“To give to thy friend is not to cast away, it is to store for the future.”
—Swahili proverb
In the 1946 Frank Capra Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, a man played by Jimmy Stewart learns how much his presence has meant to his quaint little town of Bedford Falls: first because an angel allows him to see how the town would have deteriorated without his selfless presence, and then when all his friends and neighbors, rich and poor (even a black woman!), pour into his living room to give him money to pull him out of a financial mess, all of them singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” It’s a favorite moment in film for Americans.
On a Monday night in October 1997, my father had a similar moment of enlightenment in the quaint little town of Miami, Florida, where his selfless presence was celebrated at a meeting at the Joseph Caleb Center in Miami’s inner-city in northwest Dade County. Like the Jimmy Stewart character in It’s a Wonderful Life, my father was feeling gloomy when he had his glimpse into the community’s heart. He was not at the meeting by choice. Also like the movie character, an unexpected turn had left him feeling mounting desperation.
For seven years my father had served as director of the Office of Black Affairs, and for seventeen years as program officer of the Community Relations Board of Miami-Dade County. From that post—and in his years with Legal Services, the Economic Opportunity Program Inc. (EOPI), and the NAACP—he had traversed the county and state from end to end, forging the next phase of the civil rights work he’d begun as a young man in law school. He’d worked on tenants’ rights, poverty programs, school desegregation, legal aid, Haitian amnesty, police accountability, and juvenile justice. In 1995, under the auspices of the Black Affairs Advisory Board, he’d helped mobilize community pressure to free more than 200 Haitian children being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval camp, one of the things he has told me he is most proud of. His office’s community advisory committee included a vocal member—my mother—so my parents were doing what they have always done in more than thirty years of life together as civil rights activists and community advocates. They were working for change in the best ways they knew how.
In 1997, in the wake of budget problems, the mayor was cutting jobs. My parents worried in the weeks after the rumors of cutbacks began circulating, but I was never seriously concerned. My father was John Due. He’d been out on the streets trying to ease the lives of people in the county since I could remember, braving riots, frustration, and bureaucracy. Even if the county shuffled him to a new position, I was certain his bosses would take care of my father after he’d spent twenty-five years trying to keep a lid on such an emotionally volatile place.
I was wrong. Dad was among 158 people who received pink slips. No new job had been offered to him. Two years before retirement, it seemed, my father was being put out to pasture. The new mayor of Dade County, Alex Penelas, was in his thirties, one of my peers. Also, newer voices from different communities were vying for recognition, some of whom had not lived in Miami during the 1980 riots and had no memory of a time, some years earlier, when black people had to carry passes to work on Miami Beach—or, like my father, were constantly followed by police when they crossed the causeway. Miami is a city of newcomers who bring memories of their histories from other places, which gives the region both its amazing vitality and a kind of collective community amnesia. I realized my father was being forgotten by the county he and my mother had helped build.
Sometimes bad news dazes me, leaving me feeling paralyzed. That had happened in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when it took me two full days to pull myself away from the Herald’s newsroom to visit my parents, aunt, and grandmother in the hurricane-torn area of Southwest Dade and bring them a hot meal. It happened again when I heard about my father’s pink slip in 1997. I felt helpless to do anything. I was a reporter dancing that ambiguous line of trying to observe and report the news while my family was busily making news. I’d had to grow accustomed to this role at the newspaper, with coworkers on the news desk often asking me for my parents’ telephone number when they needed comments for their stories. (Once, during my earliest days as an intern at one of the Herald’s suburban bureaus, I quoted my own father in a story about the NAACP, in a moment of supreme awkwardness and understaffing. It only happened once, and yet it seemed to be the story of my life.)
Through none of my own doing—I was too dazed to make a trip to my newspaper’s editorial board offices, nor would I have considered it proper—the Herald did run an editorial chastising the county for its treatment of my father. “Florida’s and Dade County’s history record Mr. Due as a courageous and selfless champion in the struggle for equality. He risked everything—life, family, and future—to secure rights enjoyed today by so many.”1
In some ways, Johnita is the most emotional person in our family, and she also has the most clearheaded ability to jump into the fray with both her mind and her claws sharp. From New York, she immediately dashed off letters to Mayor Penelas and every county commissioner to plead my father’s case, squeezing in the time to do it while she worked sixty-hour weeks at a Wall Street law firm. She also sent copies of her letters to a black-owned radio station, WMBM–AM, owned by New Birth Baptist Church in Miami. Miami activist Bishop Victor T. Curry, pastor of that church, read Johnita’s letter over the airwaves. Dad did his part, too. He took copies of his pink slip to the Miami Times and to Miami’s black radio stations.
I hoped the situation would take care of itself right away, that someone at the county would slap his forehead like Homer Simpson and restore Dad’s job with a letter of apology and a gift certificate for dinner for two to compensate for the stress to my parents. That did not happen.
This was also about the time I’d begun to notice that my parents were getting older. The first shock had come at my college graduation in 1987, when they’d both come out to Evanston. Mom’s hair had gone completely silver since the last time I’d seen her. Dad, too, had much more gray than usual, and his posture was slightly stooped, his gait much less spry than it once had been. In every year thereafter, I’d witnessed their continued aging: Mom needing more and more prescriptions for growing problems with high blood pressure and diabetes, which runs in our family, and Dad having less and less energy for the sit-ups and morning jogs through the neighborhood he had once enjoyed. They weren’t old to me, not by a long shot, but I was beginning to imagine with disturbing clarity what they would be like once they were. The older people get, the more tired they become. Even fighters get tired of fighting.
I wondered if Dad might fall victim to the biggest irony of all: that after he and Mom had spent their entire adult lives fighting for others, they would not have the energy left to fight for themselves. That scenario began to seem more and more like harsh reality in that October.
As hard as it is to accept that strangers do not know and appreciate us, it’s harder to accept that often our own people do not know us either. It must be human nature to forget, a biological function of the brain that encourages old information to fade, enabling us to absorb new information more readily. Perhaps our forgetfulness is just a human tendency that enables us to avoid pain at every opportunity. Memories hurt sometimes. Dad told me that when he stopped in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1994 to commemorate his civil rights work with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, he met a group of black ministers for breakfast. After he introduced himself and stated his purpose, they collectively told him, “There’s nothing to remember. It’s time to move on,” a form of community amnesia. Bearing in mind that forgetful tendency, my deepest fear during the 1997 upheaval in Dade County’s government was that even blacks in Miami would have forgotten my father, and that the people he had fought for would not be willing to fight for him.
I did not know what to expect when Mom, Dad, Mother, and I drove to a community meeting at the Joseph Caleb Center, the arts and meeting complex on Northwest 54th Street in Miami. I have seen plays and music concerts at the center, which is named for black labor leader Joseph Caleb. I once had the honor of introducing actress Alfre Woodard when she made an appearance there. The center also has a library, and it is a satellite government center. I had attended meetings there, mostly as a reporter. I’m sure my parents could not calculate how many meetings they had attended at the center and places like it. Sometimes meetings bear great fruit, and sometimes they’re a waste of time and gasoline. That night, as we drove, none of us knew what kind of meeting this one would be.
Mother was not traveling nearly as much as she once did. She’d had surgery to remove two of her toes, and learning to walk again had been a struggle for her. She also grew fatigued much more easily. If I’d been watching Mom and Dad slowly grow older, I’d been watching my grandmother simply falling apart, and not nearly so slowly. Toward the end of her life, Mother was in almost constant discomfort, but that night she was with us. She was worried about Dad, but I’m sure she was even more worried about Mom. After her daughter had been forced to grapple with so many family and community emergencies over the years, I’m sure Mother was worried Mom might be at her breaking point. The future financial insecurity was bad enough, but the added disrespect made the situation that much harder to accept.
Dad didn’t want Mom to speak at the meeting. He knew how emotional she’d been over the last few weeks, and he feared the worst if she stood in front of an audience that would probably include the mayor. Mayor Penelas, after all, held my father’s future in his hands, and diplomacy might not be on Mom’s mind, given her anger. “Patricia, this is a meeting about the county’s budget cuts, not about me,” he reminded her.
“I won’t speak,” Mom said. “I’m just there to show my support.”
I’ve heard stories about the mass meetings of the 1960s that filled black churches throughout the South, but the closest I’d come to seeing one for myself was the night of October 27, 1997, at the Caleb Center. The meeting room was packed. Scanning the crowd, it seemed to me that every seat was filled. The newspaper estimated that 400 people were there, but in my mind there might as well have been a thousand. People were crowded in the back, hugging the walls. There was standing room only.
The crowd was in a bad mood, stirring restlessly. Bishop Victor T. Curry, serving as moderator, set the tone from the start. “We are in trouble in Metropolitan Dade County,” the clergyman said, and the crowd uhm hmmmed with recognition. “We are in trouble. This is not the same old Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow trouble. This thing has taken on a whole new scenario.”
“That’s right. It sure has,” Mother said quietly beside me. Because her eyes troubled her, she often allowed them to fall shut when she was in public, but she was listening.
“It’s deeper than you and I can ever imagine,” Bishop Curry continued. “This thing is so deep, it’s not even black and white anymore. It has crossed all color lines. It has crossed all ethnicities. Now we have to make those persons who have been elected to public office accountable. They must be.”
The crowd rippled with amens and applause.
The mayor was tardy for the meeting, and much was made of that. When Mayor Penelas arrived, he contended that he hadn’t heard about the meeting, and a small debate ensued, claims and counterclaims. After that, the business of budget overruns and the mayor’s proposed staff layoffs came to the fore.
Mrs. Eufaula Frazier, a Democratic committeewoman from Dade County with whom my parents have worked since I was very young, was one of the people who stood up to speak. She spoke up for Dad and the others whose jobs had been threatened. When she finished, the audience cheered her. Marlene Bastiene, president of the Haitian Women of Dade County, also spoke passionately on Dad’s behalf. Black Miami was in a bad mood.
The community had also been in a bad mood in 1990, when a different set of mayors throughout the region denounced Nelson Mandela on the event of his first visit to the city after his release from prison. In that situation, the county’s leadership clearly had embraced the feelings of the Cuban-American community toward Mandela, rendering the black community’s feelings wholly inconsequential. The ensuing economic black boycott, spearheaded by black Miami lawyer H. T. Smith and others, ended after Dade County had lost millions in tourism dollars. The word “boycott” was being uttered at that meeting again.
Dade County’s new mayor, feeling defensive after being booed soon after his arrival, was doing little to soothe hurt feelings. His answers were polite, but he captured none of the “I feel your pain” sincerity it takes to win over an angry audience, which Bill Clinton, for example, had mastered so well. There were times the freshman mayor seemed on the verge of losing his patience. His youthfulness only made matters worse, since several people at that meeting were many years his senior and there were moments when he sounded condescending.
When my mother stood up to speak, my heart froze with dread. What would she say?
After the ritual of welcoming the honored guests—who included the mayor, County Commissioners Barbara Carey and James Burke, and State Rep. James Bush—her voice trembled with barely suppressed emotion. “I want to get to the meat of some things,” Mom said, and the crowd knew she was about to preach. She began slowly, asking some general questions about the mayor’s proposed changes as it related to her appointed position on the Black Affairs Advisory Board, but then her voice swept into the same rhythms I imagine had inspired students in Tallahassee to go to jail. “I have several interests here tonight. I should say that I have a personal interest, and I have a personal interest. My husband is John Due, and this is my community.”
The audience was hypnotized. Applause rained on my mother.
“And you know, Mayor Penelas, you may not understand where I’m coming from. You may feel, and some other people may feel, that I have audacity to be up here because my husband is involved. But this is my community. I am concerned about him personally and about this community. Because this is a man whose children sometimes felt that the community was his family.” Again, her voice trembled. Listening, I had to fight tears. Yes, the truth hurts.
“That’s right, that’s right,” Mother said beside me, patting my knee.
“I respect him,” Mom went on. “He’s my husband, and we are very different. He’ll say, ‘You’re talking tonight. You said you weren’t going to say anything.’ But I have to.” There was laughter and applause.
My mother told the story of Dr. Tee S. Greer, the Dade County Public Schools administrator who’d recently passed away after being continually overlooked for a permanent position as school superintendent even though he’d been designated several times to serve as an interim superintendent. (There had not been a black school superintendent in the Dade County school system since the removal of Dr. Johnny Jones in the 1980s.) “You know, Dr. Greer died recently,” Mom said. “Some of us said over Dr. Greer’s tenure that he was too conservative, that Dr. Greer always wanted to work within the system. And what happened? That system rooted him out—and, I feel, killed him prematurely. Why is this important? This is important because we tell our children that you must work within the system, and this is what we have to say happens to people who work within the system.”
The audience applauded loudly. Then they waited to see how the mayor would respond.
Mayor Penelas addressed Mom’s more general concerns in great detail, explaining how he wanted to organize the advisory boards dedicated to black, Hispanic, Asian, and women’s affairs as subcommittees of the Community Relations Board, so members could sit at the table together. Then he addressed the question of Dad.
“As it relates to your husband.… We’re working with him, and he’s working with members of my staff, and we’re doing everything we can to help him, but I don’t think this should become a meeting about particular people, because—” At that point, the mayor was nearly drowned out by the restless, irritated stirring of the crowd. They did not boo him again, but they wanted to.
At that, Bishop Curry spoke up. His voice, too, was soaked with emotion.
“Mr. Mayor, I think you miss the point of why it’s personalized. This man, Mr. Due—” He stopped, frustrated, and began again. “See, this is part of the problem with many of our Hispanic brothers and sisters. You all don’t know the history. You all don’t know the history of the black community.” Applause, a few shouts.
“You don’t know and you don’t care,” Bishop Curry went on. “This man is on record as the attorney to help desegregate the school system. Sir, in our opinion, this man is a hero.”
At that, the crowd erupted with applause and hooting.
“And if this is how your government treats our heroes, if you can do it to John Due, the rest of us will catch much hell. If you do it to him, the rest of us don’t have a chance. And Mr. Mayor, that’s what’s missing. That’s what many of our wonderful Cuban brothers and sisters are missing. You have no respect. You’ve got to respect us, Mr. Mayor. That’s disrespect right there. This man shouldn’t have to be working with anybody in your office. Leave that man alone. It’s wrong, Mr. Mayor. And that’s what you’re hearing today. People are upset because we’re not being respected as a people.”
The roar of the crowd sounded to me like a powerful creature stirring to wakefulness. Their shouts were a combination of love and rage. The people were on their feet, venting decades of frustration. I think Dad and Mom were too tense that night to savor the community’s love, as speaker after speaker stood up on Dad’s behalf, but I’ll never forget that meeting. I’ll never forget the sound of that love. That night, I knew exactly where my father had been all those years my sisters and I were growing up, what he had been doing with those papers in his garage. I saw my father’s other family.
Little more than a week later, Dad got a new job assignment within the county, as an executive with the Miami-Dade Community Action Agency, to help coordinate anti-poverty programs. He would no longer enjoy the freedom of running his own office, but he would have a job at the same salary. Sometimes communities are heard, if only they speak up.
Sometimes people don’t forget.