The National Association of Black Journalists gave ESPN's Stephen A. Smith its Thumbs Down Award on Aug. 15 at the organization's annual convention in Atlanta, citing what it called a "recurring public pattern of disparaging commentary directed at prominent Black women across politics, sports, and media."

Smith rejected the finding as false and said no one from NABJ contacted him before the award was announced.

He was one of five recipients this year, alongside Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, CBS, The Washington Post, and media executive DuJuan McCoy.

NABJ President Errin Haines framed the rebuke as a call to accountability.

"We are here to confront the systems and the people whose choices make your jobs harder," Haines told convention attendees. "We are here to defend the truth. And that means telling it even when the truth makes our friends uncomfortable, especially them."

Haines said the organization had heard concerns about Smith's treatment of Black women across politics, sports, entertainment and media. She specifically cited Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crockett and Joy-Ann Reid. Critics have also pointed to his comments involving Serena Williams, Michelle Obama and Monica McNutt.

"I find it highly offensive that they would label me in this way, give me a Thumbs Down Award specifically for disparaging Black women," Smith told Fox News' Sean Hannity. "There's no such thing. That did not happen. That is a flat-out lie."

Black folks have been arguing about how to hold each other accountable for a long time. Longer than Stephen A. Smith. Longer than NABJ, even.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X stood on opposite sides of that argument in their day, disagreeing openly over nonviolence, over integration, over how far a Black man had a right to go in defending himself. Neither man softened his position to accommodate the other.

Speaking at Cornell in November 1960, King looked that division in the eye and said, "There can be unity when there isn't uniformity."

King said later he disagreed with much of Malcolm's political philosophy, and he said it while still recognizing the man's deep concern for what Black Americans were going through. After Malcolm was killed, King recalled "a deep affection" for him. Yet he later recalled Black nationalist critics talking about him as a "sort of polished Uncle Tom" because of his commitment to nonviolence.

In the Black community, argument over strategy has a way of curdling into a question of loyalty. It happened then. Could it be happening now?

The Thumbs Down Award goes back to 1989. NABJ created it for individuals or organizations responsible for "especially insensitive, racist or stereotypical" reporting or commentary about the Black community, or practices at odds with the organization's goals.

Pat Buchanan was among the first two men NABJ ever called out this way. At the time, he had written that if a young Black man and a young white man approached a stranger and one of them was a robber, a rapist, or a killer, the odds were at least 11-to-1 the Black man was the guilty one.

NBC News took the other inaugural rebuke, over its coverage of the death of Max Robinson, the first Black man to anchor a network evening newscast, who died December 20, 1988, of complications from AIDS.

Buchanan received the award again in 2008 for a column claiming America "has been the best country on earth for black folks" and warning that "the Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans" as the Black population grows.

NABJ has used the Thumbs Down Award plenty of other times, too, against practices as much as against people: Hampton University administrator JoAnn Haysbert, after copies of a student newspaper were seized; BET, over its programming and how it treated Black audiences; NPR, after it canceled Black journalist Michel Martin's "Tell Me More" and cut positions; and in 2020, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, over newsroom practices affecting Black journalists.

Thirty-seven years after Buchanan received the first one, NABJ handed the same sanction to Smith, citing what it called a recurring pattern across separate controversies involving Black women.

Did he deserve that?

The central dispute is not whether Smith criticized prominent Black women. The record shows that he did. It is whether the substance, tone and pattern of those criticisms amount to disparagement.

Smith's dispute with Jasmine Crockett grew out of an October 2025 segment on the Texas congresswoman's rhetoric. "What I was saying was this educated, brilliant Black woman, representing over 750,000 people, is engaging in verbiage and rhetoric for the streets," Smith said, pointing to her calling President Trump a "piece of s---" and referring to Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as "Governor Hot Wheels."

He walked some of it back after Trump attacked Crockett publicly, saying he understood how his own criticism could hand ammunition to people looking to demean her.

"I apologize because I respect the hell out of Jasmine Crockett and what she has accomplished," he said, though he never let go of his underlying disagreement with her approach. Crockett said the comments had hurt her, and in January she wrote on social media that Smith was "synonymous with the modern day Django," referencing the loyal enslaved character in "Django Unchained" to make her point.

Joy-Ann Reid's clash came after MSNBC canceled her program. Smith called her talented and intelligent, then asked on ABC in January: "If your numbers drop 47% and you are Black, in this culture that we are living in, did you really expect something else to happen?"

Reid disputed his ratings figure and said Smith reserved a different kind of intensity for Black public figures. "You got a lot of smoke for Black folk," she said, naming his commentary on Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, LeBron James, Jemele Hill, Serena Williams, and Colin Kaepernick. Smith answered that Reid and Crockett "should be ashamed of themselves" for accusing him of attacking Black women.

His trouble with Harris started during the 2024 campaign, where he said publicly she had his vote even as he pressed her hard on strategy. "The only damn place we've seen Kamala Harris is at pep rallies," he said that August. "What you hiding for?"

Days before that, asked about claims Harris was a "DEI hire," he rejected the label flat out, running down her record as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, U.S. senator, and vice president: "The qualifications on that resume are so expansive at this point in time that DEI shouldn't even be mentioned."

With Michelle Obama, the friction was political too. Smith objected to her saying, while campaigning for Harris in 2024, that a vote for Trump was "a vote against you and a vote against y'all as women."

"Black men don't just love our Black women, we revere y'all," he said, in the same breath calling her the greatest first lady in American history and insisting she would have beaten Trump had she run herself.

The Serena Williams controversy came out of entertainment. After Williams appeared in Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Super Bowl halftime performance of "Not Like Us," aimed at Drake, Smith said on "First Take": "If I'm married and my wife is going to join trolling her ex, go back to his ass." Williams said the appearance wasn't a shot at Drake in the first place. Smith held that his own comments were never disrespect toward her, just an honest read on the moment.

The exchange with Monica McNutt centered on WNBA coverage. Defending "First Take's" attention to Caitlin Clark, Smith asked, "Who talks about the WNBA, who talks about women, who talks about women's sports more than First Take?"

McNutt answered him bluntly: "Stephen A., respectfully, with your platform, you could have been doing this three years ago if you wanted." Smith called that "highly offensive" and pointed to how often she's appeared on the show since.

Even Haines, standing at the podium presenting him the award, allowed that Smith "has done so much good for so many Black journalists who respect him."

A graduate of Winston-Salem State University, he has served as an HBCU Week ambassador. ESPN said his participation in HBCU Week in 2019 and 2020 helped generate more than 2,000 on-the-spot college acceptances and $11.2 million in scholarships.

"First Take" has broadcast from Howard, Tennessee State, Clark Atlanta, Morehouse, Norfolk State, Delaware State, and Bethune-Cookman.

He also executive produced "Why Not Us," an ESPN series on North Carolina Central University basketball, and he has said his late Winston-Salem State coach, Clarence "Big House" Gaines, asked only one thing of him: "The one thing he made me promise is that I would always do what I could to help HBCUs."

Smith has a history with NABJ, too.

He credits the organization with shaping his career, has attended its conventions, and broadcast "First Take" live from its 2025 gathering. He calls himself a registered independent and says his willingness to criticize Democrats, including prominent Black ones, is what actually cost him standing inside Black media circles.

Smith says the label turns criticism into disparagement. NABJ says his commentary adds up to a pattern serious enough to earn one of its oldest rebukes.

The disagreement ultimately turns on where legitimate criticism ends and disparagement begins, and whether a professional organization can police that boundary without also policing dissent.

Sixty-six years after Cornell, King's words remain relevant: "There can be unity when there isn't uniformity."

See Stephen A. Smith’s full response below.

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