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"Being a TV host is the least of what I do," the Crenshaw district-based media force tells Patrick Goldstein in Sunday's LAT Calendar.
The smooth-talking 42-year-old journalist and social activist has emerged as one of America's bright new media stars. He's penned and edited eight books, with a new one, the autobiographical "What I Know for Sure: My Story of Growing Up in America," due out later this month. He runs a foundation that helps fund programs to develop young leaders in the black community. He also funds the Tavis Smiley Center for Professional Media Studies at Texas Southern University. He oversees an annual State of the Black Union conference, hosts a weekly Public Radio International show, does commentaries on the nationally syndicated "Tom Joyner Morning Show" and spends most weekends on the road, speaking about leadership at high schools and black colleges.
Shaped as much by his religious upbringing as his progressive politics ("I literally spent every day of my life in church till I was 18," he says), Smiley is a product of the post-Martin Luther King Jr. generation of black leaders, his enormous drive having as much in common with the entrepreneurial spirituality of the Dallas-based minister T.D. Jakes as civil-rights activists such as the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. If Smiley isn't one of the most ambitious men in show business, he's certainly one of the most straight-laced. Growing up in Indiana in a deeply religious household — his mother is a Pentecostal minister — he wasn't allowed to go to movies or listen to R&B music, much less smoke or drink. The first time he saw a movie in a theater was at 18 after he left for college.
So Smiley doesn't really need to worry about anyone thinking he's been smoking pot. His concern about the Jet photo was more about losing control of his image. In Tavis World, control is everything. When I admire the look of his office one day, he beams. "Look around," he commands. "The carpet, the furniture, the baseboards — I helped design the whole building."
Smiley noted in the story that it was the first time the hometown newspaper had done a major profile of him.