Robert C. Smith is professor of political science at San Francisco State University.   An honors graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, he holds a master’s degree from UCLA and the Ph.D. from Howard. He is author or co-author of scores of articles and essays and ten books including Race, Class and Culture: A Study in Afro-American Mass Opinion; Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Now You See It, Now You Don’t; We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era; African American Leadership; and Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide. He is associate editor of the National Political Science Review and general editor of the State University of New York Press African American Studies series. He has taught African American politics and American government for more than twenty-five years.

Professor Smith is co-author of a leading textbook in the field (American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom) and the Encyclopedia of African American Politics. He is currently doing research on African Americans and the Reagan presidency. In addition to his teaching and research, Professor Smith appears frequently on local and national radio and television programs analyzing American and African American politics.

In 1998 he was recipient of Howard University’s Distinguished Ph.D. Alumni Award.