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ZORA and The Blackness present Moonrakers 2020
Giving Thanks For The Mothers of the Movement
They’ve faced down suppression, racism, and sexism to ensure their descendants have equality
My mother is a mother of the movement.
Because my grandmother died in childbirth, Eleanor Barber had to raise her siblings amid enormous pressures. At 12 years old, she finished high school in Indiana, went to a leading Black business school, trained as a concert and church pianist, and became a government employee — all before 1960. After marrying my father, she came to the South to challenge a school system that was still segregated 12 years after the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was illegal.
Here, in the face of resistance to justice, my mother decided to birth and nurture transformation. I was her only child, and she could have easily stayed where facing the reality of segregation would not have been necessary. But she came to the South and enrolled me in segregated kindergarten. She and my father took jobs at the all Black school — she as a secretary to the principal. My…
