He met my mother there, and this was the beginning of their relationship and their marriage. They were married some years, long before I was born -- not long. I had two sisters who were older than I. One four years older and one two years older, so my parents had been married for at least six years at the time I was born.

TI: Did they ever tell you how the two of them met?

CS: Sort of. My father was an automobile mechanic, and at that time, in the central part of Florida, there weren't very many other Cubans. The Cuban culture, as it was established in Florida in the old days, was based upon a quote, "colony," unquote, of Cubans in Key West, which is 90 miles off the mainland in Florida, and then there was a Cuban colony in Tampa, which is 30 miles away from the town of Lakeland. Tampa was the center of the Cuban cigar industry at that time, so the only other Cubans my father was able to associate with were in the distant area of Key West where his family lived, or in Tampa, which was 30 miles away from the town of Lakeland, where he lived and worked as an automobile mechanic. Somehow or the other, these two persons of color, from different backgrounds, got together, and apparently they "fell in love," which is the expression we used to use, were attracted to each other. My mother was a very beautiful woman, and my father was a very handsome man. And so they fell in love, got married, and established their family, ultimately resulting in eight children. I am the third of eight children, with seven children younger than I. No -- five.

TI: So, so you had two older sisters, you...

CS: Two older sisters, then there was me, then we had...

TI: Five more.

CS: One, two, three... five. Five more, right.

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