OUR RIGHTS, RECOGNIZED IN THE 1960S, ARE UNDER ATTACK
At 90, I am very proud of my family and my heritage. I’m a lifetime member of the NAACP who has been a member of Calvary Baptist Church since 1968, still am, and joined under Dr. S.M. Lockridge when I moved to California. I have four sons, three daughters, at least 37 grandchildren and 17 great-grandchildren. Black history is not all doom and gloom.
Jesse Owens is my cousin. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Owens, my second cousin, my mother’s first, he was one of the greatest U.S. track and field stars of all time. He won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. His house is a museum in Alabama, near where my mother’s side of the family still owns land. You see they both grew up around there. A lot of White people want to buy that farm, but we refuse to sell. It was my grandparents’ desire that it be passed down in perpetuity from generation to generation.
Now that was during the Great Depression. You couldn’t just go to the store and pick something up. There was rationing, like today with the COVID-19 pandemic. My childhood wasn’t a lot of fun; I went to church conferences with my father, peeled apples, snapped green beans, pickled beets, and during the summer, when the days were longer, even cured and canned meats to prepare for winter.
After my mother went to nursing school and graduated in 1921 from Meherry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., she was recruited by her professor, Dr. Bowser, as one of three in her class to found the first (and last — we would eventually witness desegregation) Black hospital in Parsons, Kansas. That’s where she would meet my father, an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) minister, and give birth to me on Aug. 2, 1931.
I was 12 when I moved to Kansas City, Kansas, after my father, an engineer for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (MKT) Railroad, was transferred there in 1943. At that time, there were all Black schools that weren’t integrated. Black people were in one part of town, and White people in the other. My mother had been told about this big university hospital and was hired as head nurse of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Kansas University Hospital. At that time it was only one story, and now it’s eight or 10 city blocks, and produces some of the greatest nurses and doctors in the world.
It was always my desire to become a social worker. I come from a long line of nurses, and that was expected. After my sister passed in 1967 and I moved to California, I determined to be a social worker, as I knew I could. My kids were old enough for me to go back to school, since I had raised my eldest children to help me raise their younger siblings.
At that point my second daughter, Donetta Moore, had already been at San Diego State University playing sports, and I joined her and we walked across that graduation stage together in 1976 with our bachelor’s degrees. I was able to transfer in credits from Southwestern Community College, where I also earned an associate degree. I later earned a master’s degree from SDSU.
I worked 10-hour days at the old Mercy Hospital, and had seven children as a single parent and accomplished all of my goals. I hope that’s eye-opening for those who say they can’t go back to school; that’s a lie. I took a full load of classes and didn’t have a babysitter or parents close by to help, but I had my kids trained so well that when they got home at 3 p.m., they did their homework before going out back to play.
They had a huge celebration in New York for Jesse Owens when he got back with his gold medals. But Alabama, his own state, in the South, did not give him the honors that the world did. They couldn’t celebrate in Oakville, his birthplace, so they went to his Baptist church and took the celebration there.
Today, the state of Alabama now recognizes his achievements, and things are changing. Finally Black people are being recognized. In 1996, they built a museum and a great big park in his honor, and I even visited for a celebration. But we had to go through that rejection first.
What I really want to communicate during Black History Month is that those human rights of ours that were recognized during the civil rights era are under attack. My mother watched our progress from reconstruction crumble, and I saw the progress regained in my 30s, but the gains of the 1960s are crumbling now with all of President Donald Trump’s court appointments denied to President Barack Obama by GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, and acts of voter suppression in Republican-controlled states.
History is repeating itself. Our rights that were recognized in the 1960s are being attacked by the Republican Party. In all my life, I never imagined those gains we made would be taken away. I had no clue it could happen; I thought things would keep getting better. But in the long run, hopefully they will.
My mother desegregated the hospitals in Kansas, and I, later, the schools in California, even becoming PTA president at Morse High School. That’s in the San Diego neighborhood of Skyline, where I reside on a street now named in my honor.
Harmon