49ers and Warriors chaplain to speak at Modesto MLK Day gathering

The Rev. Earl Smith, chaplain for the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors, will share a message of hope and unity when he speaks Monday at the 30th Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration at Christian Love Baptist Church.

Smith said he will talk about what the legacy of King’s dream looks like in 2017. “I think Dr. King’s dream is a reality – I just believe there are people who don’t sense it’s a reality. I think we’re more fragmented than we realize, we’re letting our differences hold us hostage, when we have more things in common than we have differences.”

Focusing on similarities to build unity is a lesson he learned as a youth in his native Stockton, Smith said by phone Thursday. “I grew up in a time in the ’60s when there were riots at my junior high school,” he said. “I was kicked out of school over the differences I had with the white kids.”

He was a troublemaker, according to a PBS biography of Smith – stealing cars and money and selling drugs at that junior high age. In 1975, he was shot six times and left for dead during a botched drug deal.

The faith and love of Smith’s father helped pull his son through, says a biography provided by Smith’s father-in-law, the Rev. James Anderson, pastor of Christian Love Baptist. Words Smith’s father said to him – “You are a rebel, but you are God’s rebel, and he is going to use you to his glory” – have motivated him ever since.

He ended up going to St. Mary’s, a Catholic high school in Stockton, where he learned “to let some things go,” Smith said.

After being ordained, the Rev. Smith – in 1983, at the age of 27 – became the youngest Protestant chaplain ever hired by the California Department of Corrections. He started work at San Quentin State Prison. Over 23 years there, he ministered to such criminals as Charles Manson and Robert Alton Harris, the first person executed in California since 1976.

In his 2015 book, “Death Row Chaplain,” Smith wrote: “Looking back, I realize now that a career in prison ministry probably appealed to me because I wasn’t much different from the inmates. In many ways, I was very much like the men and women whom society has cast aside for their crimes and mistakes.”

Smith is chief executive officer of Project IMPACT (Incarcerated Men Putting Away Childish Things) and CARE (Concerned About Recovery Education), in addition to his work with the Warriors and Niners. At Monday’s commemoration, he said he expects to share a few stories “about people I’ve had encounters with that will translate into where we are in the country today.”

He said he doesn’t plan to talk about 49ers quarterback and Turlock son Colin Kaepernick, but thinks it was a good move for Kaepernick to change his racial-injustice protest from sitting on the bench during the national anthem to kneeling. He said he sees the kneeling by Kaepernick and teammate Eric Reid as a show of praying for the country to come together. Smith, who said he’s known Kaepernick since he was a rookie and has spent a great deal of time with him, called taking a knee “a good message.”

Asked whom he’d like to look out into the audience and see Monday, Smith said he hopes to see “difference makers, change agents. I think there’s a group of people who if they decide to work together can effect change.”

These people who have humanity as a focus can inform others if there’s a commitment to get together in small groups and work on it, he said. “It’s not a one-off, nothing that can happen in one meeting.”

This story was originally published January 12, 2017 at 1:57 PM with the headline "49ers and Warriors chaplain to speak at Modesto MLK Day gathering."