Author Information
Our Parents
Our parents had 8 children, one of whom died at the age of 2 which caused
a lifetime of painful memories for my parents.
Our father did probono work in the 1930's for the NAACP and was the first
man in our city to sue a policeman over the beating of a black prisoner.
At the time in our northern state, there were several racists sitting on
a lawyer's committee and our father was disbarred for those actions and for
attempting to create a peaceful mediation between his client, a cousin, and
his client's father. His ivy league law degree, obtained at the age of 22,
was gone. He had been given a vaccination for Japanese encephalitis
in Korea and had developed a temperature of 107 degrees. Like many others
in the US military who had the vaccination, he subsequently contracted Parkinson's. In 1951 on July 4th, his only sibling, a brother, was
in a lake setting off fireworks in a boat for the 2 families. The boat capsized
giving him a concussion and he drowned. The suffering my fathe endured
precipitated his Parkinson's. Next he worked to ceate a lake for African Americans, excluded from virtually all swimming places. The dam broke
and with it the money invested in the project. The death of his brother
precipitated his latent Parkinson's which he had for 25 years. In the last 10 years he was totally bedridden.
Our mother had been valedictorian of her high school class. Her father
made sure that she went to college.. After our father's illness, she would
rise at 5 am, prepare the children's lunches for school, clean, leave to teach school, come home and take care of our father, continue working and retire at 11 or 12. She carried on this brutal schedule for 20 years.
Because of the sacrifices they made for their children, they never carried
out their own creativity desires.
