Ten years later, I graduated from the University of Texas Law School. In the huge and ornate hall where the Sunflower Ceremony was held, again friends and family surrounded me. But my thoughts focused on the lady at the bus stop. A few months later, I opened an envelope, which held confirmation that I had passed the Bar exam. I smiled. The lady at the bus stop would really be proud.
On a cold January day several years later, I was sworn in as a judge. I am so grateful my father, who scrimped and saved for my education, and who died the next November, was able to attend the swearing-in ceremony. I am so grateful that my uncle, who had tied perfect bows in my sashes when I was a little girl, and who never had a little girl of his own, came too—against the advice of his heart doctor. One of my girlfriends took off work and drove two hundred miles to be with me. Even surrounded by friends and family, I wished that the lady at the bus stop could have been there. I know that she—and those women I saw in her eyes—would have been proud.
I have been a lawyer for over twenty years now and I have written three best-selling novels. At every milestone in my life, I have remembered the lady at the bus stop. I wish that she could know that I have tried to earn that crumpled dollar bill she worked so hard for and the pride on her face that hot and humid day. I wish she could know how I strive to emulate her by taking every opportunity to be the lady at the bus stop for another generation of descendants of slaves. I pray that forty years from now, another woman will remember me, and remember seeing the lady at the bus stop—and all those other women—in my eyes.
Evelyn Palfrey
Over the Wall
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.
Janie Mines
I would not have been there except they had lowered the height requirement in the late 1970s to recruit more minorities and women—and I was both a “minority” and a “woman.” Their goal was to recruit Asian and Latino men, but it also opened the door for a “little” woman like me to get through. This was my chance—me, Linda Coleman— to become a deputy sheriff.
The day was young and overcast when I arrived at the police academy. But as far as I was concerned, the sun was shining. I’d made it.
It had been a long, grueling year getting to this point. I had taken a written test, a psychological exam and an oral interview, and I had passed all three. Then the background investigation began. They investigated everyone, from my grandmother in Texas, to my next-door neighbors, to the babysitter of my two small children. They knew everything about me from the day I was born.
As part of my qualification process I spent a day at a sheriff station with the captain. I was scrutinized, chastised and downright ostracized. It was no secret how he felt; he never missed an opportunity to tell me. “Women don’t belong on the department, all gays should be taken out and shot, where do ‘you people’ get off thinking you can do whatever you want nowadays?” If I heard one more story about the “good ole days” when women were women and men were men and “you people” knew your place, I think I would have puked.
But all that was behind me now. I was at the academy, and I was going to be a deputy sheriff. My excitement didn’t last long.
My first encounter was with a twenty-year career officer, a sergeant nicknamed “Goliath.” He was six-feet-four-inches tall, and 300 pounds of solid muscle, to my five-feet-three-inches and 118 pounds of woman. “Sgt. Goliath” let me know in no uncertain terms he was not happy I was there. Like others in the department, he believed this was a “men only” profession. And it would suit many of them just fine if it were “white men only.”
The sergeant never called me by name. It was always “little lady” or “little girl.” When he looked at me, he would stare as if he were looking right through me. It was apparent he was not going to make it easy. In fact, his job was to make it as difficult as possible for me to pass the physical agility test, and he did a darn good job.
I had to run the mile, climb through one window and out another, walk a balance beam five feet off the ground, pull a 150-pound mannequin thirty yards and push a police car twenty feet, all in record time. And as the sergeant said before I began, “Look here, Little Lady, if you can’t do all of these activities including pushing that police car over here until it touches my kneecaps, I’m gonna have the pleasure of sending you home.”
I completed each task, but every bone, muscle and fiber of my body ached. I could hardly catch my breath. Some of the recruits passed out and had to be carried off the course. My vision was blurred, my heart beat a mile a minute, and my ears hummed, but I didn’t pass out. In fact, I walked off the course on my own and felt pride welling up inside. I had completed that obstacle course, and I was going to be a deputy sheriff.
But the smirk on the sergeant’s face told me I was wrong. That’s when I discovered yet another challenge waiting for me. This time even I didn’t know if I would be able to make it. My head ached, my legs were as heavy as lead, and my arms felt as if someone had yanked them from their sockets.
The ultimate challenge? Climbing a six-foot, solid concrete wall. If somehow you were able to get through the physical agility test, this would separate the boys from the men—or girls from the women, as it were. Recruit after recruit, both men and women, tackled the six-foot wall only to fall to the ground in defeat. Most of them were taller and bigger than me. I could feel my heart sink and my confidence fade. I saw my career with the sheriff’s department slipping away.
Two more recruits, and then it would be my turn. I closed my eyes and tried to envision myself going over the wall. Suddenly, I remembered a song my grandmother used to sing in church, an old Negro spiritual. “I shall, I shall, I shall not be moved.” My nerves calmed. I heard my father’s voice, “You have to be twice as good and do twice as much just to compete.” And I thought, I have been twice as good and I have done twice as much and I have given it my all and now this. . . .
And then I swear I heard the words of my high school track coach. “A lady’s strength is in her legs, not in her arms.” I had watched the women try to tackle the wall by jumping up like the men and grabbing hold of the wall with their arms in an attempt to pull themselves atop the wall, straddle it and drop to the other side. It hadn’t worked for them, and I knew it wouldn’t work for me.
I shall not be moved. Be twice as good and do twice as much. A lady’s strength is in her legs. It was my turn. The six-foot, solid concrete wall loomed bigger than life—the only thing standing between me and my dream. I closed my eyes and imagined it was a track field.
I took off running as fast as I could, and when my feet hit the concrete I looked up to the heavens. And I ran up that wall! I shall not be moved. Twice as good. A lady’s strength. I straddled the top and dropped to the other side.
The whole camp was cheering—everyone, that is, except the sergeant. He never said a word. He turned his back and walked away. Several men made it over that day, but I was the only woman.
Since then, I have gone over a lot of walls, but I learned some valuable lessons at the academy that have helped me. What the Goliaths think is not nearly as important as what I think about myself. The Goliaths despise change and progress, but there are some things even they can’t control.
Linda Coleman-Willis
On Becoming a Farmer
I may not be responsible for getting knocked down, but I am responsible for getting back up.
Jesse Jackson
I sat with dreaded anticipation and a feeling of impending doom. I was sitting two rows from the front in a crowded college amphitheater filled with more than one hundred pre-med science majors. We were all waiting for our chemistry professor to return the year’s first exam.
I had started my freshman year in a Southern California university filled with anticipation. I had a full scholarship. I graduated valedictorian of a small black Christian school of seventy-four students and had all the earmarks for a bright future. However, after arriving on a campus where the student bod
y was 96 percent white and 90 percent pre-med, I was filled with doubt. It quickly became evident that many of the other students’ level of college preparation far exceeded mine.
The professor, Dr. Kraig,* wore black horn-rimmed glasses, was extremely sarcastic and spit when he talked. What made it even more dreadful was that he made comments loud enough for others to hear as he passed back the exams. I held my head down and began to sink lower into my seat as I watched his stack of exams grow smaller. I had done poorly, and I knew it.
Having been born and reared in Compton, California, I came from a family with a rich heritage but very little formal education. I had decided in the third grade that I wanted to become a doctor. Yet now that the time had come, I was afraid I wasn’t smart enough and afraid I couldn’t measure up. I was fearful that the reality of my goal was available to everyone but me. Many of my peers’ parents were either doctors or professionals. My mother was the only college graduate in our family, and she had just graduated the year before.
I was snapped back to reality as Dr. Kraig stood looking down on me, waving his horn-rimmed glasses, smirking and spitting as he spoke. “If you think you are going to become a doctor, that is a joke! If you want to help people, you should become a farmer and grow food . . . you will never be a doctor!”
He then crumpled up my exam like a piece of trash and dropped it on my lap. I blinked back the tears as I opened it up and read scrawled across the top—36 percent. Oh no! I knew I had done poorly—but this! I wished I could evaporate and disappear into thin air. I was humiliated.
I held my head down during the remainder of the lecture, unable to listen or take notes. Every negative thought, every self-doubt that I’d ever had reared its ugly head. Maybe Dr. Kraig was right; maybe I should just give up and change my major and—but no.
While I did not have role models with higher degrees of formal education, I had a family who had taught me the value of integrity, perseverance and tenacity in the most difficult of situations.
Though my father had little formal education, he was the smartest man I ever knew; he had a keen sense of wisdom and business foresight. He would always smile and say he had a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks. Though he ran a junkyard and used-car lot, he wore a suit and tie to work every day of his life.
Sitting in that university amphitheater, I began to envision my father dressed in his suit, standing in the pouring rain with his feet sinking in the dirt and grease, attempting to get those old junk cars started. I began to hear my mother’s typewriter clatter at 6:00 a.m. as I awakened for high school. She had been up all night finishing a paper toward the completion of her college degree. She would then head to work at my father’s junkyard where she was the secretary. I began to hear my father saying, “Do not be shaken by what others say or think of you. Cover the ground you are standing on, and who you are and what you are will show up anyway.”
I felt my life flow return as I unconsciously clenched my fist and dug my heels into the floor. I had always been taught by word and example that God is in control and that all things are possible through God’s power.
I sat straighter in my seat, wiped away any remaining tears, gathered my books and waited for the amphitheater to clear. I quietly made my way to Dr. Kraig’s office and stood outside his door praying for strength and courage.
I tapped on his door, walked in and began to speak from my heart: “Whether I become a doctor or not is immaterial. Your comments were demeaning, disrespectful and hurtful. Furthermore, one day I will come back and place my M.D. degree on your desk!”
With that, I turned around and marched out of his office.
I went on to graduate with honors with a degree in biology and was accepted into five different medical schools. I also had the privilege of being elected class president and giving the baccalaureate address during my senior class graduation.
I wish I could report that life was easy from that point, devoid of drama and trauma. The truth is that the journey through medical school and residency tested my core sense of self and survival at every level. At different times, I had to fight back the demons of doubt and negative voices that prompted feelings of inadequacy.
It has been through God’s grace that I was able to complete a residency and a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry. I am board certified in two different areas of psychiatry. In my specialty, there are no more exams to be taken. I can say from personal experience that out of adversity come many blessings.
Fifteen years ago I received an alumni newsletter that reported Dr. Kraig had died of cancer. Pity—he died before I could share the valuable life lessons about the merit and value of belief and determination that began in his chemistry class.
“A farmer”? Perhaps. Today, I plant seeds of hope and courage in lives lost in barren fields, shrouded in darkness. By warmth and nurturing, I help these dormant seeds blossom and grow into hope-filled lives. Dr. Kraig, you will never know the impact your words had upon my life, but others have reaped the results. It takes rain as well as sun and good seed that is resistant against drought and disease, for prolific growth. Perhaps God sent you my way to propagate seed resistant to doubt and discouragement, to quicken dormant desires to help others. I am proud to fertilize and farm these fields.
Jenée Walker
*Name has been changed
Buffalo Soldiers
A Letter from Then-Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff General Colin L. Powell
to Senator Nancy Kassebaum
March 12, 1991
Dear Senator Kassebaum:
I am very grateful you invited me to provide a letter expressing my thoughts about the Buffalo Soldiers. I’m also thankful for your efforts on behalf of those soldiers and especially for introducing in the U.S. Senate the Joint Resolution to designate July 28, 1992, as “Buffalo Soldier Day.”
When I was a brigadier general and assigned to Fort Leavenworth in 1982, I was jogging around the post one day and noticed a couple of gravel alleys that were named “Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Streets.” I wondered if that were all there was to commemorate those great soldiers. I wondered if on one of America’s most historic Army posts, a post where the Tenth Cavalry spent so much of its garrison life, a post in the center of the region where both the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry spent so much of their blood, I wondered if those gravel alleyways were all there was to signify their presence, all there was to commemorate their incredible contribution to the settlement of the American West.
And so I looked around some more. And on the entire post all I could find to commemorate two of the greatest regiments in the Army were those two alleys. That was a situation that I believed had to be changed. So a few of us set in motion a project to honor the Buffalo Soldiers. You, Senator, now co-chair the committee that grew from that project. Your committee oversees the construction of a proper monument to those great soldiers—a monument not simply to honor Buffalo Soldiers: instead, to honor all black soldiers who have served this nation over its long history.
Since 1641 there has never been a time in this country when blacks were unwilling to serve and sacrifice for America. From pre-Revolutionary times through the Revolutionary War, through every one of our wars and on up to the present, black men and women have willingly served and died. But it is also a part of our history that for most of that time blacks served without recognition or reward for the contribution they made for our freedom—for the freedom they did not enjoy here in their own beloved native land. The Buffalo Soldiers are a symbol of one chapter in a proud and glorious history.
To remind me of that history I have a painting that hangs on a wall in my office directly across from my desk. From that painting, Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson, Tenth Cavalry Regimental Commander, Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, and a troop of Buffalo Soldiers constantly look at me. They remind me of my heritage and of the thousands of African Americans who went before me and who shed their blood and made their sa
crifices so that I could be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They look at me and make sure that I will never forget the courage and the determination of African Americans who defied all odds to fight for their country, and who wore the uniform of the U.S. Army as proudly and as courageously as any other American who ever wore it.
The legacy of that pride and courage motivates every black soldier, sailor, airman, marine and Coast Guardsman taking part today in Operation Desert Storm, and every black man and woman who helps man the ramparts of freedom around the world from Japan to Panama to Germany. It’s as if a full century had passed in the blink of an eye and Frederick Douglass’s words were suddenly and vividly fulfilled, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, ‘U.S.’, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” Amen.
Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin L. Powell
What Black History Means to Me
The first interpretation of African history is the responsibility of scholars of African descent.
John Henrik Clarke
What black history means to me:
We are the children and descendants of the great African empires of Mali, Songhay and Old Ghana.
We are Estevanico, an African who accompanied Spanish explorers through the Arizona and New Mexico territories in 1538.
We are the slave Phillis Wheatley, who in the 1770s wrote poetry that has been read throughout the world.
We are Jean Point du Sable, a Negro trader who founded and helped settle Chicago.
We are five thousand slaves and free blacks who served in the Continental Army and Navy between 1776 and 1781.
Chicken Soup for the African American Soul Page 6