Homer Smith, Jr  Homer Smith Jr (1909–1972) studied journalism at the University of Minnesota between 1922 and 1928, financing his schooling while working for the U.S. Post Office. In 1932 in partial reaction to the Scottsboro Boys trial (nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931), Smith decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1932. While working in the Soviet postal service, Smith was a journalist in the Associated Negro Press. When Germany invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, he became a full-time war correspondent for the Associated Negro Press and in 1944 he became half of the two-person Associated Press team in Moscow. Smith left Russia for Ethiopia in 1946, and returned to the United States in 1962. His time in the Soviet Union was the primary focus of his 1964 autobiography "Black Man in Red Russia". Homer Smith died in Chicago in 1972 at the age of 63.