The two homes that sit at the corner of N. Albany Avene and W. Cypress Street in Tampa were never schools, but over the years, they were places where people came to learn.

“He would sit here and tell you story after story after story," said Walter Smith Jr., remembering his father Dr. Walter Smith Sr.

A former president of Florida A&M University, his son said that education meant everything to him.

“He sat typically in what is now my favorite chair,” Smith said. “But he would sit in this chair and people would come and he would tell story after story after story, and there are a lot of them.”

There were so many stories told and so many things collected, that Walter Smith Sr. turned his mother's home, and the house next to it, into the Dr. Walter L. Smith Library.

Smith said the library is not only a safe place for people in his community to visit, but also a place where people can come away having learned something that could change their lives.

“Dad wanted to do this because there were children that he saw that were not in safe places," Smith said. "In seeing that, he said, 'I’m going to build this library.'”

Growing up without a father and in fear for his life from lynch mobs in the south, Walter Smith Sr. was a self-made man, and his son said the things housed in the library are tools to help make his father the man he was.

First opened in 2004, the private library closed during the pandemic. Then the elder Smith died last November before it could be reopened. After some time coming to terms with that, Walter Smith Jr. is now ready to reopen the library on Saturday in hopes that he not just honor his father's memory, but then he also continue his father's wife's work of educating the community from where he grew. 

“He gave his heart and soul to everything in here," he said. "Everything in here and by doing that he was giving his heart and his soul to this community.”