“A man’s character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things around him.”
—Frederick Douglass
I’ve been a serious person all my life, always the sensible and responsible one. I can’t explain why I’m that way. It’s just my personality. Biologically, I became a woman when I was only nine, when my menstrual period began early. Maybe that made me feel older than most other children. Sometimes it’s a real burden, having to be the one who’s toeing the line when others around me are carefree. Even when I was a child, the people close to me tended to rely on me, to expect me to be strong and self-sufficient. In the end, maybe I became what I was expected to be.
I like music so much that I have a CD player in almost every room of my house so I can listen to Roy Hamilton, B. B. King, Tina Turner, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Beethoven, and others. I like to laugh and enjoy myself as much as anyone—but there’s a switch in my head that won’t allow me to ignore injustice when I see it. There are many times I’ve wished I could turn that switch off, but that’s not the way it works. It’s on. It always has been, and it always will be. I’ve learned to accept that.
I was born in 1939 to Lottie Mae Powell and Horace Walter Stephens, although I have very little memory of my parents being married. My father was a local entrepreneur who, I have been told, was running his own restaurant business even while he was in high school. At one time, Daddy was run out of town because many whites, as well as Negroes, frequented his nightclub, and the local white powers threatened him because they wouldn’t tolerate “mixing.” In addition to being a chef, he was also a talented tap dancer. My mother told me many times he was so accomplished that he no doubt would have been famous if he had been white. It’s true there were famous Negro dancers in the 1920s and 1930s, but skin color was, of course, still an obstacle for most Negroes—as it always has been. Discrimination has cost the dreams of many generations of black people in this country, and I believe it was no different for my father.
I was the middle child. My older sister, Priscilla, is fourteen months older than I am, and I have a brother—named Horace Walter for my father (although we call him Walter)—who is two years and nine months younger than I. My parents were married as teenagers and could not handle the responsibilities of marriage, especially my father. They divorced when I was about four, and as a teenager I saw him from time to time when we visited him in Miami, where he had moved when I was older.
My mother adored her own father, a successful carpenter and farmer named Richard Allen Powell. (He was named for Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although Mother was raised as an only child by her father, she had three half siblings: a sister, Corrie Jackson, and two brothers, Guy Lee Barnes and Leland Barnes, who were raised by her mother.) Mother was a real “Daddy’s girl,” and I think she wanted us to feel the same way about our father, so she made a fuss about reminding us to call him and give him cards at holiday time. But I thought that was hypocritical, even when I was young. He seldom came to see about us, so why should I care about him? The bottom line is, even though I always called him “Daddy,” I never had a real relationship with my biological father.
We lived outside of Quincy, Florida, in an area called St. Hebron, which was a very small rural farming community. Today, some long-standing black families there own land tracts and have streets named for them. A lot of Negro residents back then were in tobacco, priming it for the big growers, pulling the leaves from the tall stalks. The leaves were about twelve inches wide, eighteen to twenty inches long. You’d use cord to string eighteen or twenty leaves together to hang in the large tobacco barns. Even the schedule of the black schools was set around the time the tobacco was to be picked; they closed a month earlier and opened a month earlier than any other schools in the state so students would be available for harvest. Once, when we were about twelve or thirteen, my sister and I came to visit Quincy and tried to get a job in the tobacco fields so we could renew friendships with children we had known before we moved away, but the supervisor sent us home. “Those jobs are for people who really need them, and we don’t need you here socializing and distracting the workers,” he said. My sister and I never had a knack for farm work, as my grandfather also discovered when we visited him. He tried to put us to work in his cotton fields in the early-morning hours, but I enjoyed riding horses and playing in the huge, dizzying tobacco barns.
Of course, Florida being in the South, all of the schools and facilities were segregated. But when my sister and I attended the so-called “colored” or “Negro” school each day, my mind didn’t flood with questions about why there were no white children there. I didn’t even wonder where the white children went to school. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I knew any whites. My mother had white relatives in her family who had occasionally visited her childhood home, so she’d grown up with more familiarity with whites than I did. I just accepted segregation for what it was, just as my mother had a generation earlier.
I had lighthearted moments as a child, especially when I was very young. My favorite pastime was fishing, and every day after school I walked down a hill from my house to Mr. Jerry Brown’s creek. I caught pails full of catfish and brim. I guess I was too young to be afraid of the snakes hanging from the trees overhead. Priscilla and I once dragged a dead snake a long way down the red clay road near my house—a snake that was five feet long, according to shocked onlookers. Children aren’t as aware of the world around them, and those were my years of blissful ignorance.
When my mother left her husband, she decided to find work in Miami. She was caring for her own mother then, as she had been since 1942, because Grandmother had lost her hearing as a young woman and was completely deaf. Mother took us all on a segregated train when we moved—but again, because I was so young, I didn’t pay special attention to the “White Only” and “Colored” signs on the trains. All I noticed were the uniformed Negro soldiers who were riding the train with us. My mother found a job in Miami Beach as a customer attendant and window trimmer in a very exclusive dress shop for whites only. There were no other Negro women working in the shop, and she probably only got that job because she was so fair-skinned. I started school in Miami, at Anderson’s Kindergarten in Overtown, then I went to Phillis Wheatley Elementary School. After a time, Mother found it too difficult to take care of all of us in a city atmosphere, so she rented a house back in St. Hebron and asked Grandmother to care for us while she returned to Miami to get herself in a better position to bring us all back together again. We spent several years with Grandmother.
Of course, being children, we found ways to take advantage of my grandmother’s inability to hear. After bedtime, when Grandmother thought we were sleeping, Priscilla and I used to climb out of the bedroom window to engage in our little card-playing games. We’d set up a table and chairs, the neighbors’ children would come over, and we’d sit outside in the moonlit backyard playing bid whist and other card games, laughing and carrying on because we knew Grandmother would never hear a sound. Thinking back on that, it seems like a lost era, because it would not be safe for young children to do that now.
Mother came back to retrieve us when I was about nine, and that was probably a good thing. It was time for us to have more supervision. But Mother didn’t come for us alone; she had remarried a very tall, refined man named Marion M. Hamilton, of the Atlanta Hamiltons (who, it was said, were direct descendants of statesman Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, which might be one reason my stepfather was so fair-skinned, even more so than my mother). All of the Hamilton offspring were highly educated. Marion Hamilton had a master’s degree, and his brother, Henry Cooke Hamilton, whom we later learned to call “Uncle Cookie,” would later become the registrar and head of the psychology and education departments at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Uncle Cookie was married to Grace Towns Hamilton, who, in 1965, would herself be the first Negro woman elected to the Georgia House of Representatives.1
This new man in Mother’s life had an impressive pedigree, but he did not impress me. Not at first. I know now that my mother remarried because she wanted to provide a father for us—but to me, he was just a stranger who’d driven up to our house in a shiny black car I later learned was a Cadillac. His shoes were as shiny as his car, so shiny you could see your face reflected back when you stared at them. And I don’t think I had ever seen a man so tall! He must have been at least six-foot-six. The more he tried to reach out to me and encourage me to call him “Daddy Marion,” the more I retreated from him. I have never opened up to people immediately. It took me six or eight months just to call him “Daddy Marion.” As for building up my trust, that would take years.
Whether I liked it or not, we were a family now, and we moved to a South Florida town called Belle Glade. Belle Glade was in Palm Beach County, but it was nothing like the affluent areas of Palm Beach most people think of. Ours was a community of migrant workers and struggling people who lived in tin shelters that looked like barracks, but there were also professionals with their own homes. Housing was provided for teachers who, for the most part, came from West Palm Beach. Belle Glade was situated on dark black soil everyone called “The Muck.” The soil was called “Black Gold” because it was so fertile, but I had asthma and very sensitive skin as a child and was highly allergic to it. My stepfather taught in the local colored high school, Everglades Vocational High School, so this became our new home. He was also a minister, and he preached in the local AME church with a style that I enjoyed.
The thing I grew to appreciate most about Daddy Marion, however, was that he was a very talented musician, and he shared his love of music with all of us. He had played with jazz great Lionel Hampton. Every Christmas Eve we sat around the piano as he played Christmas carols, and my entire family would join in; my brother and mother shaking maracas, my sister playing the flute, and me playing my trumpet. We played until midnight, then went to bed eager to open our gifts later in the morning.
In Belle Glade, I became aware of the racial differences around us.
On the one hand, many of my new observations of whites had led me to have positive feelings about them. My mother was a Democratic committeewoman, and Belle Glade had an interracial council even in the 1950s, so my mother brought me around whites who addressed her respectfully as “Mrs. Hamilton,” which was rare in those days even though I didn’t realize it.
But there were also things I didn’t like, and I learned to rebel early.
The Dairy Queen, for example. When I was in junior high school and probably twelve or thirteen, my sister Priscilla and I liked to walk up to the Dairy Queen window to order ice cream, but there were two windows: one marked WHITE in front and one marked COLORED in the rear. Well, most of the customers were standing at the WHITE window, and Priscilla and I saw no reason that we shouldn’t stand there to be served, too. We sensed that the COLORED window would not receive the same care and attention as the window for whites, and we figured we were as good as any other paying customers. We went to the WHITE window every time. And the man would say, “The colored side is back there,” pointing it out to us as if he thought we were too stupid to know how to read. When he realized we did know the difference and we were there just flashing our sweetest smiles with no intention of moving, he got irritated. But he served us. If we had been adults, it probably would have been a different story. Someone might have called the police.
In my brother’s case, he had an incident where someone did call the police. I only found out very recently from Walter that when he was fifteen, after I’d already left home for college, he and some of his friends went to that same Dairy Queen and were told to go to the COLORED side. They were shocked, he told me later. “We didn’t know about it, because we were sheltered in a black neighborhood,” he said. He and his friends left in a rage.
They were so angry, in fact, that when they were driving in his friend’s car and encountered a lone white boy walking by the side of the road, they all shouted “Cracker!” at him as they passed. Walter had never done anything like that before.
“We took out our frustrations on him,” Walter says. “When we got home, the sheriff came to the house and told Daddy Marion we had done this. We tried to act like we didn’t do it. The sheriff reprimanded us, and Daddy Marion acted very Uncle Tomish and said, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ and ‘It won’t happen again.’ At that point, I didn’t understand it—but that was part of survival. The sheriff was the one in charge.”2
An incident in high school really left an imprint on me, too.
When I was about fifteen, I was on the student council. As student council members, we were assigned to welcome guests to the high school during our free periods. I remember very vividly that I was wearing my favorite red corduroy suit as I sat in the breezeway one day, and suddenly I heard a man’s voice say behind me, “How ’bout a little bit?” There was a white postman standing there smirking, and I was absolutely shocked. You have to remember—this was the 1950s, and for an adult to say something like that to a child was outlandish. I challenged him, to make sure I hadn’t heard wrong. I said, “What did you say?”
He had the nerve to repeat it. “How ’bout a little bit?” Then he walked away laughing, without a care in the world. And why not? I was just a Negro girl. During those days, white men could rape Negro girls and never see justice in the South, so why should he expect any kind of penalty? When my mother was growing up, she routinely heard about Negro girls who were forced to climb into white men’s cars so the men could have their way with them, and that sort of practice had been going on in the South since the days of slavery.
Oh, but I was mad! I marched right into that school and went to find Daddy Marion, who by that time was the dean of students. This was when I first began to notice the volatility of the white versus Negro question, because Daddy Marion hesitated. I know that if a Negro man had made a comment like that to me, Daddy Marion would have reacted with the same kind of outrage I felt. But we were discussing the actions of a white postal worker, a government employee, and I could see the doubt and nervousness pass across his face like a shadow. By then, I’d developed a lot of respect for Daddy Marion. After all, he had been my civics teacher, and had taught me about my rights and responsibilities as a citizen. But I lost some of my respect that day. I didn’t want to wait for him to make up his mind about what to do. Instead, I went straight home and told my mother about it.
Let me tell you a little bit more about Mother. As a young woman, Lottie Mae Powell had no stomach for the indignities she watched Negroes subjected to. When my sister, brother, and I were very young, according to my mother, a controversial trial involving a Negro defendant took place in Quincy. Negroes were told to shut their businesses for the day and keep clear of the streets, but my mother was expecting a money order from her brother, and no racist decree was going to prevent her from marching downtown to Western Union to take care of her business. My mother was a very small-boned woman, with delicate features, and she remembered how the whites sat chewing tobacco and watching her from shaded porches downtown. There she was, a lone Negro woman, walking forbidden streets. No one said a word to her.
To her, however, what was even worse than the attitudes of the whites was the compliance of the Negroes. She was disgusted to see men she had admired and respected cowering in hidden corners “like rats,” she recalled. She went home and packed a bag to leave town that same night. She later learned there was nowhere to run, really, but since she had ended her relationship with her husband, she fled to Miami with us in tow.
Years later, after we moved to Belle Glade, my mother took us out with her at night as she taught Negroes to register to vote. As a Democratic committeewoman, she brought new voters to churches to demonstrate how to fill out the ballots, and we helped her. I grew up with a very strong sense of civic duty.
So when my mother heard about the sexual advance a white postman had made toward me, she was just as shocked and angry as I’d been. She didn’t hesitate to pick up the telephone and begin making the necessary calls to report the man’s actions and to file a formal report. She hoped the complaint would make it all the way to Washington, D.C., but I don’t think either of us expected it would. Looking back on it now, I think Daddy Marion was afraid we would be visited by misfortune if we stirred up trouble—and men, of course, usually had to bear the brunt of retribution in the South, so I understand why he hesitated. But for my mother, fear of repercussions was the last thing on her mind.
It was a year before anything at all happened. But the report did make its way to Washington. Apparently, this postman had made similar comments to white females, too, so our complaint was lumped in with the others. When the white investigator showed up on our front porch, though, he made it clear he was trying to blame me for what had happened. First, he seemed skeptical because I was sixteen by then, and he pointed out that I’d claimed to be fifteen when we filed the report, as if that made all the difference in the world. Patiently, we explained that I had been fifteen when it happened. Then he used a different tactic: “Well, how do you know what he meant when he said, ‘How ’bout a little bit?’ ” I think he wanted to intimidate us, since so many Negroes could be very easily intimidated by white men of authority. My mother and I were very angry, but we answered his questions as patiently as we could. My mother didn’t scratch her head foolishly or let herself get confused. She said curtly, “Well, she knew what he meant and he knew what he meant.” And that was that.
Eventually, that postman disappeared, and we heard he was fired. I never fooled myself into thinking he lost his job because I spoke out—it was because whites had spoken out, too—but I was proud that I had stood my ground. It was a lesson I would draw upon again and again as I became a young woman. I didn’t know it then, but refusing to back down would become a trademark in my life.
Unfortunately, however, sometimes racial discrimination was much closer to home. Of Mother’s three children, Priscilla and Walter were both brown-skinned, and I was lighter, closer to Mother’s complexion. Priscilla always called me “dirty yellow” or “dingy yellow,” which I found very hurtful. When I was about eleven years old, an incident took place that left a strong impression on Priscilla: Daddy Marion’s mother died, and I was the only one of my siblings allowed to accompany Mother and Daddy Marion to the funeral in Atlanta. At the time, I had no idea why I was the one who went while Priscilla and Walter stayed at home. When we got there, all of Daddy Marion’s relatives were hugging me, and I found myself wondering, “Who are all these white people?” Although everyone there was considered Negro, the church pianist and I were the two darkest people at the funeral! Mother had arranged for me to spend time with another girl who was my age, but some of those present objected right away, and I felt my face burning as I realized they didn’t like her because of her color. Mother was very angry about it. That was how I slowly came to realize that Priscilla and Walter had been left at home because Mother didn’t want to subject them to rejection by these fair-skinned Negroes. Years later, I learned that Priscilla had been very hurt and resentful about being left behind. The issue seemed to fester between us. I was nominated to serve at the prom in the tenth grade, and when Priscilla heard my name called, she raised her hand and asked the teacher, “Why just the yellow girls?” Priscilla hadn’t objected to any of the other girls. The teacher called Mother to tell her about it, because she thought it indicated sibling rivalry at home. Obviously, Priscilla believed color separated us. Society had created the barrier.
When I was in high school, changes in those barriers seemed imminent. In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and the news of that antisegregation measure rocketed through the Negro community. Finally, after so many years of being forced to attend separate schools with less adequate facilities and supplies, the Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” lie that had been the law of the land, particularly in the South, ever since the racist Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case was actually five combined cases, all of them spearheaded by the respected National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund. Attorney Thurgood Marshall—who later became the first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice—argued the case before the high court, pointing out sociological and psychological research showing that segregation led to feelings of inferiority in Negroes.
I was so excited about the Brown decision, it’s almost too difficult to describe in words. I was in the ninth grade at the time, and I immediately had a grand vision of Negroes and whites sitting side by side, building a future together. The way I saw it, there would no longer be a world of limitless possibilities for whites and a second-class citizenship for Negroes—for the first time, this nation would belong to all of us equally! I thought the Brown decision would bring sweeping changes. As young as I was, I realized it would not eliminate all the problems we had in education, but I envisioned Negroes and whites working together to solve our common problems, and I wanted to be ready.
Of course, my reaction was fueled by naivete. It was May 17 when the decision was handed down, and I expected that we would all be going to school together by September. I had no idea what kind of delaying impact the phrase “with all deliberate speed” would mean in terms of bringing about desegregation. I also didn’t have the wisdom or experience to ask myself what negative changes might take place in the black community as a result of Brown—for example, that a Negro principal at a Negro school could not hope for such a prime assignment at a white school because he would be an outsider, subject to the prejudices of his superiors. (As it happened, in the state of Florida, all Negro high school principals were eventually demoted and made elementary school and junior high school principals3—including Daddy Marion, who had become a high school principal a few years after the Brown decision, but instead found his school designated for students in grades five through seven.) Or that the burden of “busing” students from one neighborhood to another would so often fall on Negro children, since white parents would not want to send their children to Negro neighborhoods.
None of this, of course, occurred to me in high school. All I knew was that I was excited by the prospect of all things implied by “integration”—better science equipment, up-to-date books, modern school buildings, and all of the other benefits I knew white children received. I wanted all Negro students to benefit from integration, and to me that meant we could not afford to be ill-prepared.
There were many fine instructors at my high school in Belle Glade, and Daddy Marion was a top-notch instructor who taught social studies as well as band. He had our little school playing sophisticated orchestra and marching band pieces while I was there. Somehow, he convinced the school to buy a bassoon, a very expensive, beautiful, and uncommon instrument he believed should be part of our school’s ensemble. Our school was in such a poor area that many of the students couldn’t even afford their uniforms, so we regularly held fund-raising drives to buy uniforms, but Daddy Marion never lowered his sights simply because most of the students were disadvantaged. He had grown up in affluence, in a home that had a music room and a library, and he thought it was critical to expose his music students to everything he could.
I wish I could say that all of the teachers at my high school were as dedicated.
This was “The Muck,” after all, a community of mostly poor blacks and migrants from the Caribbean who picked beans and other vegetables to earn a living, and my school was far from a coveted teaching assignment. Some of the teachers, like Daddy Marion, lived in Belle Glade and had a stake in the area—participating in church, taking part in the social fabric—but many lived during the school week in cottages owned by the Belle Glade Housing Authority, then on weekends drove forty miles to their homes in West Palm Beach. Some of those commuters were remarkably devoted to their students, but for many it was not a choice assignment. Sometimes, I felt I could see them watching the clock on Friday afternoons, eager to jump into their cars and drive away from Belle Glade as fast as they could. In my eyes, some of those teachers were not invested in the welfare of their students. Their attitude seemed to be “Well, this is just a bunch of migrant children. What good will it do to teach them anything?”
Since promises of integration were now in the air, I couldn’t tolerate the idea that we weren’t getting the best possible education. The person accountable for that, I decided, was our principal. Don’t get me wrong. My high school principal was a very nice man, very well-liked. He always had a smile on his face as he walked through the halls, and he knew how to make people feel good. But when it came to setting tough guidelines and enforcing them, he just did not measure up. He was not an assertive man, so I had the impression, even as a student, that some of his teachers were getting away with doing less than they should. They weren’t prepared, they weren’t following curriculum guidelines, and they weren’t putting nearly as much of themselves into teaching as Daddy Marion and the other dedicated teachers.
So what did I do? I started a petition drive to get the principal removed. Since Daddy Marion had also been my civics teacher, and I had watched my mother registering people to vote and conducting petition drives throughout the town, I had a good understanding of the procedure. I explained what I was doing to my classmates, and slowly they began to sign. First a dozen signatures, then two dozen, and before I knew it, hundreds of students had signed. I was a good motivator, even then.
Word of my petition got out, and it frightened some teachers. One day, a math teacher I respected began discussing my petition in his class—and he told the students that if any of them had signed it, they could be arrested and thrown in jail. To me, because I had not yet seen what this black teacher had probably seen in his lifetime, this was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. We lived in the United States of America! He probably just didn’t want to upset the administration at the school. Whatever his reason, he spread that lie, and it spread fast. That same day, students began approaching me, desperately asking to have their signatures removed. I tried to explain that there was no way they could be sent to jail for signing a petition, but they wouldn’t believe my word over a teacher’s. I felt sad and disillusioned.
I wasn’t going to give up. The way I saw it, they had given me their signatures, so those signatures now belonged to me, and I refused to let anyone remove his or her name on the basis of false information. The students were very anxious, though. At one point, their demands got so heated that I figured I should make a run for it and put my petition in a safe place—suddenly I was being chased out of the school yard by thirty or forty students!
I didn’t know it then, but my future as a freedom fighter had already begun. In the years to come, I would have experiences I never would have dreamed of as a fifteen-year-old high school student. Once I got to college, other instructors—teachers I truly admired—would continue to criticize any actions they deemed as radical. Students would be afraid to participate in activities that would make valuable changes. I would learn that one could, indeed, be jailed for the simplest of actions.
I graduated from high school in 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education. By that time, the excitement over the ruling had died down and reality had set in. I never attended an integrated school, and even today some schools have never been truly integrated.
Our principal was removed by the school board the term after I circulated the petition against him, but later I would wonder if maybe that math teacher had been sincere in trying to protect the students from unjust retribution. He knew something I had not fully learned back then: He knew that, as Negroes, the rules we had learned in our student lessons about the blessings of freedom in the United States of America surely did not apply to us.
I would learn that for myself very soon.