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My Website
This website was created
to share information about the “Black Experience” with people of all
races, creeds, color, gender, age, political, economic, or social
groups from all geographic regions. It is hoped that the information
thus shared will help people to gain knowledge and information about
the history of African-Americans and, indeed, about the universal
human experience and that they will use this information to
challenge injustice and inequality wherever it exists thereby
promoting peace, harmony, and justice in the world.
My
earliest memories, at age 4 or 5, are of my helping my mother and
dad with the nurture, care, and teaching of my young sisters and
brothers. (I was raised as the eldest of 8 children. The first-born
child in the family died at age three when I was a year old). Each
succeeding stage in my life, I continued this process of nurturing,
caring, mentoring, teaching and activism. At Douglas Elementary
School in Preston, Oklahoma in the 1940's, I was teacher Ada Key
Pete’s loyal little helper. At Dunbar High School in Okmulgee,
Oklahoma, in Mrs. Pete’s daughter Vern Key’s history class, I wrote
my first letter to the editor (to the “Okmulgee Daily Times”) about
an injustice to black people in Okmulgee. Every year, like
clockwork, Greasy Creek overflowed ruining furnishings, property,
and homes, and one time even resulting in a drowning. And every
year, nothing was done about the problem. When my letter to the
editor appeared, attention was focused on the problem and, later,
something was done about the problem. I was hooked on literary
protest from then on!
Between the ages of 17 and 20, I was a
student at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama where I continued my
activism under the tutelage of master teachers such as Dr. Frank
Toland, head of the history department, Dr. Sherman Webster my
favorite Sociology teacher, and my absolute favorite of all, the
indomitable Dr. Charles G. Gomillion whose case “Gomillion vs.
Lightfoot” went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In that
landmark case, gerrymandering, which led to the disenfranchisement
of black citizens in Macon County Alabama, was declared
unconstitutional. The way was paved for the Voting Rights Act of
1965! My fellow ‘Skegee classmates and I did our part in breaking
down racial barriers in the 1950's by helping Dr. Gomillion in his
fight to get Macon County Alabama blacks registered to vote.
I missed out on the greatest activist movement, in my view,
in U.S. history - the 1960's civil rights movement. I was living in
London, England at the time. I married Norman Gates in 1954 two
weeks after he got his B.S. degree and his 2nd Lieutenant bars at
Tuskegee Institute. Three months later, he was called to active duty
in the United States Air Force and thus began the military dependent
stage of my life. That entailed 12 moves in 14 years to military
bases all over the U.S. and in Europe, five trips to base hospitals
or English hospitals for additions to our family, and, at the
University of North Dakota in 1968, my graduation from college at
last! If I had been back in my native Oklahoma, I would surely have
gone with the busloads of Tulsans who went on marches in Alabama and
in Washington, D.C. But since I couldn’t, I did the next best thing
- I got out my “protest pen” and I wrote!
In 1968, my
husband left active duty and finished out his military service in
the reserves in Oklahoma. We moved to Tulsa where I taught school at
Edison High School for 22 years. The last two years of my education
experience in Tulsa, 1990-1992, were spent as an administrator for
the Tulsa Public Schools System. I was Curriculum Coordinator,
Social Studies, Kindergarten-12. My main focus was to develop
curriculum which depicted the history, achievements, and role models
of all Americans. I am proud of the cultural diversity that began to
be reflected in Tulsa’s curriculum in the 1960's and 1970's and
which continued to be developed each succeeding decade. The
curriculum developed in 1992 was praised as the most multicultural
in Tulsa’s history (race, ethnic, gender, geographic, cultural,
diversity, etc.) at that time. That trend continues to this day.
Educators are constantly improving the curriculum to reflect this
nation’s unique diversity.
I retired from Tulsa Public
Schools in 1992 and wrote my two books, “Miz Lucy’s Cookies: And
Other Links in My Black Family Support System,” Coman and
Associates, Tulsa, OK, 1996, (a cultural autobiography), 441 pages,
110 photographs, $16.95; and “They Came Searching: How Blacks Sought
the Promised Land in Tulsa,” Eakin Press, Austin, Texas, 1997, 296
pages, 113 photographs.
I have come full circle in my life.
I am doing what I began to do at age 4 or 5 in that little
sharecropper’s house two and a half miles west of the little village
of Preston, Oklahoma. (The dirt road to that house was called
Preston Road in those days; today it is Will Sampson Road, a paved
road, named after the famous Native American actor Will Sampson who
grew up on a farm adjoining my little sharecropper’s home). My
activism has taken me to conferences at UN headquarters in New York
City, to Holocaust conferences in Poland, Israel, and all over the
U.S., to education conferences all over the U.S., to college
campuses all over the U.S., to government capitals in my state and
in other states, and in other nations, and to other places where
there is a need for a voice to enlighten and to promote peace and
harmony. As long as I have my life, my being, I will be doing what I
have always done since I can remember - I will be nurturing the
young and the helpless, I will be mentoring and teaching children,
and I will be protesting injustice and inequality wherever I observe
them. (See Oklahoma Legislative Commission to Study the Tulsa Race
Riot of 1921).
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