'I could walk into a room, and two people that I loved-who loved each other-were yelling and screaming at each other.' 'The thing that stuck with me was the emotional resonance,' Smith says. I walked into the kitchen where my parents were arguing vociferously, and my Uncle Milton was there.' Young Roger was upset, but his uncle reassured him: 'Don't worry, your parents are simply rehearsing what's called a play'-namely, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Helen Guenveur and Sherman Smith were also responsible for their son's initial exposure to acting. My father had to explain to me that no, JFK was not a Negro.' And I said, 'Well, is Kennedy a Negro?' My parents were adamantly in support of Kennedy, so I figured that he must be a Negro that was the form of support that was discussed. 'I remember asking my dad if he was a Negro, and he said yes. 'There were political conversations all the time at the dinner table,' he says. It seems appropriate: Throughout a decades-long acting, writing, and directing career on stage and screen, Smith has confronted issues of racial identity, politics, and history through his interpretations of events and the lives of iconic figures-many of them African-American.īorn in Berkeley and raised in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles to a lawyer father and dentist mother, Smith's parents informed his social awareness at an early age. Family legend has it that Roger Guenveur Smith '77 was conceived at an NAACP gathering in Monterey.

Roger guenveur smith parents