Aisha,
This family blog
site has taken on a whole new meaning when it opened up to become a family
resource of stories that can be shared with and among one another, beyond just
you and me. We have a very interesting story to tell because of the radical
changes that rocked our family as we went from an extended Italian family in a
predominantly ethnic neighborhood to nuclear families emerging from a roiling
racially charged atmosphere in Detroit. Some of us stayed in the city of
Detroit and some of us rode the wave of White Flight out of Detroit. Even with
such disparate attitudes towards race, we were able, somehow, to maintain a
close family bond until after Grandma’s death. That’s when many phone lines
went silent and many shared meals remained unplanned. It was not so much that
we stopped loving each other so much as our worlds became separate and the
bridges between them were becoming few and far between.
My mother’s
household, as you know, stayed in Detroit, she being not only a Catholic who stepped
outside the Church at this time, but my parents divorced AND we found ourselves
in a sudden racial minority. Life was very different from the Catholic girl
making her first communion in the second grade with my white shoes, dress,
stockings and veil. I felt so safe and loved. But I was in for a ride when I found myself being one of two white kids left in my class when
the rapid White Flight changed my classmates, as well as our neighbors. The early 70s
were very militant and there was a lot of unrest with the police and the
S.T.R.E.S.S. program that equated to open season on Blacks, in general, and
Black males, in specific. The twist of fate twisted gradually more when we were
bussed, from our predominantly Black neighborhood, into a White neighborhood
that didn’t want any of us out there…and we were White kids. Neither side knew
how to take us and our color was relevant. But, being strangers about whom our
parents were fighting, made for a lot of interesting transitions as children
learned to work things out.
Our family was
very politically active, involved in community work, projects, events, and organizations.
We went to School Board meetings (city-wide and regional), went Court watching,
volunteered for many things and found some unexpected notoriety along the way because we
involved ourselves in positive change. In the sixth grade, I was part of a
weekly panel discussion on a local radio station discussing peaceful
integration, raising community awareness and working together between the
races. I was interviewed that year by a local news station news journalist for the
daily news segment after speaking before over 5,000 people at a state-wide convention
in Lansing, Michigan addressing education accountability issues (administrators, teachers, parents and students). I served as a
community board member of the Eastside Community Health Clinic at 16, the same
year I sent to the National Convention of the Coalition for Peaceful
Integration. A few months after that, I served as a Student Ambassador for
Peace to Israel. We were on welfare at that time, surviving on food stamps and not always keeping the utilties paid, yet we were walking an atypical path within this system.
My brother Ralph was involved in many things of equal merit,
the least of which not being his role in serving as a student representative on the New
Detroit Board of Trustees, sitting in meetings with a member of the J.L. Hudson
Family, the Mayor, and the "movers and the shakers" of Detroit during its brief renaissance. There were many other wealthy Detroiters whose work in the city
was unquestionably helpful to community promotion. Laurie Anne, the baby of my
mom’s family, served on the Police Community Relations Committee when still in
high school and after taking R.O.T.C. in high school went on to a successful
career as a law enforcement officer, reaching the rank of Lieutenant (so far). My mother served as a school board member
and helped start, and worked for, myriad non-profit organizations. Services like
creating a drop-in center to keep youth off the streets, providing tutoring and
lectures to teach anyone, neighborhood clean-up projects, low-income housing repair
and delivering hot meals to senior shut-ins, to name only a few.
Ralph organized a Students Rights and Responsibilities
Assembly at our Middle School when he was in the 8th grade and was
able to get a nationally known speaker named Junius Williams (a lawyer in juvenile law) to be the guest
speaker. We petitioned our school and were able to get chocolate milk added to
the lunch menu, and it was empowering to see our organized efforts for change work, even at such a simple level. But, when we petitioned our mother for a change in chores
(insisting that we re-organize the distribution of labor) she demonstrated the
"power of the control of resources." She withheld dinner until we agreed to
withdraw the petition. She said the lesson of power and wealth in this country
was not to be underestimated and you should know the reach of those you
challenge. Ralph and I held out the longest, but we, too, folded. Not to be
swayed, we continued our activities when Ralph joined Close-Up in high school,
which is a program designed for politically interested students to see
Washington, D.C. as part of a national program. He raised the funds for his own
trip by selling candy bars and participating in other school club activities, like car washes. I wrote for my
Middle School newspaper and learned how to LETTER well, making great looking
picket signs. We were dedicated to making things seem as right now as they were
before the sweeping changes of the neighborhood. We knew change happened nationally, but we lived it personally, locally.
The violence, the drugs and the decline of the educational
quality of schools continued to challenge our neighborhood. We all saw
shootings, stabbings, armed robbery, and fire-bombings. We all knew someone our
age who was raped and someone our age who was dead, before the end of Middle
School. We were embraced by some of our neighbors and distrusted by many
others, just based on racial histories and ongoing battles. Black kids, ten
years old, arrested for riding their bikes in a white neighborhood in case they
were “casing the houses.” It was raw and powerful.
So, as Jessica would ask, at this point, “…so you said all
that to say what?”
The bi-racial children in our family represent first,
children that we love. Second, they represent the possibility of a harmony
within human bodies, in a prayer that we will see racial harmony made of people
in America. We have fought for change and witnessed the beauty, intellect,
creativity, love and humanity in our children and it is a treasure that America
provided us now, what could never have happed in earlier times in our history.
We know struggle. We know hope. We know that change is possible and our
Grandfather and Grandmother’s family immigrated here to plant that hope in us,
our willingness to work for what we want most, and to love our children toward
a better future. Aisha, you and my children, and L.A.'s children, are the products of many lifetimes of effort to get to this
point in time. Thank you for letting your voice be heard, as you continue the
storytelling richness always evident in our family. You are a part of this
story, even as you are telling it. I love you, beautiful woman.
P.S. We also support the late Fr. William Cunningham's dedicated work in Detroit as founder of Focus:Hope. They are still there, doing their job to work for community education.
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