HONORING ROLE MODELS
NAACP recognizes local leaders from different fields
POTTSTOWN » The local chapter of the NAACP marked Black History Month Thursday, Feb. 27, by recognizing area African American leaders who are making history today.
“Kids want to see people who look like them” when they attend school, have contact with police, the medical or business community, more than one of the speakers noted.
And that began with Pottstown NA ACP chapter President Johnny Corson who said he was inspired to become a community leader when he first saw former Pottstown Police Chief James Rodgers “riding a horse and wearing a cowboy hat.”
“When you’re a black kid playing in the yard and you look up and see a black man, riding a horse, with his back straight and his chest out, that does something to you,” he said.
Mark Gibson
That may be true someday of a kid today who sees Mark Gibson driving a speeding Empire fire truck to the scene of a fire, and racing into a burning building.
Gibson said he was inspired to become a firefighter in fifth grade after learning a cousin had died in a fire. He “started hanging out at the firehouse” and soon helped form the company’s first junior corps at age 12.
He volunteered with the company for 22 years and the first time a paid driver’s position opened up, he decided to stick with his job at Stanley Flagg Brass, because the pay was better.
The second time a slot opened up, “they turned me down. I had experience and I was qualified.
The reason they turned me down was the color of my skin,” he said.
He got the NAACP involved which, at the time, was headed by the late Newstell Marable, but to no avail.
But the third time a vacancy opened up, in February 1998, Gibson got the job “and The Mercury interviewed me and I said in the paper ‘I’m here to stay.’ I could have gotten a job somewhere else, but I wanted to say and be a firefighter in my home.”
His journey was not a straight one. Gibson said dropped out of high school, which he regrets to this day, and developed a drug problem that required three trips to rehab “and now I am 26 years clean.”
But speaking to the students from Pine Forge Academy who were in the audience, Gibson said: “God gave me a second chance, but you have to take advantage of it.”
He urged them to stay in school and off drugs. “We get called out to a heroin overdose two or three times a day, and they don’t always make it,” he warned.
Ervina White
White had an emergency and could not be at the Feb. 27 celebration, but her sister read a statement outlining the many challenges faced in opening Pottstown’s first African-American-owned funeral home, Beauford Funeral Services, on High Street.
Although a petition sought to prevent its opening, the business complied with zoning and was granted permission to open, despite facing many challenges from the codes department.
It is now a successful business that also sponsors community events.
Sharon Valentine-Thomas
Pottstown’s first African-American mayor, Valentine-Thomas said she had many instances in which she was steered “to the little table.”
And although she advised against complaining too loudly, “you can’t let it change who you are.”
Her advice is “every time someone offends you, do something nice for them.”
Also a former school board member, Valentine-Thomas said she knocked on 1,100 doors the first time she ran for office.
“Four hundred of those doors were in the week before the election. My feet didn’t know they were African-American, and I just kept thinking about Harriet Tubman, who walked 600 miles,” Valentine-Thomas said.
“The excitement of being elected was that it was the people who made the choice, not me.”
Emanuel Wilkerson
Wilkerson, who made headlines when he was elected to the Pottstown School Board when he was still a high school student, said he has learned “there are those who came before you, and those who will come after you. So you have to be the best you can be.”
“There are people who read history, and people who write history. Go write history so you can read about yourself,” advised Wilkerson, who also works in the office of U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-4th Dist.
Since graduating and attending Temple University, where he is an officer in the NA ACP chapter there, Wilkerson said he has also learned “to love my blackness.”
That does not mean rejecting white people he said. “the NAACP was founded by white people, all of us need to get to the top of the mountaintop together.”
Stacey Woodland
Woodland, who grew up in Philadelphia, said she became inspired to get involved with the YWCA by her early experience volunteering with community groups there.
Now the CEO of YWCA TriCounty Area in Pottstown, she reiterated the goals of the 112-yearold chapter — “eliminating racism, empowering women.”
She urged the community to get involved.
“There are lots of opportunities for you there, and lots of opportunities to give back,” Woodland said.
As someone who did not grow up in Pottstown, Woodland thanked Corson for introducing her around town to ease the transition in her new position.
“He became my friend and supported me,” she said.
As for her climb up the ladder to a leadership position, Woodland advised: “it’s not how you start, but how you finish.”
Maria Tucker
Tucker, who has been an obstetrician and gynecologist at both Pottstown Hospital and Einstein Montgomery, said she was inspired to follow in her father’s footsteps.
Tucker said her father had a practice for 30 years who was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. With her mother being a retired educator, education was strongly stressed in her household.
“They always said a good education is the one thing they can’t take away from you,” said Tucker.
Despite growing up in a household where education was revered, in school she was advised against applying to her first choice-college — University of Virginia.
“They said ‘you should apply to Virginia State. There’s nothing wrong with Virginia State, but I had visited Charlottesville, and that’s where I wanted to go. Thankfully, I was accepted there,” Tucker said.
Although she always knew she wanted to be a doctor, it wasn’t until she started practicing, “and helping women with their health and with the greatest miracle on this earth, childbirth, that I truly
hold where education was revered, in school she was advised against applying to her first choice-college — University of Virginia.
“They said ‘you should apply to Virginia State. There’s nothing wrong with Virginia State, but I had visited Charlottesville, and that’s where I wanted to go. Thankfully, I was accepted there,” Tucker said.
Although she always knew she wanted to be a doctor, it wasn’t until she started practicing, “and helping women with their health and with the greatest miracle on this earth, childbirth, that I truly found my calling.”
Ken Harrison
The CEO of U.S. Axle, a 100-yearold business in Pottstown, Harrison said he has a mechanical engineering and metallurgical background.
But that is no guarantee when you are an African American trying to be successful.
The key, he said, is relationships and building a personal network.
“All your skill and education means nothing without an opportunity,” said Harrison, and personal networks can make those opportunities happen.
When he was hired, another employee named Ken was also hired.
“One of them was African American and had a degree and the experience, but someone in HR gave the wrong Ken information about salary,” he said.
“One of those Ken’s who had more experience and a degree was making less money than the other,” Harrison said. “Don’t try to tell me it won’t happen to you.”
In addition to networking, recognize everything those who went before you have done, Harrison said.
“I had a great-grandmother who was born a slave and died at 105. If it were not for someone who paved the way, you would be nobody,” Harrison said.
Recognizing trailblazers and building a network, came together in the form of one person for Harrison — the late Newstell Marable.
“He had already blazed a trail in business, all I had to do was buy him lunch and he gave me his time and his insights,” Harrison said.
The same was true of the late Reggie Brooks, who was a pastor as well as a successful businessman.
“He helped me realize the importance of keeping things spiritual,” Harrison said.
Don’t let fear of failure keep you from trying, Harrison advised.
“If you are fearful of failing, you will look back at it many years from now and regret not trying,” he said. “You should be fearful of not trying. If you are not challenging yourself, don’t ask someone to pull you along.”
Gregory Scott
The first African American district judge in Montgomery County, Scott was elected in 2016.
It was not his only accomplishment.
At age 16 he was elected to Norristown Municipal Council.
At age 11, President Bill Clinton asked to meet with him in Philadelphia after receiving an impassioned letter from him about health care.
Scott said his mother was ill and her benefits from her new job had not yet kicked in, and doctors were telling her she should hold off on treatment until her insurance kicked in.
He was watching the news and saw a television report that spent 10 minutes on the salacious details of Ken Starr’s investigation of Clinton and the impeachment that followed and only three on the health care reform being championed by Hillary Clinton.
Scott wrote not only to Clinton but called the television station that night to express his disappointment.
That resulted in a television report about him and his dinner meeting with Clinton. While that whetted his interest for politics, policy and public service — he spent time on the staff of former U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak — another experience altered his course.
With his aunt dying of cancer, Scott said his cousin got unwittingly into a car driven by friends who had just committed a robbery.
The car was pulled over and his cousin put in jail on $100,000 cash bail. It was keeping his cousin from seeing his dying mother, so the family hired a lawyer.
“That lawyer got a common pleas judge, on a Friday, to come into his courtroom at 7 p.m. and have a hearing,” Scott recalled. “And something the judge said to the DA really stayed with me: ‘it’s not what you think, it’s what you can prove.’”
His cousin was released and able to see his mother just days before she died.
“That convinced me I needed to stand up,” Scott said. “I decided I have an obligation to those who died so I can be where I am, to stand up to people who would divide us.”
Scott, who was born to “two drug-addicted parents” in Norristown, where he still lives, and said sees in his courtroom every day, the result of defendants raised without a father, and without a decent education.
“We are incarcerating the mentally ill at alarming rights. They do not have the supports they need, but when you ask a politician, they say ‘there is no money.’ But they have money enough to build new prisons, and for the military,”
Scott said.
Naimah Rhodes
As a senior at Pottstown High School, Rhodes was also raising two children.
When it all seemed like too much, she visited her guidance counselor — an African-American woman — with the intention of dropping out. “She told me ‘No.’ She would not let me drop out, and instead connected me to a teen parent program that helped people like me, so I could to finish school.”
Rhodes said that experience helped cement her interest in education, but when she came back to the school “there were not as many faces like mine as I would have hoped in a community like Pottstown. Kids want to see people who look like them.”
That is also true of teen mothers when they go to the ob-gyn, which is why Rhodes was so pleased that Tucker was her doctor.
“She never made me feel ashamed to be a teen mother,” Rhodes said.
It is one of the reasons she runs a mentoring program for teen girls, called Leading Ladies, in conjunction with Terrence Shawell and his group Molding Men.
In fact, Tucker was one of the people Rhodes invited into the school to talk to her girls, not only to answer questions but also for them to see they can achieve their goals.
“We need to be in all these spaces, and we need to be unapologetically black.” Rhodes said.