For Black History Month 2019
Throughout history, the powers of single black men [and women] flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their greatness.
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
In early September, my grandmother, Mary Kelly Foxx, passed away. At 101 years old, she was the last of her generation in my family. Raised in Carthage, North Carolina, her father drove a truck and her mother was a midwife. Both barely completed elementary school. Yet, in the early 20th Century, they had the foresight to push their 13 children to college.
After graduating from the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in 1939, she embarked on a career as a school teacher. She prepared thousands of black students and her family to enter a hostile world — and to be ready when the doors of freedom opened up.
We should never romanticize segregation. Grandmother didn’t. It was brutal, sometimes physically and always psychologically. Black people had no rights whites were bound to respect. Black people could not vote, could not live where they wanted and were prohibited from certain public accommodations such as hotels, rest stops and the like. Even labor unions and political parties held blacks at a distance. Lynchings were not uncommon. Men like her father might have been called Uncle or Boy. There were bathrooms Grandmother could not use, and water fountains from which she could not drink. Grandmother told of a long bus ride from Carthage to Charlotte during which she held her infant daughter because all seats were taken by white men and women.
The black schools, with tattered books and dilapidated classrooms, made teaching and learning hard. She persisted. When the math teacher did not show up, Grandmother taught math. When a child did not show to school or got a failing grade, she visited his or her home, often facing down the poverty, illiteracy and dejection borne of a people who, in earlier times, could be punished for learning to read. She even taught social graces and enforced formal English. Once, a family left three infant children at the doorstep, and my grandparents brought one in and raised her as their own.
If any American had a right to be disgruntled, Grandmother did. She never found these conditions acceptable but she believed her life, her works and her presence would be vindicated one day. She just wanted this city, this state and this region to work as well for us African Americans as it did for others. She worked for better days.
She did see progress.
On Saturdays, we rode the Number 6 bus to the Belk’s Department store. After what seemed like endless “browsing,” we would finally ascend the long elevator to the Woolworth’s lunch counter and have a hot dog, an activity that would not have been allowed just a few years before. She made a point of never taking our food to go and often enough she ordered a little ice cream to top it off.
On April 27, 2013, President Obama invited me to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Transportation. He called on a Friday. The nomination would be public on Monday, and I was to keep a lid on the news. I told only my wife and my mother. We worried about Grandmother following the rules so we did not tell her initially. On Sunday, we piled everyone, including Grandmother, into a car for the trip to Washington.
Because she feared being placed in a nursing home, we spent the seven hour drive assuring her that such was not our destination. Finally, when we arrived, we told her the news. She could not have been happier — or more relieved. The great-grandson of a truck driver would now regulate all of the trucks in the land. Things had somehow come full circle.
On April 29, I walked my grandmother into the White House. It was my most cherished moment in public life, a milestone built by so many generations who worked against all odds for a seat at the table. As I watched her talk with President Obama and as he remarked about her to the public, there was something poetic about her journey. She and all who preceded her lived through painstaking days that paid for my journey. She was the one who lived long enough to be there.
Old school black educators performed miracles. They gave sight to the blind. They made a way out of no way. History sometimes celebrates underserving people and discounts everyday hope. History sometimes lets deserving folks, particularly African Americans, die quietly in plain sight.
Grandmother made America great by making it better. A tiny African American woman with a dedication to fixing our nation one day at a time.
