"In almost every way, she was the Jackie Robinson of baseball writers," said John Quinn, Smith's former colleague at the Inquirer. "People don't always make that connection."
She was a trailblazer for female baseball writers — the first woman beat writer to cover a major-league baseball team and the only woman to win the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, for which she was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame — and for black sports writers everywhere.
On Thursday, she will be inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame. That induction, which will take place Thursday for her and more than a dozen other honorees, has allowed Smith to reflect on her career here.