'Our history is like a compass': Seven Tallahassee seniors reflect during Black History Month
The history of Tallahassee and its older African American citizens is woven tightly together.
During this Black History Month, the Democrat is revisiting conversations with seven Tallahassee residents – with their long lives and multiple accomplishments – who know that from poverty, a professor can be born. That teachers and historians may have once walked behind mules.
By sharing a few of their reminiscences and an iron-clad exhortation for Black youth to work hard, become educated, and believe in themselves, they offer their own legacies as proof that one day all may sing… “We HAVE Overcome.”
Here are their stories:
Osiefield Anderson: An explorer through education
His voice may waver slightly, but the certainty in his words is rock solid: “Your thoughts and your imagination are the previews and coming attractions of your life,” he says.
Dr. Osiefield Anderson, 92, does what he has done down through the decades — he shares advice on how to live, to achieve, to model oneself into something of great value— lessons meant for both African Americans like himself, and for people of all other races and ethnic backgrounds.
A now respected and accomplished professor, Anderson started off life as the son of a high-school educated teacher who in turn taught students using cast-off white children’s books. But it seems that even from the beginning, Anderson was an expert on how to shape one’s life into the form he envisioned, no matter his starting point.
Anderson is a retired Chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Florida A&M University. He is the author of 34 books, many non-academic, but which impart lessons in life. He is the one who was told by a white student, “Tonight I’m going to propose marriage to my sweetheart. And because of you, she’s going to be marrying a man, not a boy.”
“I was born in rural Pineview, Georgia,” Anderson said. “Black children were only offered schooling to the eighth grade, if that.”
His mother also tended the farm when she wasn't tending the classroom. “All five of us, three brothers, a sister, and my mother would have to sleep in the same bed… it was the only one we had.”
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Anderson remembers when the family “lived in a white man’s house, and he’d fallen behind in the planting. He wanted my mother to take us boys out of school to help him in the fields, and she said no. At first, he told her she’d have to get out then… but he relented, 'cause my mother was so strong on education.”
Anderson says he’d always had confidence in himself. And his mother did too. She wrangled him a kind of audition to get into Georgia’s Gillespie Selden Institute, a progressive high school for African American children begun in 1902. Anderson thrived there, learning to love math, and went on to earn higher mathematical degrees from Florida A&M University and Ohio State University. He would become the Chairman of FAMU’s Math Department, serving for 28 years.
As to the difference in yesterday’s and today’s students? “We tried harder back then, I think. Today’s students don’t prepare like we did. They don’t take the value of knowledge seriously.”
“Our history is like a compass to locate ourselves on the map of human geography,” he says. And he encourages everyone to be ever the explorer.
Mary Hadley: 'We all looked out for one another'
Mary Hadley, 80, is a retired Tallahassee teacher who grew up in Griffin Heights, which was then “all the way out in the country.”
She and her sister, Althemese Barnes, the founder and Director Emeritus of the Riley House Museum, recall that their great-great-grandmother had been enslaved, and that their father had to quit school after the third grade, yet each of the nine siblings went on to become college graduates.
Among Hadley’s many memories during Black History Month are that “We had a cow and some hogs. No electric lights or indoor plumbing.”
In her youth, African American neighborhoods or “enclaves” were restricted by "red-lining," the inability to obtain loans, and the general segregation of the races. That created communities where it seemed everyone helped to parent children, and the church and your neighbors were family.
Mary Hadley says that then, “we all looked out for one another.”
Other memories revolve around having access only to the day-old bread that was brought to the black neighborhoods and using school books handed down three times from Leon High to Lincoln to the Griffin Heights school where she attended.
“I remember the new library they built on, I think, Monroe Street and finding out we weren’t going to be allowed to use it,” she says remembering the sadness she felt as a child.
Deloris Sloan: A memorable trip to the Tallahassee jail
Dr. Deloris Sloan, now 76, was a student prodigy, who graduated FAMU high school at 14 — despite the hand-me-down supplies. Always encouraged by a mother who “expected the best out of us, saying, “what you think, you can do,” she would go on to earn advanced degrees from FAMU and the University of Florida.
She become Vice President of Student Affairs at FAMU, where her brother was also president, and eventually retired from FSU’s Office of the Vice President, a once-segregated university she wouldn’t have been allowed to attend as a young woman.
Once during her teen years, Sloan found herself a participant in a lunch counter protest that led to a trip to the Tallahassee jail. That resulted in “five or six hours in a filthy basement holding room,” Sloan said. “I would always remain interested in civil rights issues.”
And yet, though segregation’s end permitted many things not previously allowed, Sloan says that, “the cohesion” of the African American neighborhoods was lost.
“If a neighbor told you your skirt was too short, you’d go home and change it. It they reminded you it was getting dark, you’d hurry back to your own place. The sense that growing up 'takes a village,' sadly became a thing of the past.”
Annie Harris: 'It's the goodness part'
Annie Harris, 74, is an Alabama-born daughter of a share-cropper and his teacher wife. She would also go on to become not only a teacher, but an “Assistant Superintendent of Leon County Schools.”
As a girl, “I just hated working those fields,” she says of the days when she would hide in the “green cotton rows” to keep from picking in the hot sun. She also didn’t much like the milking or chasing after the frequent runaway cow.
But after graduating from FAMU, establishing her family and career, Harris says that what remains most with her is the emphasis in those days on the importance of education and going to church.
“It’s the goodness part… the part you pass around,” she says. “My mother would always say, “Don’t ask someone if they need help, just give it. And don’t ask if they’re hungry, just bring them food,” Harris said. “It’s those seeds that get planted early that linger and grow up strong."
Miaisha Mitchell: Growing up right in Smokey Hollow
Miaisha Mitchell, 74, was one of 14 children, and born in nearby Smokey Hollow.
She would later become a social worker and researcher. Mitchell lived with her mother, a teacher, and father, a skilled laborer, in an extended family that often took in friends and other children.
With no school for black children in Smokey Hollow, the cadre of young students would walk three miles to Bond School, where they read from hand-me-down books from white schools.
And yet, Mitchell’s Smokey Hollow memories are radiant.
“We roasted potatoes in the fireplace, because we didn’t have a stove. We burned candles and kerosene lamps, and when we could hear one, we loved to listen to the radio,” she told Tallahassee Magazine in a November story.
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“We loved our elders — the people from church, the deacons and mothers, and the neighbors who all took care of each other, and us.
Mitchell says all of Smokey Hollow’s children knew there were open doors in nearly every house for little ones with hungry appetites.
“Wednesday you could get potato salad at one lady’s house, peach cobbler on Sundays at another house, and if you’d shuck them, corn on the cob somewhere else. You’d be full by the time you got home for dinner.”
Mitchell also remembers her mother feeding the hobos from the trains that ran through Smokey Hollow, with the reminder that “it’s proper to share what you have.”
“We had 'girlhood training' at the church on how to behave properly."
In what Mitchell says was her first “civic duty,” she and other children delivered messages to families of incarcerated men who would call out through the jail’s barred windows to the little couriers below.
“Children had lots of responsibility back then,” she says. “It helped us grow up right.”
Edward Duffee: When Frenchtown was a boomtown
Eighty-three-year-old attorney Edward Duffee remembers when Frenchtown boomed.
“We had four dry cleaners, five grocery stores, four service stations, two movie theatres, and many other small variety stores—all black-owned. Life was great.”
Though his father worked as a logger, and his mother was a maid, Edward Duffee would go on to become president of his law school class at FAMU. Positivity was in the air in Frenchtown.
But, according to Duffee, desegregation impacted the community in some negative ways.
Outside business and economic development forced the small stores to close, and people began to move out.
“When the big stores moved in, it forced the mom and pop stores to close, and people began to move out," he said. “A once stable community was wiped out.”
Etta Ruth Crump Jefferson: 'The First Lady Barber in Frenchtown'
One person who hung on though, was 82-year-old, Etta Ruth Crump Jefferson, known affectionately as “The First Lady Barber in Frenchtown.”
She began life as the daughter of a lady farmer who raised three children alone after her husband died. “Mama would open the furrows with a mule and plow,” she says.
After she’d married, Jefferson decided she wanted “something a little different.” And with a barber’s license in hand, she began at Your Way Barbershop, and stayed for the next 40 years.
Back story: Barber hangs up her clippers after 53 years.
“It was a busy place back then,” Jefferson said. “Lots of businesses and entertainment spots right in the same area.” The streets were filled with patrons of The Red Bird Club, Café’ DeLuxe, and the famed El Dorado where the likes of Cannonball Adderley would play.
Finishing her career 13 years later in other shops, Jefferson remembers that she both mastered all the latest styles — “flat tops, crews, covados, afros,” and held her own in the barber shop’s intimate setting of male congeniality.
“I was always respected,” she says. “Yes, they’d talk about the news, their families, sometimes women. I’d just listen,” she says.
And collect nice tips.
“One man gave me $100 tip! I’ll never forget that… when the going rate was $8 for a shave and cut!”
Marina Brown can be contacted at: email@example.com.
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