50 years of great black mothers

Ebony, May, 1995 by Laura B. Randolph

WAY down deep we feel it. The power of motherlove. For centuries, it has been the glue that cemented the two things Black folks have traditionally valued above all others: our families and our faith.

Motherlove. Its power is often supernatural. So strong is its magic, in fact, it can make you feel safe in an unsafe world, hopeful in a hopeless situation, inspired in a time in which inspiration is the rarest of all commodities for little Black children.

Motherlove. By sheer force of will, it transforms lives. It is the emotional elixir that raises our children, saves our children, sustains our children; the mystical compound that safeguards--sometimes even spawns--their dreams.

To hear their children tell it, in fact, there is nothing in the world like being raised by a Black mother. That's because, if you take her teachings to heart, you know too much--about yourself and life--to ever give up on either.

Says Jonah Edelman, the second son of Children's Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman: "When I am feeling paralyzed by a task that seems too difficult, I remember the love that lies at the core of my family and their legacy to me. The love gives me strength and I can go on."

Though Jonah wrote those words for the country's best known and most tireless child advocate, they echo the feelings of sons and daughters everywhere. Superlawyer Johnnie Cochran, for example, still visits his mother's grave every week, though she died in the fall of 1991. It is his way, he says, of thanking Hattie Cochran for making him the man he is today.

And, this year, when CNN anchor Bernard Shaw was honored with the Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, he spoke for millions of influential men who say they are able to do what they do outside the home because they have a strong, smart, successful Black woman taking care of home.

Dedicating the honor to his wife, Linda Allston Shaw, he said: "Any woman who has a husband who does what I do for a living and gives birth to two human beings and nurtures them to splendidly promising adulthood is the honoree."

Nurturing children "to splendidly promising adulthood" has always been the goal--and the crowning achievement--of strong Black mothers like the late Clarissa Clement who, in 1946, was chosen "American Mother of the Year" by the Golden Rule Foundation. The mother of former Atlanta University President Rufus Clement and the granddaughter of a slave, she was the first Black woman so honored.

And though it isn't common knowledge, the first African-American ever to hold the post of U.S. surgeon general became a doctor because of motherlove. Every morning before school, Joycelyn Elders milked cows and fed the hogs on the family farm first sharecropped, then owned by her parents. In the afternoon, she worked in the field picking cotton.

When she wanted to attend college, her father was dubious. There was too much work to be done on the farm, he felt, and not enough hands to do it. That was when her grandmother stepped in.

"She told my father, 'I got enough young'uns around here to do the chores' so I could go away to college," recalls Elders, who had never even seen a Black woman doctor, let alone dreamed of being one, until she attended Philander Smith College thanks to "Grandmother Minnie."

Like Elders, basketball greats Isiah Thomas and Karl Malone owe their careers to motherlove. Malone was four years old when his father left the family of eight children. To keep food on the table, his mother, Shirley Turner, worked for 18 years at the sawmills in Louisiana; by night, she worked in the poultry houses cutting chickens into parts.

"I saw my mother wear cardboard in her shoes, just so each of us could have a good pair," Malone recalled. "I saw what the water did to that cardboard. I can never repay her."

Isiah Thomas, retired Detroit Pistons star and current vice president of basketball operations for the Toronto Raptors, knows that feeling well. In the fall of 1970, when leaders of a neighborhood gang came to his house to recruit new members, his mother, Mary Thomas, was waiting for them--shotgun in hand--with a message.

"There was only one gang in my house and that was the Thomas gang, and if they didn't get off my porch, I would blow them across the expressway," she has recalled of that day.

Saving children--their own and others--has always been the special calling of Black mothers. Ask Maya Angelou, who still lives by the advice her mother gave her on the day she moved out of her mother's house when she was a 17-year-old single mother with her 3-month-old baby in tow.

"From the moment you leave this house, don't let anybody raise you," Vivian Baxter told her daughter. "Every time you get into a relationship you will have to make concessions, compromises and there's nothing wrong with that. But keep in mind Grandmother Henderson in Arkansas and I have given you every law you need to live by. Follow what's right. You've been raised."

Raised and sustained and nourished and nurtured. And above all, say countless Black sons and daughters, strengthened and uplifted. Though she does it far more eloquently than any of us, Maya Angelou speaks for all of us when she pays tribute to her mother in the foreword to the groundbreaking book, Doublestitch: Black Women Write About Mothers and Daughters: