B. Smith

Barbara Elaine Smith was born on the twenty-fourth of August 1949 in Everson, Pennsylvania, to William, a steelworker, and Florence, who kept houses — and raised in nearby Scottdale. At nineteen she won a place on the Ebony Fashion Fair tour; Wilhelmina Models followed; and in July 1976 she stood among the first Black models on the cover of Mademoiselle.

Then she set the table. B. Smith's opened in New York's Theater District in 1986, at Washington's Union Station in 1994, and on the wharf at Sag Harbor in 1998 — rooms where Southern elegance was the house language. Her television show, B. Smith with Style, ran for some eight seasons into homes across the country, and her books, from Entertaining and Cooking for Friends (1995) onward, carried the same welcome.

In 2001 her home collection debuted at Bed Bath & Beyond — widely described as the first home-goods line by an African-American woman carried by a nationwide retailer — and the brand grew to serveware and furniture. She was often called the Black Martha Stewart; those who kept score noted she got there first in more rooms than one.

Diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in 2013, she told the country in 2014 and spent her remaining strength as an advocate, especially for African Americans facing the disease, co-writing Before I Forget (2016). She died at her home in East Hampton, on Long Island, on the twenty-second of February 2020, at seventy. Honored be B. Smith, who made elegance a door held open.