eyes if it did something like that.My arm is getting tired of writing, so I guess I will stop…
Keep the faith babies!!!
Myra
After reading the letter, I realized that now it’s an artifact, a hand-written record of what happened and why we did what we did. I read and re-read the letter and immediately telephoned Marilyn A. “You’ll never believe what I found,” I told her. That letter opened the flood gates of memory.
We were known as the Seven Sisters back then, but were actually the “Seven Sisters + Harold.” My experiences with this band of believers at Swarthmore pointed the way for me professionally as I learned to always seek the truth, stand for what is right, and model collective leadership long before I had heard of the concept.
Growing Up
I had a happy childhood and was the oldest of four children raised by Joseph and Ednae Rose. I was “the different one.” I was the brown one, the fat one, the ugly one who did not look anything like either my father or my mother. We lived in Liberty Park in Norfolk, Virginia, a Depression-era, pre-war housing project of pasteboard homes. The houses were connected with ribbons of asphalt on tar-based streets that wound through what had once been a large wooded area complete with ditches, winding streams, and lots of trees. We even had our own elementary school and city-run recreation center. The only black hospital in town, Norfolk General, was next to both the edge of the projects and one of the in-town enclaves of the black middle-class.
I never knew my maternal grandparents as they had died long before I was born. My mother and her four sisters were left to raise each other beginning in their late teen years. Ednae is my stepmother, the only mother I have ever known. She was short, light-skinned with full lips, a big nose, no hips, and short nappy hair that she did not like, but she was the prettiest woman I have ever known. She was a great dresser and the very definition of “style,” although she made almost all her clothes. She was never seen without makeup until her later years. I did not know that she had full dentures until I was a teenager. The fact that she was my stepmother only bothered me in that I did not look like her and did not have her style, her beauty, or her way of existing in the world. Ednae was an outgoing, gregarious person who “never met a stranger.” When she was in college, she was voted Miss Morgan State. Her confidence was awe-inspiring, and if she had any major insecurities other than some of her physical attributes, she hid them well. When her hair did not please her, she colored it or wore a wig. She was a master at makeup and had some foam rubber inserts that fit into the girdle that all women wore those days to give her hips. She was something else and my father loved her.
My father was a plasterer who learned the trade from his father. He did the best housing construction and decorative circle ceilings. He owned his own construction company. He was a true Renaissance man, born in the country, who later migrated to the city with his family. He graduated from college with a degree in animal husbandry, was a member of the Navy shore patrol during World War II, and organized and played with the Brown Bombers, one of the pre-integration black football teams. Daddy always took care of his birth family. He spent a lot of time helping my grandmother, who in my early childhood years lived with two of her daughters and my three cousins in a four-room house. We saw Grandma nearly every Sunday at Sunday School, church, and sometimes after church. She was a mother of the church, a deaconess, and quite formidable. Daddy was always respectful to his mother whom I later learned was largely responsible for my being raised by my father.
My real mother was named Marian and died in childbirth at the age of thirty. Her family lived across the water in Hampton. I never knew how my biological parents met, but I understand that she was a schoolteacher. They had been married for a few years before I was born. I look just like her, as people who knew her said—like she had spit me out. My parents’ wedding photo looks like my father could have been marrying me with an old-fashioned hairstyle. For most of my life, I believed that my mother died in the throes of childbirth without ever getting to see me. I later learned that I was born via C-section and that my mother died of complications a day or so later. So, she probably got to hold me and name me. My father gave me this information when I was middle-aged. I cannot tell you how it comforted me to know that I was not a truly motherless child.
Apparently, her death was a big surprise to the doctor and my father who was called in the middle of the night and told that his wife had died. He walked around in a daze for several days and forgot that I was in the hospital. There were plenty of people who were willing to take me and raise me as their own. Apparently, I was quite the prize because I was an exceedingly adorable baby. Daddy was so distraught that he was really considering these options when Grandma told him to bring the baby to her. I lived in my grandmother’s house for the first few years of my life. Grandma wanted to keep me, but when Daddy remarried, Ednae stated that I was to come home with them. I think that this was the only family battle my grandmother ever lost.
So, I had a happy childhood: loving parents, one sister, and two brothers. I was the oldest, but definitely not the leader of the pack. That title will always belong to my sister Joanne, who to this day is the boss of us. I was the smart one, the quiet one who stayed in the background, the one who read all the time. I felt invisible in this family of extroverts who were physically beautiful and gifted in their own right. My brothers were excellent football players: Allen, the high school quarterback in a predominantly white high school, and Don, who excelled in college and went on to a short career in the pros.
The world we grew up in was Southern, segregated, and insular. We lived in public housing until I was fifteen. School, church, buses, the eating establishments that we could frequent, and our hospital were all black. The mailman, the bus driver, the teachers, local shop keepers, the staff at movie theaters , amusement parks, beaches—everything and everyone was all black except the white department stores downtown and of course everything on television. We were aware of the white world, which we had to interact with from time to time. This was always anxiety-provoking because you knew that they had the best of the best (they showed that on TV) and ultimately all the power over you. Nonetheless, we were happy. My father had his own business and was able to support his family. We grew up safe and protected in the projects. We had a car, a sandbox and picnic table in the back yard, a three-foot-deep plastic swimming pool, a green Plymouth convertible, a pickup truck, a console radio and record player, and a television when they became available.
This was a time when people who were black middle-class lived side by side with others who were on welfare. Our family was part of the black bootstrap generation that pulled itself up by its own efforts. Both of my parents were college graduates and higher education was always stressed and assumed. As the “smart one,” I always knew that I would go to college and that I would need a scholarship. I excelled in my segregated public school and was offered advanced placement to skip a couple of grades. My family wisely declined as other intellectual prodigies in the community did not fare well, developing “nervous breakdowns” and never quite living up to their early promise. I spent a lot of time in the library in elementary school to keep from being bored. I participated in local and statewide sponsored enrichment programs from junior high school onwards.
In addition to running his business, organizing/participating in early black football, and serving as a deacon in our church, my father was a prolific writer, philosophizer, and wannabe politician. He was concerned about the plight of the Negro (as we were called in those days) and was active in the community. He wrote and published a book in which he proclaimed that the solution to the race problem would be solved with miscegenation. He sent free copies to anyone that he thought might have some power or concern over the situation including every POTUS and major politician he could access. He wrote letters to the editor of the local white paper, wrote opinion articles for the Journal and Guide (the local black newspaper), and had a talk show on local black radio called “Joe Rose—Tell It Like It Is.” We had lots of lively conversations from which I learned to think critically and seek to understand issues at their
