Remembering Freda Smith

ESWA full-timer organizer and leader from 1977 until her passing in 2008

Freda Smith dedicated herself to the struggle of the oppressed and provided a shining example as she taught others how to turn adversity into victory for service, domestic and other low-paid workers. She was the founder of the Vivian Cooper Community Service Center and president of Eastern Service Workers Association (ESWA) Advisory Committee until her death in 2008 at the age of 81.

Freda was a lifetime resident of Princeton and a daughter of the working class; her mother was a domestic worker, her father a maintenance worker from a family of sharecroppers. At age 15, she joined her mother as a civil rights organizer, facing down government harassment, and in her later teenage years she played an instrumental role in fighting for the freedom of the Trenton Six, the six young African American men who were unjustly imprisoned on false accusations of murder.

Freda’s lifelong commitment to finding a permanent solution to injustice was just beginning, and she never made any secret of her strong convictions while making her living as a domestic worker and personal attendant care work for affluent New York and Princeton families. In 1978, she became a full-time volunteer with Eastern Service Workers Association. The following year she helped to spearhead the ESWA move into Trenton. Freda purchased a fire-damaged building at 6 West End Avenue for one dollar with the idea that it could become a service center for ESWA members.  Freda rallied members of the Central New Jersey Workers Benefits Council, local small business people and churches to organize the volunteers and resources needed to rehabilitate the building. Under Freda’s leadership, the building housed a membership service center for almost two decades and subsequently became, and remains today, the association’s Office Central. One of Freda’s greatest pleasures was seeing the building she had first secured for the membership become a professional office space to better serve the association’s goals.

Freda was president of Mercer County Workers Benefits Council (WBC). In the 1980s, she took a leadership role in exposing the level of rat infestation in the city and in calling the city government to account for the problem, helped organize informational picket lines for Local 155 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) Union to bring attention to workers’ grievances regarding occupational health concerns at a local brake shoe factory; and led a WBC delegation to oppose the installation of Urban Enterprise Zones, a trickle-down scheme, in Trenton.  

In the 1990s, when the city Department of Buildings lined a wrecking ball up in front of ESWA’s then Office Central on North Clinton Avenue, Freda, undaunted by the implicit threat of arrest when trying to stop the demolition, picked up the phone and dialed the then mayor of Trenton and demanded he stop the demolition crew. Under her leadership, the City ultimately agreed to repair the building.

During her later years, Freda organized an ESWA field office out of her apartment in Princeton, motoring food drives, clothing drives, back-to-school supply drives, and holiday turkey and toy drives. She coordinated work with dozens of area supporters, who dropped off clothing, food and other donations, part of which she distributed to ESWA members in Princeton and part of which other volunteers carried to Trenton for distribution to members there.

Freda’s list of contributions to the service worker struggle was tremendous. Her lifetime of dedication as a guiding force in the movement for change inspired hundreds of organizers and supporters across the area who benefited from the movement for which she helped lay a foundation for future fundamental change.