But this isn’t a place that will leave African Americans upset and depressed. The exhibits generate a sense of pride. I am proud to be part of a legacy of people who endured so much, yet survived and thrived. I am proud, but I also feel a little guilty. When I see what others have gone through, I feel guilty that I am not doing more. When I see the Rosa Parks exhibit and see how the Montgomery residents walked and carpooled, in heels, for months, rather than ride segregated buses, I feel guilty that I won’t drive an extra few miles to patronize a black business because it is out of my way. When I see the Freedom Riders exhibit and the sacrifices made for the right to vote, I feel guilty about the times I skipped voting because it was “just a primary,” or I had to work late. When I see the sparse room that this great man stayed in, I think about how he sacrificed time with his children and spent time in rooms like this, and I feel guilty that I don’t spend more time reviewing the civil rights struggle with my own children.
Each visit to the museum is a wake-up call for me. It’s like the sense of renewal you feel after an inspiring church service. I enjoy taking visiting friends and relatives. I have gained an appreciation for the humanity of Dr. King and the contributions of “regular people” to the civil rights movement. After each visit to the museum, I wake up from complacency and recommit myself not to take things such as voting, public education or even my job for granted. I recommit myself not just to remembering the past, but trying to improve the present and the future. I make a special effort to patronize black businesses. I donate time and money to worthy causes. I hope my efforts will serve as a tribute to the lynched black woman in the picture. These are things a “regular person” like me can do to make Dr. King’s dream a reality.
Phyllis R. Dixon
Shades of Black and White
It doesn’t matter what you’ve been through, where you come from, who your parents are— nor your social or economic status. None of that matters. What matters is how you choose to love, how you choose to express that love through your work, family and what you have to give the world . . . own your power and your glory.
Oprah Winfrey
Tied down, my arms outstretched, I lay motionless on the gurney. I thought to myself, I came into this world stretched out on a cross, maybe that’s how I will die . Helpless and afraid, being prepped for surgery, the events of my life began to replay in my mind.
I remembered my mama telling me stories about my birth. I had been strapped down before when my mother first received me. I was literally tied to a cross because, during my birth, both of my collarbones were broken as I was yanked out of the birth canal.
My Negro mama was significantly overweight, but her chocolate skin and dazzling good looks revealed a fiery and attractive woman. It was a long while before my mama could holdme. She didn’t know at the time that the doctors were patching me up. Finally, the nurse brought in two Caucasian redheaded twin girls and handed them to her.
Naturally Mama put them to her breast and they suckled.
Perhaps a half hour or so had gone by when a nurse frantically returned to the room red-faced and apologizing. “Oh, Mother Roberts,” she cried. “I’m so sorry. These are not your babies. Please forgive me—and please don’t tell the mother across the hall that you nursed them,” she pleaded.
The mother across the hall was a white woman, and the hospital did not want to be liable if the woman were to adamantly protest. They could imagine that even litigation might occur.
Mama agreed. “Okay,” she said. “But don’t bring me no black baby,” she insisted.
A few minutes later I was brought in, white-skinned and tied to a cross.
My mama’s reply was, “Well, she’s all broke-up, but she’s pretty.” As my mother recounted the story, I couldn’t imagine how confused that nurse must have been. My mother, the oldest girl of five siblings, had the darkest skin color of the girls in her family. Her father would irately address her as “Black Gal.”
When I grew up, and you called somebody “black,” them was “fightin’” words.
It was not until her father was sick and on his deathbed that he asked for his daughter’s forgiveness. But by then, it was too late. My mama had already determined that there was something very wrong with her skin color and that having dark skin was a curse—a curse big enough to make even your own father treat you differently.
As I lay on the gurney waiting to be cut open, my mind’s eye quickly flashed to the Detroit race riots of 1943.
The riot of ’67 was pale in comparison. It was reported that a pregnant woman on a streetcar was shot and killed through the window because they thought she was a white woman. She wasn’t. And a white woman aboard another streetcar discreetly hid a black man under the skirt of her dress to keep him from being killed. What courage and tenacity this woman demonstrated.
This color thing is insane. Where did this notion come from? I pondered as I lay motionless. Blacks killing whites, whites killing blacks, skin color judged by both blacks and whites—it all seemed crazy to me.
I turned my reminiscence from my mother’s childhood to my own. At the turn of the twentieth century my immigrant father traveled by water from Sicily to New York’s Ellis Island. Eventually he came to Detroit, where he owned a neighborhood grocery store. Even though my parents were not married nor did they live together, we were never hungry.
I was born in 1924 to a single-parent Negro mother and an Italian father. In those days it was, without a doubt, a disgrace to give birth to a child out of wedlock. It was equally shameful for the child. Even though growing up mulatto and without a true father-daughter relationship brought me pain, there were many times that I’d say, “Mama, I don’t care how I got here. I am glad I’m here.”
I was happy she chose to have me and that I was alive regardless of the circumstances, but I hated school. The name-calling was cruel. I have been called every derogatory name you can think of and, thank God, I am now immune to all of them.
Even though I was light-skinned, dark-skinned colored girls were my best friends because, like me, they were ostracized and considered outcasts of society. The so-called respectable children (born in marriage) could not stay outside when I was out playing. Their mothers would call them inside.
My mind began to wander from the more painful memories to thoughts of the many good things about growing up in those times. Flickering images of growing up on Hastings and St. Antoine danced in my mind.
Reverend Franklin (Aretha Franklin’s father) had his church at that time on Hastings and Willis. We had many prayerful and singing good times in that church.
I smiled as I remembered the story Mama had told me about the time she was nursing me on the streetcar, and the conductor was so engrossed looking through his rear view mirror at a large Negro woman nursing a white baby that he missed his switchover. He had to back up the streetcar and reconnect his switch exchange.
And then there was the time she and I were in the ten-cent store, and I loudly cried and acted out for a doll. The store clerk implored my mother to buy the doll for me saying, “I’m sure her mother will be happy to repay you.”
“I am hermother,”Mama indignantly answered the clerk.
I tell people all the time, “I’m glad I came through those years.” I reminisce and tell folks things like, “We could sleep all night on Belle Isle, and nobody would bother us.”
And I tell them about the times when Joe Louis was the upcoming champion in the world of heavyweight boxing.
His mother lived in the neighborhood. She was such a nice woman. Most of us didn’t have televisions, so when her son Joe was fighting, and it was televised, she would put the TV on the front porch, and we would walk around to her house on McDougall Street to watch the fights. We would all be cheering for the “Brown Bomber”!
When Hudson’s department store began to hire colored girls as elevator operators they had to be light-skinned girls. I think part of my mother’s healing was her refusal to buy anything from Hudson
’s.
As I lay spread out on that gurney I relived the aftermath of Pearl Harbor when Detroit’s FordMotor Company was hiring more factory workers. I set out one bright, brisk early morning looking for work and I stood in the long line marked “Colored.” When I approached the clerk at the desk he abruptly snapped at me asserting, “We’re not hiring!”
I was so disappointed; I was counting on that job to help our family make ends meet. Sadly, I turned around and went back home. My minister heard of the incident and encouraged me to go back, but this time he urged me to stand in the line marked “White.” I did, and the response at that window was markedly different. A woman with a handheld apparatus stamped my application with a loud and deliberate motion and announced, “Hired!” I stood there startled and speechless.
Perhaps, it was in that astonishing moment when I realized that another world of opportunities could open for me if I went with the white side of my heritage and was quiet about the colored side. I looked white, so I learned to do what was necessary to survive. My father was white, so I was, indeed, both black and white. I was never ashamed of myself or felt like I was “passing.” I was just using my challenging racial mixture to my benefit for a change.
I worked at Ford during the war as a riveter on the wings of the B29 bomber airplanes. Then, after the war, I took a job as a dance instructor at the renowned Arthur Murray Dance Studio. Considered beautiful by society’s standards and compared by some to the likes of Rita Hayworth and Susan Hayward, I stood about 5-feet 6-inches tall, a brunette with long, flowing hair and a slender build, with a flair for glamour and style.
At the age of twenty-eight, married with two children, I lay on the table awaiting surgery to remove a lump from my breast, wondering if and praying that this will not be the last chapter of my life.
Somewhere between reminiscing about dancing at the
Elmwood Casino in Canada where my partner and I would waltz out and “take the dance floor,” and being a finalist in Bob Hope’s “My Favorite Brunette” contest . . . I remembered nothing more until I awoke from surgery.
What had looked like a tumor was really a milk clot from nursing my babies, and they removed it. I cried with relief and gratitude knowing how blessed I was to continue being with my family. And continue I would!
Today, I am eighty-one years old. I have been on both sides of the shades of black and white. The depth and the richness of being “colored” (it’s still hard for me to say “black”) has its roots in my soul. I have accepted and carried my crosses in the light and the dark of it. My spirit reigns free.
I love my mother for giving me birth and life. I’m glad I’m here. I don’t care how I got here. Life is a gift no matter who we are, how we got here or what the color of our skin. I rejoice in all the shades of black and white in myself—and in you.
Dorothy Jackson As told to Hattie Mae Pembrook
Moving On from Militancy
I’m not a feminist. . . . I’m just a proud black woman.
Queen Latifah
“Hey, white girl! Hey, white girl! Damita, you look just like a white girl,” said Johnny. Johnny was a fourth-grade classmate of mine. It was picture day, and my mother had pressed my hair real straight and made me some “Japanese bangs.” I thought I looked fine, but Johnny said I looked white. My classmates began to laugh at me and make fun of me. I was downright mad.
“No I don’t! I’m not white. Just because I’m not a tar baby like you! So there!” I stormed off, and when it was finally time for me to take my picture, I made sure that my hair was a mess. After all, I just did not want to be white. I wanted to look like everyone else in my class.
I had light hair, light eyes and a light complexion. Why me? Everyone else in my family was brown except me. My mocha-colored sister Kathy said that I was adopted! I didn’t want to be adopted, either. My mother assured me that I was not adopted and that I was her baby. So there!
I grew up always trying to prove my ethnicity. When I got to high school in Los Angeles I decided to join a militant organization. It was called the Black Youth Alliance. I changed my name to Tamu Impanduzy, Sweetest of the Revolution. My boyfriend was a senior, and he had an African name also. Now I was so black—or so I thought.
We also became involved with a ragtag organization outside of the school. They talked about “offing the pig,” but I knew I wasn’t going to “off” anything. I was a nonviolent black girl who happened to look white. I was just sitting in those meetings questioning my commitment to the movement. I didn’t think that I had what it takes to be a full-fledged revolutionary. The following events confirmed it.
When I arrived home one day my mother met me at the door. Her face was red and swollen like a big beach ball, and her eyes were bulging like Kermit the Frog! I could have sworn that I saw steam coming out of the top of her head and drool peeking out of the corners of her mouth.
Oh God, what happened to her? What did my siblings do to her?
Well, I quickly found out that it wasn’t the other kids that had caused her face to blow up—it was me !
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had visited my neighborhood. Can you believe it? Looking for me ! They asked my neighbors questions about me and about my militant behavior. I couldn’t believe it. All I did was wear a big Afro, dashikis, sandals and ethnic jewelry.Well, okay, I did talk a lot of mess, but I sure wasn’t going to back it up!
And they had visited my mother.
“Who do you think you are? Didn’t I raise you to be a law-abiding citizen? You are not Angela Davis, you’re Damita Kelly, and you’d better start acting like it! The FBI!
Well, somebody better call the FBI to get me off of you!” my mother ranted. I saw my entire life flash before my eyes, and suddenly looking like a white girl just didn’t seem that important.
There was a funeral that day. Tamu Impanduzy was laid to rest. My mother “offed” her! I was told to excuse myself from that organization, press my hair, put on some “American” clothes and get myself some real friends. She informed me that as long as I lived under her roof, I was to answer only to the name “Damita.”
I went to my last meeting to inform the brothers and sisters that I was no longer a member and why. It seemed as though each member had a story similar to mine. One of our new members was a spy. He was actually a member of the FBI and had gotten all of our information and turned it over. This was all too heavy for me. I didn’t want to tangle with the FBI—or worse yet with my mother!
Oddly enough, I wasn’t that upset about it. In retrospect, it is probably because the “establishment” was never my issue in the first place. My issue was wanting to feel like I belonged. Somehow my mother’s lecture and the wake-up call about the direction my life was taking caused me to take another look in the proverbial mirror. This time when I looked in the mirror, I softened my critical eyes and worked on just accepting myself “as is.”
I made a decision then and there to go to college. I even decided I’d try out for the cheerleading squad—a gang with a lighter purpose.
Now, I really don’t care that I look white. I know who I am, and I finally know that I have nothing to prove.
Damita Jo Johnson
Never, Ever Give Up
Courage allows the successful woman to fail— and to learn powerful lessons from the failure—so that in the end, she didn’t fail at all.
Maya Angelou
Growing up against the odds in the Brewster projects of Detroit, Michigan, was no day at the beach. Just ask diva Diana Ross and world champion boxer Joe Louis whose lives began there also. Getting into fights was a way of life, and most girls got pregnant before they graduated from high school.
I was often chased home from school by jealous girls yelling, “You think you’re so cute.” I was called “Yellow Banana,” and accused of having a white daddy because my skin tone was so light. I would get my hair pulled or get a kick from behind by someone while standing in the lunch line.
When I was in ju
nior high school my family moved into a much nicer neighborhood. I thought things would get better for me socially, but they got worse. Being blessed with a God-given athletic ability and natural good looks, I walked tall with confidence. The boys jockeyed for my attention while the girls hated me. I was the talk of my new school. I was referred to as the tall, light-skinned girl with long hair.
One day after school as I was leaving the girls’ locker room, exhausted from an intense track practice, I was attacked by a gang of girls. I literally began fighting for my life. A couple of girls held me down while one girl beat me, another pulled my hair and kicked me, and one began to slice my face, arms, neck, chest and legs with a razor. As she was cutting my body, she said, “Let’s see what boy is going to like you now!”
This fight was nothing like the Brewster projects’ fist-fighting days with hair pulling and a few punches! I could not believe this was happening to me. I felt like I was having a nightmare and could not wake up. The girls attacking me began to run away as they heard someone yell, “Call an ambulance!”
Someone else shouted, “Oh my God, look at her face!”
I was covered in blood from head to toe and felt faint as I ran back into the locker room to look in the mirror. I cried so hard! I could not believe that I was looking at a cut so deep that I could see the inside of my flesh hanging out. It made me weak in the knees, and sobbing I screamed, “My face! Look at my face!” The face I once took pride in was now mangled and dripping with blood.
The tragic event that I had hoped no one would find out about became the headline news. I wondered how I would ever go back to school to face everyone. I was given over one hundred stitches and stayed home from school for the next fourteen days. While I was home recovering, I experienced many different emotions and had several conversations in my head about why someone would try to hurt me like that. I felt alone, embarrassed and helpless. I was very angry with my parents for not protecting me. I built an invisible wall between the outside world and myself, and I no longer trusted anyone. I kept pondering what I could have done to prevent this. Maybe on that particular day I should have run away as fast as I could instead of trying to defend myself.