For choir members at historic Detroit church, Faith, family and music are harmonious
It was 1919 and George and Minnie Kinney, along with their 12-year-old son Richard, were new arrivals to Detroit from Georgia as part of the Great Migration.
For Black families establishing roots in Detroit heading into the 1920s — a period when the city's Black population would quadruple from about 41,000 residents to roughly 150,000 by 1930 — finding a space to bond with fellow community members spiritually and emotionally to foster a sense of shared purpose often was just as important as securing employment.
The Kinneys would soon find such a space, at Plymouth Congregational Church. The church's Detroit history goes back to May 4, 1919, when nine former Alabama Congregationalists, led by Edward M. Dole, met in the home of Mrs. Carrie L. Thompson, at 620 Melbourne St., to begin the organization of the first Black Congregational church in Michigan.
Today, the Kinney family still is proudly represented at what is now Plymouth United Church of Christ, whose current membership includes 90-year-old Marian Kinney Stephens, who says her church addresses the same fundamental community needs that it did more than 100 years ago when her grandparents and father joined.
'We use our church as a way of gathering and being with other people, leading to relationships that are lasting,' Stephens, who has been a member of Plymouth her entire life, explained. 'You begin to feel like it's your family, which is so important with the number of displaced people we have in the world right now.'
As Stephens spoke on three consecutive days beginning April 15, she was looking forward to coming together with her "Plymouth family," at 600 E. Warren — Plymouth's home since March 24, 1974 — for a special Easter Sunday service. And while Stephens will no doubt have many stories to share about Easters past celebrated at Plymouth, most of her storytelling will have to wait until she carries out an important mission as a member of a Mass Choir that will be performing during Plymouth's 9:30 a.m. Resurrection Sunday Worship Service presided over by the Rev. Nicholas Hood III.
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Resurrection Sunday, or Easter Sunday, is one of the biggest and most important holidays in the Christian church, celebrated with solemn reverence; in some cases, praiseworthy pageantry; and typically, in high fashion, especially in Black churches where the holiday takes the phrase "Sunday best" to a whole other level. And then, of course, there's the music.
'You always look forward to seeing all the people dressed in their finery,' said Stephens, a product of Cass Technical High School (Class of 1952) and Wayne State University, whose illustrious career as an educator and artist has included being named 'High School Art Teacher of the Year' by the Michigan Art Education Association when she was a teacher at Cass Tech. 'But singing on Easter is more than singing to entertain. We're singing to help our people gain more religious strength. It's food for the soul and we all need that.'
On the evening of April 15, shortly before 6 p.m., Stephens settled into a seat in the first row of a cozy section of Plymouth's sanctuary near a piano. Stephens and her fellow choir members that sat alongside her appeared to be cool, calm and collected just minutes before a scheduled rehearsal was about to begin. However, one Plymouth choir member seated near her pointed out afterward that looks can be deceiving, especially when an Easter performance is nearing.
'I'm a little nervous because I'm still not as familiar with some of the music that we will be performing as a mass choir that I would like to be, but God always makes it work,' 78-year-old Brenda Jett, a 1964 Cass Tech graduate who was christened at Plymouth in 1947, said. 'And I just love being a choir member (since 1980) at Plymouth. I got my love of music from them.'
Jett, who normally sings soprano with Plymouth's Renaissance Choir — known for its stirring renditions of praise songs in the tradition of spirituals and anthems — has followed in the footsteps of her mother, Margaret Turner Thornton, as a renowned soloist at Plymouth. Jett says her preparation for the Easter performance also provided an opportunity to reflect on the ways Plymouth choirs have impacted Detroiters outside of the church through the years: This includes a long-standing relationship that has taken some choir members across town on certain Sundays.
'We had a nursing home ministry, and every fourth Sunday we were on West Outer Drive (at the Hartford Nursing & Rehabilitation Center). It was my favorite Sunday of the month.' recalled Jett, a retired Detroit educator who taught English at Western High School and was an English teacher, librarian and English Department head at Chadsey High School. 'Margaret Lockard was in charge of our nursing home ministry all the way up until the time she passed away at 85. And we would have a complete service with music and a homily. We even had a printed bulletin. It definitely contributed to my spiritual growth because it was more than singing; I also was doing prayers. So, it made a big difference in my life, like the entire choir experience, it's been life-altering for me.'
Like Jett, Cassandra Rimpson, a pioneering member of Plymouth's Gospel Choir, explained that preparing to sing with the Mass Choir on Easter requires some additional study and other adjustments here and there. But the 72-year-old, lifelong Plymouth member says the space she will be occupying on Easter, along with the people that will be around her, made all of the extra effort more than worthwhile.
'There's nothing like being in the House of the Lord, and our church is a family,' stated Rimpson, a 1970 graduate of Mackenzie High School who is now retired after a long career in the financial services and real estate services industries. 'As a choir member you feel so bad if you have to miss even one rehearsal because of the love we share for each other.'
The smile worn on the face of Joseph Hurst as he played the piano and exuded positive energy and support throughout the April 15 rehearsal seemed to indicate that he has already come to love being the music director at Plymouth since assuming the position in February 2024. The lifelong Detroiter also seemed to have no doubt that members representing an array of Plymouth choirs — Renaissance, Gospel, Men's Chorus and Water — will not have a problem presenting an uplifting musical program that celebrates and reflects 'what Jesus did for us,' perhaps because of his unshakable belief in a Higher Power.
'I try my best to allow the Spirit to lead us to where we need to go,' explained the Osborn High School graduate (Class of 1990), who has already spent 30 of his 52 years of living as a 'minister of music' for various Detroit institutions and organizations.
While further explaining how he was preparing for the Easter choir performance, during the afternoon of April 16, Hurst also expressed his gratitude for the ongoing feedback he receives from Rev. Hood and others that are responsible for maintaining the high standard of music performed at the church, including Kyle Rushing and Damon DeBose, who direct the Gospel and Renaissance Choirs, respectively.
For DeBose, the Easter service and his continued work with the Renaissance Choir presents an opportunity to build on the rich musical tradition at Plymouth, which is part of an even larger legacy that covers the entire city of Detroit.
'It's an honor to be able to put my influence and fingerprints on so much history and tradition,' DeBose, a 1993 graduate of Renaissance High School, who also directs United Voices of Detroit, said. 'And it's also extra special to be a part of all the music that will be performed in Detroit on Resurrection Sunday. There will be all-star performances in churches throughout the city.'
Gloria Cooley, a choir member at Plymouth since the early 1970s, knows all about Plymouth's rich musical history. But when she discussed her feelings leading up to the Easter service, she spoke mainly about doing what comes natural to her and keeping a promise that Cooley made to a man who is special to the entire Plymouth family.
'When I first started singing in the choir, Rev. Nicholas Hood II (June 21, 1923-April 10, 2016; Minister Emeritus of Plymouth United Church of Christ) said, 'I like your voice,' " Cooley recalled about an unforgettable interaction she had with a gentleman who also served Detroit as a city councilman and his nation as a longtime civil rights activist. 'Then he said, 'Do me a favor, I want you to always sing in the choir.' And that's what I have done and I have always looked forward to doing it.
'Music is just so much a part of me, like breathing.'
Scott Talley is a native Detroiter, a proud product of Detroit Public Schools and a lifelong lover of Detroit culture in its diverse forms. In his second tour with the Free Press, which he grew up reading as a child, he is excited and humbled to cover the city's neighborhoods and the many interesting people who define its various communities. Contact him at stalley@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @STalleyfreep. Read more of Scott's stories at www.freep.com/mosaic/detroit-is/. Please help us grow great community-focused journalism by becoming a subscriber.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Rich musical tradition continues on Easter at historic Detroit church
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Chicago Tribune
4 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Route 66: The last (or first) 300 miles in Illinois
Our Route 66 road trip ended at the beginning, at East Jackson Boulevard and South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where a brown sign hanging 12 feet high on a light post tells people they've reached the venerable road's threshold. On a hot and windy Saturday evening in June a large group of well-dressed people stood on the steps at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, between the museum's famed bronze lions and below a sign advertising an exhibit on Frida Kahlo's time in Paris. Members of a mariachi band weaved through the crowd of pedestrians walking along Michigan. Few people stopped at the Route 66 sign. Those that did, did not linger long. They pointed, noted its existence, and continued on their way. While the route often conjures images of quaint small towns, its foundation, said historian and author Jim Hinckley, has always been rooted in Chicago. The existing roads and trails that would eventually become Route 66 nearly 100 years ago largely followed the railroad, with Chicago as its hub. 'Chicago's part of Route 66 is a huge part of the Route 66 story,' Hinckley said. 'It is a cornerstone.' About 300 miles southwest of Chicago, different alignments of the route leave St. Louis and cross the Mississippi at three different bridges. The northernmost iteration once spanned the river at the milelong Chain of Rock Bridge. Constructed three years after the route was commissioned, the bridge makes a 30-degree turn at its midpoint between St. Louis and Madison, Illinois. The bridge closed in 1968, replaced by a new one 2,000 feet upstream. Today, the original structure carries pedestrians, cyclists and, on a Thursday in June, one dog. The road climbs north toward Springfield, where a former Texaco gas station from 1946 a block from the route now houses the Route History Museum, which documents the Black experience on Route 66. Public health researchers by trade, museum founders Gina Lathan and Stacy Grundy spent more than a year collecting stories of Black homeowners and business owners — some found in The Negro Motorist Green Book — who provided safe havens along the route at a time when vast stretches of the highway passed through sundown towns. Museum visitors are given virtual reality headsets to help bring those stories to life. 'They want to be a part of the story of Route 66,' Lathan said of the families she and Grundy interviewed, 'and be recognized for not only what their family and the community brought to that whole travel experience, but what they as a people did to not only persevere but make these phenomenal economic engines in these communities that were oftentimes forgotten.' Continuing north, stretches of the route lie nestled between Interstate 55 and farmlands. In Atlanta, population 1,637, a group of international journalists and media buyers from at least a dozen countries snapped photos of towering 'muffler man' fiberglass statues — once used to advertise businesses along the route — collected at the town's American Giants museum. The group trip, organized by the state's tourism office, followed the International Pow Wow (IPW) travel trade show in Chicago. Illinois has invested millions over the last few years on Route 66 redevelopment and promotion, said Eric Wagner with the state tourism office. 'Route 66 is huge for us,' he said. 'People want to see America.' Follow our road trip: Route 66, 'The Main Street of America,' turns 100 About 50 miles north, Pontiac also appears to have capitalized on its position along the route. Among its attractions is the Route 66 Association Hall of Fame & Museum. There, visitors can find a school bus-turned-land yacht and a Volkswagen van belonging to Bob Waldmire, whose family opened the Springfield, Illinois, institution Cozy Dog on Route 66 and claims to have invented the corn dog. Waldmire became a legendary figure of the route's lore with his hand-drawn postcards, maps and murals. Both he and the van he took on his frequent route trips served as the inspiration for the character Fillmore in the Disney Pixar film 'Cars.' Waldmire died in 2009 of cancer, before he could finish painting a map of the Route 66 stretch through Illinois on a wall of the museum. 'He was very friendly, that's why he never got the mural done,' said Rose Geralds, 87, who has worked at the museum for the last 18 years. 'He stopped and talked to everybody. He didn't care. He just wanted to talk to the people. Just such a nice man.' Forty miles north, artist Robert Ryan, 61, stopped to inspect a detail in the mural he's painting on a storage building along Route 66 in Wilmington's South Island Park, next to the town's famed Gemini Giant, a 30-foot-tall fiberglass 'muffler man' recently relocated to the park after once facing destruction. Ryan's design, picked out of 20 or so entries, covers three walls of the building. One side shows a large Route 66 shield behind a yellow convertible driven by the original owners of the Launching Pad restaurant where the Gemini Giant once stood. Nearby, the town's football team waves to viewers. A mural on another wall has the giant standing in front of an American flag and behind the town name painted in block letters. A third wall mural depicts motorcyclists on the route. 'The best part has been talking to people who stop to ask about it,' Ryan said. Leaving Wilmington, the route heads past farmlands now broken up by massive logistic centers amassed on the outskirts of Joliet, where the country's largest inland port is located. It cuts through Joliet's downtown, past Stateville Correctional Center and into Romeoville and Bolingbrook. It's briefly absorbed by I-55 before returning as Joliet Road. Near Hodgkins, the route is forced to detour around a quarry where a stretch of the road has been closed for decades. It links up with Ogden Avenue in Berwyn and takes motorists through Cicero and into Chicago, through North Lawndale, Douglass Park and across the Eisenhower Expressway, named for the president who commissioned the interstate highway system that led to its demise. Route 66 then hits Jackson Boulevard and runs to its eastbound end. A block north of Jackson, a similar brown sign on a light post at Adams Street and Michigan marks the start of Route 66 for those heading west. At 8 a.m. on Sunday in June a family of three stopped to pose for pictures in front of the sign. This was not the start of their journey but, rather, a seemingly good photo opportunity. But a mile west at the unofficial start of the route, the 102-year-old Lou Mitchell's diner, Eleonora Tomassetti and Chiara Voceri took the last bites of a pancake before heading to pick up their rental car. Originally from Rome, the pair, both 27, first got the idea for a Route 66 road trip in high school. Earlier this year, they decided to turn that idea into a reality. They planned a two-week trip: Stops in Joliet, Atlanta and Springfield. An overnight stay in St. Louis. Another in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Two nights in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Stops in Winslow and Flagstaff, both in Arizona. Detours to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Said Tomassetti: 'I think it's the perfect example of the American adventure.'
Buzz Feed
12 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
Old Photo Reveals Truth About Missing Mom
I tried not to stare when I first saw her. Her gaunt, heavily lined face made her look older than I expected. She wore a dingy pumpkin-orange thrift-store turtleneck that swallowed her 5-foot-7, 98-pound frame. But her ice-blue eyes sparkled like a kid's on Christmas morning. 'Oh boy! Oh boy,' she said, walking toward me with outstretched arms. 'It's so good to see you!' That was the first of many visits. Most followed the same script: her astonished joy upon my arrival, my mechanical hug, and then sitting on her couch to talk about her favorite topic, classic torch love songs from the 1950s and early '60s. 'Who's the better singer?' I'd ask. 'Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole?' She'd close her eyes to ponder. 'Nat King Cole,' she'd announce, nodding in reverence. After about an hour, I'd stand to leave. Her smile would evaporate. Another awkward hug. As I left, she'd call out, 'Don't take any wooden nickels.' On the surface, we had nothing in common. She was a white Irish Catholic woman who grew up in a famil y that freely used the N-word, thought that Black people were lazy, and believed that Black and white people should live apart. I was a young Black man who grew up primarily in foster homes in a Black inner-city neighborhood where just about everyone — including me — regarded white people with distrust or contempt. Yet she was my mother. And, as the years have passed, she's become something else. She's the person I find myself turning to when I struggle with the mixture of emotions that so many Americans are experiencing right now. Many of us are exhausted, demoralized, and drained by constant political and racial divisions. Countless Americans have become, as author David Brooks put it in a recent essay, 'passive, discouraged. … They've lost the confidence to wish for more.' I've been swimming in this grim national mood for years. As a journalist at CNN and elsewhere, I've covered virtually every so-called racially transformative event in America during the past 32 years, from the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the George Floyd 'racial reckoning.' All of them generated massive hope for transformational change; all were followed by a massive letdown. At my lowest moments, I've wondered whether human beings are too susceptible to racism and tribalism to make democracy work. But my mother offered another way to look at the future, without ever intending to do so. She was a person who seemed to have no power or reason to hope. Still she, and others like her, gave me the confidence to wish for more. *** In the beginning, I thought I'd never know her. When I was born in the mid-1960s, interracial marriage and intimate interracial relationships were illegal in Maryland, as in much of the country. My mother vanished from my life not long after I was born, and so did her family. No one told me why. I didn't know what she looked like. My father's name was on my birth certificate, but hers was not. All he told me and my younger brother, Patrick, was this: 'Your mother's name is Shirley, she's white, and her family hates Black people.' Their hatred did not surprise me. I grew up in a West Baltimore neighborhood that served as the setting for the HBO series ,, a crime drama that depicted a Black inner-city community ravaged by racism and drug violence. I routinely heard my friends and neighbors refer to white people as 'honkies' and 'crackers.' I heard white people yell 'Nigger!' when I strayed into their neighborhoods. During my entire time in Baltimore's public schools — from Head Start to high school graduation — I saw only one white student. It wasn't the time or place to be biracial. There were no biracial public figures like former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Kamala Harris when I grew up in the 1970s and early '80s. I was too ashamed to tell anyone my mother was white. I marked her race as 'Black' on school forms. I became a closeted biracial person. At 17, though, I discovered that there was one place worse than my neighborhood: where I first met my mom. There was another reason why I tried not to stare when I first saw her. I was trying to hide my emotions because I was in shock. I was standing in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility called Crownsville Hospital Center in rural Maryland. My mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe mental illness. I didn't make that discovery until I met her in Crownsville. No one in my family, including my father, had told me — not even on the car ride to the hospital. They didn't know how. My father had waited until I had graduated from high school to suddenly ask me one day if I wanted to meet my mom. He didn't think I could handle knowing about her illness until I became a young man. Many people didn't talk openly about mental illness in their families when I met my mother in the early 1980s. For over 30 years, I blocked out most of the memories from that first meeting, but one detail lingered. Before I left, my mother looked at me and made a request. 'Will you send me a St. Jude prayer book?' she asked. 'Ah, yeah, I will,' I said, not knowing at the time that St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Outwardly, I didn't skip a beat after that meeting. I attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris was a classmate. I became a journalist at several newspapers before joining CNN. But I had stepped out of one closet into another. Now, I was ashamed that my mother had a mental illness. I didn't even tell my closest friends. It took two years to tell the woman I would date and marry about my mom's illness — and another two into our marriage before allowing them to meet. In the life I hid from others, I tried to build a relationship with my mom. I wrote her a flood of letters, telling her about myself, my dreams and my hope that we could get to know each other. There would be no reply for months, and then a letter would finally arrive. I'd tear it open to find a single sheet from a yellow legal pad, with large cursive letters spilling over the margins: ' Dear John! I could use some money and to see you in person. Could you send a picture of yourself and Pat for Mother's Day? I need another St. Jude prayer book. Love, Shirley. ' Personal visits were no better. She would drift away in the middle of conversations. She'd forget what we talked about two minutes earlier. Her lips would tremble, and she'd lapse into silence if I asked too many questions about her past. At times, she'd sense my frustration, turn to me and say with a rueful smile, 'Don't mind me. I'm crazy.' Each visit left me more depressed. My mother had been a mystery when I had no contact with her — and even more so once she was in my life. Her mental illness was like a thick fog; I didn't know how to navigate around it to see her. All I could see was schizophrenia. In my 30s, I gave up. I stopped writing her letters and trying to reach her through conversations. I kept visiting her and mailing her St. Jude trinkets, but I was just checking a box. Our visits were filled with awkward silences. I didn't expect our relationship to change. One day, when my wife, Terry, asked me why I didn't talk more about my mother, I cut her off. 'All I do is send her money,' I said with a heavy sigh. 'I can't really communicate with her. There's nothing left to tell.' *** But there was so much to her story that had not been told. One night, when I was about 19, my father reached into a Ziploc bag and pulled out a sepia-stained black-and-white photo. In the photo, a young white woman with a beehive hairdo looked at the camera with a wide, dimpled smile. She was holding a cigarette in her right hand and looked like she was about to burst into laughter. She looked confident, and her eyes sparkled with intelligence and mischief. It was my mother. The photo was taken when she was 20, the same year she gave birth to me. I couldn't stop staring at the photo. It bore little resemblance to the fragile woman I knew. I set out to learn about the woman in that photo. I pressed relatives to talk about my parents' relationship. I knew the outline: They met in 1963 at a hospital in downtown Baltimore. My mother was a nurse's assistant, and my father, Clifton Sr., was in the Merchant Marines. Their first date was a disaster. My father couldn't persuade a Black cabdriver to take him to my mom's house because she lived in a white working-class neighborhood where no Blacks dared venture. When my father finally did knock on her door, her father answered. He tried to shove my father off the doorstep and called the police. 'This nigger is trying to see my daughter,' my mother's father told the arriving officers. They arrested my father for disturbing the peace. My mother decided that she would visit my father instead. She started taking walks toward my father's house in West Baltimore, which was the central meeting place for my father's extended family. My relatives described her as 'quick-witted,' 'chatty' and driven to help people in need. She sat on my father's front steps, smoking Marlboro cigarettes with my uncles, and hung out in the kitchen to watch my paternal grandmother, Daisy, sing Negro spirituals while baking sweet potato pies. My father's family didn't know what to make of her. In the early 1960s, white politicians routinely warned against the evils of 'race-mixing.' Psychiatrists declared in scholarly journals that whites who married or 'mated' with Blacks had a death wish or sought an outlet for 'deviant' sexual urges. Baltimore passed the nation's first racially restrictive housing law in 1910, which banned Black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods and vice versa, and was heavily segregated when my parents met. My father's relatives chuckled as they recalled a 20-year-old white woman walking alone into an all-Black neighborhood to see a Black man. 'It was like a breakthrough,' my cousin Reese recalled. 'She was a white woman on the block, not scared, not worried about being attacked, not looking over her shoulder. She didn't seem to be conscious of her color. She was like one of the family.' I then heard stories that filled a hole in my heart that I didn't even know was there. Unprompted, relatives recounted memories of a doting young mom who took her two children on walks in the park, rubbed her nose against their bellies while they giggled and sang Patsy Cline and Tony Bennett songs to them. My mom loved to sing one song in particular to me, Doris Day's ' Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).' Try as I might, though, I have no memories of those moments. Mercifully, I also have no memory of what happened next. My mother's illness became apparent after she gave birth to Patrick, nine months after I was born. She started drifting away during conversations, chain-smoking and disappearing for long solitary walks. She couldn't keep a job. When my parents moved into an apartment together, she'd leave with the gas stove on or the front door ajar. My parents never married. 'She tried, but she didn't have the capacity to do normal things,' my father told me. 'She wanted to be accepted like normal people.' And then one day, my relatives said, she disappeared. Years later, Patrick accidentally discovered the reason why while consulting her Social Security records. Her father had placed her in a psychiatric facility, a not uncommon fate in the 1950s and early 1960s for white women in interracial relationships. Hearing how my parents' relationship ended left me emotionally numb. I no longer wanted to know more about my mother — every story seemed to end in tragedy. I thought I would never meet any semblance of the vibrant woman in that old photograph. But there was another side to those stories about my mom that I had overlooked. It was her 'marvelous victory.' *** Part of that victory can be seen in a viral photograph from last year that is now forgotten because the news cycle has moved on. It's a snapshot of Kamala Harris taken last summer during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was shot from the point of view of a brown biracial girl in a pink pantsuit and pigtails, transfixed as she gazes upward at Harris from the front row at the United Center in Chicago. The girl is Amara, Harris' great-niece, age 8. It's easy to see why the photo went viral. It was a sneak preview of a Brown New America. The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country (the majority of citizens will be non-white) by 2044. The number of people who identify as multiracial increased by 276% over the past decade. Advertisements today routinely depict interracial couples, straight and gay, along with their children. And some of our most prominent public figures — Obama, Harris, film director Jordan Peele and NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes — are biracial. The acceptance of interracial marriage cuts across racial and partisan lines. Harris and Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband, were the first interracial couple to reach the highest levels of the executive branch, but they were immediately followed by another interracial couple, GOP Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Some white supremacists objected to Usha Vance's race but even within the MAGA universe there is widespread acceptance of the Vances' interracial marriage. Someday, perhaps soon, an interracial couple will occupy the White House. It's easy to miss, but Usha Vance's ascension and Harris' groundbreaking run for the White House represents one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement: the normalization of interracial marriage and biracial people throughout America. When Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 2022, few if any news stories dwelled on the fact that her husband is white. The casual acceptance of interracial couples at even the highest echelon of American life demonstrates something that's so important to remember today: how quickly people's attitudes on seemingly intractable issues can shift. When a Gallup poll asked Americans about their views on marriage between Black and white people in 1958, only 4% approved. Gallup asked the same question in 2021, and 94% approved — an all-time high. Public opinion about one of the most entrenched racial taboos in American history went from near-universal disapproval to virtual universal approval within a lifetime. How did this happen? The quick answer is that in June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down 'anti-miscegenation' laws in the Loving v. Virginia case. But something else also made it happen. It was a choice that certain people made and a type of courage they all displayed. One of them was my mom. I only saw my mom as this fragile flower, but my brother, Patrick, was the first to notice another side to her. One morning, he took her to a hair salon that served women in a group home where our mom lived. She had been transferred to the home with other women with severe mental illnesses after Crownsville was shut down, in part, for mistreating patients. While they were waiting, our mom watched a hairdresser berate and throw hair products at a woman sitting in her chair. 'She's a bitch,' my mom said, her eyes narrowed on the hairdresser. Patrick had never heard our mother speak in such an indignant tone before. He suppressed a smile. 'Mom, do you know you just said a bad word?' 'I'm sorry, Pat.' Our mom briefly paused, then added, 'But she is a bitch.' As I dug deeper into old family stories, I discovered that my mom had long been infuriated by any display of injustice. She glared back at white people who stared at her while she walked in public with my father in the early 1960s. Sometimes she'd say, 'You act like you ain't never seen people before.' She and my father trashed a bar when the bartender refused to serve them. Once, I heard my mom say she had been arrested as a young woman. For what, I inquired. 'For opening my big fat mouth,' she said with a wide grin. Even her illness couldn't erase her spirit of defiance. I hated visiting her group homes. Some were run by good people who treated my mom with compassion, but many seemed designed to crush whatever humanity was left of those consigned there. Unscrupulous caretakers stole from or bullied people in their care. Some confined them to squalid, roach-infested rooms. When I came in to greet my mom, I'd often see heavily medicated residents sitting on couches, staring zombie-like at soap operas on television. Most of them hadn't received a visitor in years. There were few smiles or genuine laughter in these environments. But my mom could somehow bring light into the most desolate places. Patrick sneaked into a group home to surprise our mom one morning, only to be shocked by what he saw: our mother bopping and weaving down a 'Soul Train' dance line as the group home staff and residents cheered her on. Any gifts we sent her quickly disappeared because, we discovered, she gave most of them away to other group home members who she said needed them more. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her caretaker had to buy a separate living room chair for my mom to enforce social distancing rules. All of the group home members wanted to sit near her. I didn't appreciate the depth of her defiance until I was in my mid-50s, when I did something that I had never done: I traveled to her childhood home in Baltimore. On an overcast summer morning, I drove to Mill Hill, my mother's childhood community. She lived on Wilkins Avenue, on a quintessential Baltimore block of gleaming marble steps, neat row houses and a still-stately St. Benedict Church, where my mom was confirmed. I parked my rental car and walked to the spot where my father had been assaulted and arrested for trying to date my mother over 50 years ago. I scanned the street to see white, Black and brown neighbors talking to one another from their front steps and hanging out together at a corner tavern. I was surprised by something other than the racial mix. When I looked at my smartphone's app, I was stunned to discover that my father's former home was only 4.1 miles away. I had no idea that my estranged white and Black relatives had lived so close to one another. Racial segregation was so entrenched when my parents met that their families might as well have lived in separate solar systems. Baltimore's segregation wasn't just racial; it was also ethnic. Jews, Italians and Poles kept to their neighborhoods. Outsiders, particularly those who had the 'wrong' color, risked getting hurt walking into the wrong area. As I stood in front of my mom's childhood home, I imagined for the first time what it must have been like for her. The contemporary Wilkins Avenue landscape dissolved, and the circa early 1960s Wilkins Avenue appeared. I saw her — a thin, young white woman with a beehive hairdo — close the front door and walk toward a neighborhood to meet people her family and community had told her to hate. I paused outside my car and shook my head in admiration, and confusion. Damn, I thought. Why would she take such a risk? I'm still not quite sure. Was my mother's relationship with my father driven by youthful rebellion, the allure of a taboo relationship, or was it an early symptom of the illness that would engulf her? Or was it truly love? I learned through others that my parents remained close after she was institutionalized. My father routinely visited my mother and continued to take care of her even when his health began to fail late in his life. What I do know is that she did something that remains so important: She refused to accept the status quo. My mother was part of a vanguard of Black, brown and white people who would smash a taboo against interracial relationships that had been enshrined as law for centuries. They didn't wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to tell them whom to love. I was born four years before the Loving decision. Like most big changes, it started small, with countless acts of invisible courage from everyday people. My mother's decision to walk from Wilkins Avenue to my father's house ' sent forth a tiny ripple of hope.' That ripple fed into another, emboldening others to do the same. Those ripples eventually turned into a tsunami that gave us the Loving decision and a New America — one where a brown girl in a pink pantsuit could look at a biracial woman making a credible run for the White House or another brown woman at the White House today and think, 'That could be me one day.' This was the same dynamic that gave us marriage equality. Everyday people acted first, coming out to their parents, friends and co-workers; the politicians and courts followed later. As I returned to my car and drove away from Wilkins Avenue, I smiled. I felt a warm sensation well up in my chest, and something else that I'd never felt before about my mom: pride. Pride that I was her son. She was no hopeless cause. She was more powerful than she realized. She, and others like her, helped make Usha Vance and Kamala Harris possible. The historian and activist Howard Zinn said there is a tendency among people 'to think that what we see in the present moment will continue.' He said people often forget how often throughout history people have been astonished by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, and 'by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.' He said that if people only look at the worst in the past and present, it destroys their capacity to act. 'And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future,' Zinn wrote. 'The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.' *** After Wilkins Avenue, my visits to my mom changed. I painted her fingernails. I asked her to sing 'Que Sera Sera.' I asked her to show me some dance moves. And I laughed along with her as she did a little shimmy of her hips. I stopped dwelling on what I had lost; I became grateful for what remained. My wife noticed. 'You used to hug your mom like she was an eggshell and get frustrated when you couldn't talk to her the way you wanted,' Terry told me one night. 'And now?' I asked her. 'You hug her tighter now, and you're not afraid of the silence when you talk to her.' During one of my last visits with my mom, Terry took a photo that I treasure. We stopped by my mother's group home in Baltimore on a luminous summer day with oak trees in full bloom. That visit followed the same script: a ring of the doorbell, the scurrying of footsteps behind the front door, and my mom gleefully shouting, 'Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord!' Terry's smartphone camera snapped what happened after the front door swung open. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around my mother as she pillowed her face on my shoulder, a contented smile on her face. If I could have written a caption for that photo, it would be the final words I wrote to her not long after that visit — words that she never saw. It's what I wished I could have said to her so many years earlier. ' Now I see you, Mom. I finally see you.' John Blake is an award-winning journalist for He is the author of 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.' Blake's memoir has won five book awards, including the 2024 Christopher Awards, which celebrates books that 'affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Blake has spoken at colleges, symposiums and in documentaries on race, religion and politics. He is a graduate of Howard University and a native of Baltimore. For more info, visit his website. This story originally ran on HuffPost in February 2025 and was re-published on June 12, 2025 — the 58th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, as part of HuffPost Personal's 'Best Of' series today.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Archaeologists Excavated One of America's Oldest Schools—and Found a Secret Cellar
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: The Williamsburg Bray School is one of the oldest schools in the United States to educate Black students. Archeologists discovered remains of the school on the William & Mary campus in Virginia. Finds include the foundation of the school, a previously-undocumented cellar, and more than two centuries worth of buried artifacts. Few schools can say they're older than the countries in which they reside, but the Williamsburg Bray School holds that distinct honor. The Bray School was also one of the oldest schools in the United States dedicated to educating Black Americans. From 1760 to 1774, head teacher Ann Wager taught both free and enslaved students lessons from the Anglican Church. While the Bray School may seem revolutionary for its time, its history was actually much darker. The school was founded for the flawed purpose of convincing enslaved children to accept their circumstances. Today, the school serves as a key chapter in the history of Black education, yet historians know little about the students who actually attended. Luckily, researchers just discovered a few more pieces of the puzzle: the near-complete foundation of the Bray School and an undocumented cellar filled with centuries worth of artifacts. The remains fall on the College of William & Mary's (W&M) campus in Virginia; excavations were led by the school's Center for Archeological Research. According to a press release from W&M, the remnants of the cellar are sizable, measuring 36 feet by 18 feet. Tom Higgins, an archeologist for the Center, explained in the release that the cellar likely had multiple levels and was dug soon after the original foundation was laid. These recent excavations revealed the bottom of the cellar to be nearly 18 inches higher than previous research found. 'The discovery of this cellar is thrilling,' W&M President Katherine Rowe said in the release. 'The roots of our city and university entwine here. Every layer of history that it reveals gives us new insights into our early republic, from the Williamsburg Bray School through the generations that followed, up through the early 20th century.' Perhaps even more valuable than the cellar itself is the historic treasure archeologists found while digging. The artifacts discovered at the site provide a rich story spanning from the 18th to the mid-20th century. The newly found broken pottery shards, slate pencil pieces, buttons, and jewelry painted a picture of everyday life at the Bray School. According to the release, one of the team's favorite discoveries was part of a broken glass depicting the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva. One researcher at the center, Michele L. Brumfield, explained that the glass may have come from one of the school girls furnishing her dorm room, though the researchers say they're hesitant to draw any conclusions because 'it's early days.' Now that these once-lost stories have come to light, some of the artifacts will be displayed as a permanent installation in W&M's Gates Hall. Other treasures will be lent to The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and exhibited at the Colin G. and Nancy N. Campbell Archaeology Center once it opens in 2026. In the meantime, there's still much more to be done at the site. 'This is exciting,' Maureen Elgersman Lee, director of the W&M Bray School Lab, said in the press release. 'What else are we about to learn? We are not done understanding the history of the Williamsburg Bray School, the history of Black education. We are not done learning the history of this area, and we are certainly not done learning the history of this country.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
