Stephen Lynn Smith was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1944. After graduating from Marion High School in 1963, he enrolled at the State University of Iowa with a major in engineering. With an interest in the Civil Rights Movement, Smith joined the local chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He also participated in Freedom Summer (also known as the Mississippi Summer Project), a voter registration drive sponsored by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On the night of July 15, 1964, Smith and Eric Morton were detained and beaten by the local police of Canton, Mississippi as they delivered voter registration materials form Jackson to Greenwood.

As a dedicated civil rights activist, Smith also participated in an eight-day hunger strike in March 1965 in downtown Iowa City in support of civil rights workers in Selma, Alabama. In October 1965, he additionally burned his draft card in the Iowa Memorial Union in speaking of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. He was one of the first in the nation to do so.

After graduating from Iowa, Smith became a professor of computer science at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Smith died on April 24, 2009 after an extended illness.