I Remember Mama Voting: For My Stepmother

My friend Nordette Adams, who works for ACORN, asked me to help her starting a meme in which women talk about the mother figures in their lives who taught them the value of voting. Her request triggered this remembrance:

My stepmother, Virginia Sampson Pearson, came from a North Carolina family in which dark-skinned men of the soil married long-haired mixed-race women who "had always been propertied people," as great-aunt Fanny used to say. As a result, she had a laborer's toughness and a talented-tenth racewoman's pride. After her mother succumbed to illness when she was nine, she spent much of her time in the protective care of an extended family of grandmothers and aunts who were proud graduates of Fayetteville State. This eased the sting of Jim Crow and instilled in her a reverence for education and a belief in racial uplift. But when she came north with her father and brother at the tender age of 13, her encounter with the meanness of urban poverty and police brutality had galvanized her political consciousness.

As a result, when the time came for me to be educated, she was determined that I would be firmly centered in my ethnicity, history and understanding of my responsibilities to my forbears. Political awareness and involvement was part of the package. It was at her insistence that we went to the March on Washington in August, 1963 when I was six. As I began elementary school, she was a maid for a family in which both parents were professors at a state college in New Jersey. I wore their childrens' cast-off clothing; her clothes came from Goodwill. During the presidential election of 1964, she would report that her boss would tell guests over tea that she was voting for Goldwater, "because he would keep the Negroes in line." When I started reading "Peanuts" comics, she bought me a Charles Schultz- illustrated book of children's letters to Pres. Johnson. As a result, I wrote a letter to LBJ in my seven-year-old hand protesting the fact that my uncle and cousins were being shipped to Vietnam.

But the most important political lessons were about my African legacy. She showed me South Africa, told me about apartheid, and said, "Always remember, we will never be free until South Africa is free." She introduced me to real Africans, made sure I read about the new countries emerging, and about their efforts to press their cause at the United Nations. All of this while we tracked each success and failure of the civil rights struggle, and talked about whether black women had any business getting involved in feminism.

She taught me about voting first because she voted. Second, by talking about her employer, I learned how others used their votes to hurt us. And finally, when my teenaged indignation had me tilting toward militancy, we had conversations about how voting and other ways of working within the system were the ways to make real change. "You can't change the system because it IS," she would say to me. But, by her example, she showed me that little by little, through education and agitation, we could learn to bend the system our way.