The Japanese Way of Tea & My Global Education

Global Education Is Global Understanding

Blue Willow China 

When I was six, my mother bought me a miniature China Tea Set--cups, saucers and teapot--made of matching imported China, unlike the unmatched China sets we used at our mealtime. When I opened the China tea set, I loved the look and feel of the cool smooth surface, but as my fingers glided over it, I had no idea of its significance to my life and the value it would be to my mother's homeschooling plans--my global education, a college scholarship and professional success.

Rosa Parks Booking Photo
Montgomery Bus Boycott

The year I received the China  tea set was 1955, the year Rosa Parks went to jail for starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

At the age of six, I was vaguely aware of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I did not hear of the civil rights activists or the Civil Rights Movement from teachers in my segregated school. My teachers seemed wary of such discussions. I later learned from my parents that the teachers may have been warned not to talk about the Civil Rights Movement for fear that they may start trouble among the student body.

Thurgood Marshall (center)
Brown v Board of Education

I learned about Jim Crow laws, the Civil Rights Movement and the names of civil rights activists like Rosa Parks from hearing their names in conversations between my mother, father and Bigmama when they talked about current events like the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Brown v the Board of Education. 

Rosa Parks
Anti-Rape Activist

At the time, though, they probably had no idea of Rosa Parks' involvement in the protection of black women from rape and lynching from the ills of Jim Crow laws and tradition in the South. I didn't fully understand what Jim Crow laws were until much later in my life. I just knew they were bad for black people and people who were not white. This was confusing to me at times because none of the relatives I knew personally were white, though there was talk in the family about them. And many relatives I knew did not look black. I was too young to know the difference.

When I was six, I knew Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King had something to do with fighting Jim Crow laws during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Jim Crow laws affected everything about our lives and the schools I attended until I graduated from high school; and later getting into a college of my choice. But Jim Crow laws did not affect the global education my mother presented to me with my toy China tea set and other tools, such as an erector set for building structures I imagined. She also discovered meditation, which she adapted to her global education. 

My mother would use that China tea set to teach me about a world outside of Jim Crow, under which my ancestors had lived for nearly a century at that time and my family would live for years to come.

When I saw my mother sitting on the porch staring into the distance, almost trance-like, I knew she was in meditation upon something beautiful or strange or realizable. I learned later that the something she was in meditation upon was me. Living within the circumstances of Jim Crow laws did not give a person an excuse to do less than the best they could offer, my mother always told me. 

"Even the house you live in," she said. "Make it a home. Make your home the best home you can. Organize it. Keep it immaculate. Decorate it. It's where you live. Respect where you live. Take care of your home and it will take care of you; shelter you, nurture you, be standing when you need it!" 

My mother understood what I needed to hear and gave freely and loudly. From primary school through college education with a lot of homeschooling in between, my mother yelled her demands and threatened me if I did not do the work. And she never complimented me unless I had shown extraordinary skill at something. There were no gold stars for mere participation.

"We will find a way of paying for college," she said. "But you have to try to get a college scholarship to help out. If you don't study in high school with college in mine, I don't know if we should strain to pay for college. Maybe you won't study in college and our money will be wasted. Maybe you're not college material. But I won't hold that against you, even though I was smart enough to go to college and would have gone if I had had the chance when I graduated from high school."

Learning to accept and appreciate differences in people is global education.

My mother accepted the way other people lived, even if she didn't approve of their lifestyle. "I do not expect others to let me tell them what to think or how to live," my mother said. "Listen but make your own decision based on what you know. And do not follow or be bullied into going into a certain direction just because others do. Do not be afraid of thinking for yourself. And, likewise, do not bully others into thinking like you." Like you're doing me now, I thought, but had sense enough not to say it out loud.

My mother encouraged me to learn another language. She had learned Spanish when she began her supervisory career in food services and wanted to teach me Spanish so that she could practice her language skills before going off to work and giving orders. 

Image: Early 17th century Japan Stoneware
Momoyama period (1573–1615),
 Metropolitan Museum, New York

In one of our many reference books my mother had purchased over the years, she found items about the Japanese event, The Way of Tea. Sasaki Sanmiis, born in 1893 in Kyoto, wrote the original Japanese classic, Sado-saijiki, which was translated into English in 1960. My mother found translations, which cover Japanese tea tradition throughout the calendar year with descriptions, poetry and The Way of Tea: Reflections. She was fascinated by all of this tradition and ceremony, perhaps because so much of her African and Native American traditions were a mystery to her.

Admitting to me that she was probably not saying the words correctly, my mother still enjoyed trying to pronounce of the names and words describing the ceremonies. "I would love to learn to speak Japanese," she said. "That way, I would have a better understanding of these rules of the tea. "Eastern languages are very different from English and Spanish," she said. "It wouldn't hurt, though, if you learned Spanish."

Using my little toy tea set, my mother taught me about the world's fascination with tea, tea traditions, world economies built around tea and legitimate historical political movements named for the beverage, including the Boston Tea Party, one event leading to the American Revolution. From 1775 to 1783, the Founding Fathers, delegates to the Constitutional Convention, along with the other of their kind, had witnessed America's victory in the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain. Jim Crow laws were not far behind.

My mother especially loved the Japanese ceremonies, but she taught me about all tea traditions and the people who created them. Traditionally, powdered green tea is used in the Chanoyu, Japanese Tea Ceremony. Matcha ceremonial-grade tea is different from other green and black teas brewed from dried flakes of loose tea leaves or tea leaves manufactured into tea bags. Loose tea leaves or those in tea bags are steeped in hot water and then discarded. The ceremonial tea is ground to a fine power that is made to dissolve in water, which preserves its essence, making its consumption more potent and effective than tea leaves. Although we didn't have the real Japanese tea, we used the tea my mother could afford and the tea she could find. Then, we substituted what we had and pretended. It is said that using the powdered green tea within the rules of the ceremony makes the five human senses most acute, encouraging high mental concentration, emotional calm and mental composure. 

My mother and I did not have the powdered green tea for our tea celebrations, but we read about the power of the tea when certain rituals were performed in conjunction with its consumption. This thinking was certainly parallel to my mother's thinking, in that, it led to control of one's behavior through control of one's own mind. 

"Thinking about something is good," my mother told me. "But thinking deeply about something is better." She explained that thinking deeply means rolling it over again and again in my brain and examining thoroughly what was being thought about, not to come up with a better answer, but to come up with a better understanding of the answer. That was meditation, the same thing I had seen her doing so many times.

Of course, my mother and I did not have Japanese, Chinese, English or any other exotic tea. We used Lipton Tea because it was cheap and available at the corner store. We emptied the tea leaves into the little tea pot of my China tea set. My mother said the loose leaves made a stronger brew. I didn't really like the taste of hot tea, but I sipped it with my mother--our pinkies pointed toward the sky--because she said I should know about such things. Then, I hosted pretend tea parties for my young cousins and friends. But I didn't bore them with what my mother and I had read about tea, since my friends and I were only drinking pretend tea, not even Lipton, just tap water.

"You can find meaning where there seems to be none," my mother said. "People have been doing that throughout time. Whatever you're doing, do it the best you can. Give it your full concentration. Challenge yourself with every little thing that comes your way; think of them as opportunities. Do all you can with whatever it is that you have or that you are doing." 

My mother made ordinary things, like sipping a cup of tea, into something special. Finding meaning in the simplest of things, she taught me how to make my life rich without reference to money.

"What does all of this tea talk have to do with me," I asked, watching my mother prepare my lesson. "Japanese tea ceremonies have nothing to do with us."

My mother saw differently, though. "You're wrong," she said. "We are everybody. To learn about us, you must learn about all people. If you leave someone out of your study, you leave out part of your."

~~~~~~~~ My Mother ~~~~~~~~

Littie Nash

Littie Nash was one of the great global thinkers. She did not waste compliments on me. She reserved accolades to celebrate real accomplishments, not just because I dragged myself out of bed before noon on Saturday or because I made an 'A' on my report card. 

"Some things you have to do," my mother said. "And those things pass, not without notice, but without an all-day hullabaloo."

To support me, my mother sponsored my piano, ballet, tennis and swimming lessons, dance performances, recitals, literary and classical music club memberships, summer camps, out-of-state vacations, school trips and science fair exhibits, still managing to squeeze out of our tight budget money for the dentist to install braces on my teeth.

It took a great deal of courage and imagination during the era of Jim Crow laws for my mother to give me what she thought I needed. Jobs for African Americans were scarce and good jobs were mostly nonexistent for them. Black men were economically and politically marginalized and black women were publicly disrespected on a routine basis.

    

Bigmama Didn’t Shop 

At Woolworth’s 

Sunny Nash

Hard Cover

Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

Amazon Kindle

Bigmama Didn't Shop 

at Woolworth's

In the 1990s, I wrote columns for Hearst and Knight-Ridder newspapers--stories from my childhood with my part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement. Texas A&M University published a collection of the stories about which Robin Fruble of Southern California said:

"Every white person in America should read this book! Sunny Nash writes the story of her childhood without preaching or ranting but she made me realize for the first time just how much skin color changes how one experiences the world. But if your skin color is brown, it matters a great deal to a great number of people. I needed to learn that. Sunny Nash is a great teacher," Fruble said.

Sunny Nash is an author, producer, photographer and leading writer on U.S. race relations. She writes books, blogs, articles and reviews, and produces media and images on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking. Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn't Shop At Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press), about life with her part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement.

Sunny Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations. Nash's book is also listed in the Bibliographic Guide for black studies at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. Nash uses her book to write articles and blogs on race relations in America through topics relating to her life--from music, film, early radio and television, entertainment, social media, Internet technology, publishing, journalism, sports, education, employment, the military, fashion, performing arts, literature, women's issues, adolescence and childhood, equal rights, social and political movements--past and present—to today's post-racism.

© 2019 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

 www.sunnynash.com 

~Thank You~

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My Birthday in Denver

I traveled, saw movies, read books and went to galleries and museums when I was growing up because my mother wanted me to have more education than school could provide.

During the summer of 1964, I traveled to Denver to vacation with Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred in Denver. I spent many summers and other out-of-school time with those two. They had no children of their own, and seemed to really enjoy having me as a substitute.

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred mailed me money wrapped in letters and cards, which I answered promptly. When I was young, they mailed me dolls, games and gadgets. Later, more expensive gifts came. They paid for my insurance, watches, jewelry, fancy winter caps, Cashmere sweaters, quilted poodle skirts, pink petticoats, books, a typewriter, tiny radio with earphone, a Baby Ben alarm clock for my bedside table and other "unnecessary stuff you don't need and we have no place to store," my mother said. I loved to listen to music on the transistor radio they sent. I placed the little gadget under my pillow and fell asleep listening to Randy Record Shop out of Nashville, Tennessee.

Aunt Clara liked stylish clothes and bought expensive dresses, and leather and woolen coats, which I relieved her of when I became a teenager, along with most of her makeup and beauty products.

The subject even came up that I could live with them during my high school years and get a better education in a Denver school than I could back home. It was all about civil rights, the subject of Martin Luther King's speeches, Brown v the Board of Education and Rosa Parks in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred kept my school in mind when they bought a nice little home with a second bedroom that could be mine in a quiet, racially mixed neighborhood. The next door neighbors on both sides were white and there were lots of children my age of all races riding their bicycles together up and down the tree-lined paved streets with green lawns, flower gardens and sidewalks. I could even have a bicycle, they said. No bicycle for me back home. There were green lawns and vegetable gardens where I lived, but no flower gardens, paved streets or sidewalks and nowhere to ride a bicycle on the bumpy red-dirt and gravel trails that connected the blocks of my Candy Hill neighborhood.

East High School - Denver, Colorado

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred said I could attend East High School, the oldest high school in Denver and one of America's top high schools in the 1960s. Uncle Fred drove me past the school one winter day in his new car when I had traveled to Denver during the Christmas holidays.

"East High School is a great school!" Aunt Clara told my mother on the telephone. "Fred will drive her to school every day."

The following summer, 1964, they arranged a tour of East High School with a friend attending the school that Fall. There were long discussions on the telephone about East High School that summer. I liked the elegant school building and imagined walking into the tiled hallway and up the grand staircases. But I knew my mother well enough not to get into a discussion with her about it. My mother's was always the last word over mine, my father's, Bigmama's and certainly Aunt Clara's.

East High School, Main Hallway

"I know the school in Denver is better than schools here," my mother said. "I know you and Fred have more money to spend on her than we do." 

Uncle Fred had an office. He took me to the research laboratory where he worked. Aunt Clara was an assistant administrator at a large Catholic hospital. Not many black people in our town had jobs to equal those in the 1950s and '60s. Wages in most southern towns were very low and promotion was still next to impossible.

"I appreciate everything you do for her, Clara," my mother said. "I know you mean well offering to send her to high school out there."

"If it's about money, we'll buy all of her school clothes and pay for anything else she needs," Aunt Clara said.

"It's not about money, Clara."

"Then why won't you let us give her this white education?" Aunt Clara asked.

"Because I'm her mother."

To my mother it wouldn't have mattered whether I went to a great school, a white school or any other school. It had nothing to do with integrated schools or liberal Colorado politics. 

My mother wanted to give me an education herself, not that she doubted Aunt Clara's sincerity about school. My mother had a plan and her plan would work better with her in control. She wanted me to go to college and she felt that the road to a college education would be best paved by her, regardless of where I graduated high school. And the discussion was closed forever, although I resented not having input into the decision.

College was my mother's insurance for my success.

For my birthday that summer, Uncle Fred went out and bought a croquet lawn set and read all the rules to learn how to play, so he could teach me and my friends how to play. Uncle Fred sacrificed his impeccably landscaped rear garden with flowerbeds along the fence that separated their backyard from the neighbor's very large Great Dane. After carefully placing the wire wickets and hardwood stakes into the soil, Uncle Fred tried out a wooden mallet for himself to strike an Easter-egg-colored wooden ball. He did not let me try the game or teach me the rules, saying it wouldn't be fair to the others if I knew how to play the game already.

Croquet, a one-thousand-year-old outdoor game invented around 1066 for the English Royal Court, took its name from the French word, meaning conqueror. 

Croquet Set - 4 Player

A game that had stirred the imaginations of a great number of Americans by the 1960s, croquet had also seemed to have ignited Uncle Fred's attention, too. Why he thought genteel competition would be appropriate for me and my little heathen friends, I will never know, but I am sure it had something to do with my mother. 

When I returned home on the train at the end of the summer, the croquet set was shipped along with all my other birthday and vacation gifts. I found out later that the croquet set was quite expensive and my mother had shared in that expense. "You can teach your friends here to play the game," my mother said, unwrapping Uncle Fred's sturdy package.

Birthday Cake Book 

On my birthday, in addition to spending a lot of money on games, Aunt Clara purchased my birthday cake and made all the snacks. Then Aunt Clara brought her phonograph from the living room out into the backyard to play the latest music she had bought, to which we were to teach her the latest new dance steps. On three card tables, Uncle Fred set up his chess set to try to teach us to play, a set of dominoes, set of checkers and other board games I had never seen. 


It was a fine birthday with my friends nibbling on healthy snacks and other goodies at my mother's insistence, "Don't come

Aunt Clara danced with my friends and Uncle Fred played Chinese checkers, regular checkers, dominoes and other table games with them. But mostly comparing notes about politics, race relations and civil rights that we had all been hearing so much about on television lately. Everyone had an opinion. I thought the new civil rights law meant more to me than it did to my Denver friends until we got into some pretty heated discussions. The school they attended, East High School, where Aunt Clara tried to convince my mother I should go, was integrated. They could sit at the lunch counter at Woolworth's. They could watch movies from any seat in the theater. What is their complaint, I wanted to know. Certainly Martin Luther King wasn't talking about them in his speeches. 

Estes Park Rocky Mountain National Park

At home, I couldn't do the things I could in Denver. When Aunt Clara took me shopping or to lunch, we tried on clothes and sat where we wanted in the restaurant. That could not happen a back home. Black people were not allowed to try on clothes before buying them, could not return the clothes if they did not fit and could not sit down and eat in most restaurants, except in a segregated section. 

Aunt Clara and I rode at the front of the bus not the back like Rosa Parks had been forced to ride before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. When Aunt Clara took me to Red Rock, Cherry Creek, Colorado Springs, Estes Park or other places in the mountains to see the sites, clerks behind the souvenir counters were polite when they took our money for postcards, trinkets and gifts. That was all I expected from civil rights, except that I may have to go to a different school one day.

"What's it like to go to a white school?" I wanted to know. "Do you have any black teachers? Do you have any white friends?" 

"A few," they said.

As I listened, I realized that these people experienced racism of a different kind, "the sneaky kind," as my mother would say. They had been made to stand in lines waiting for services because of their race. They were taunted at school and treated badly by some white teachers and students. This whole subject of race and civil rights in Colorado and the rest of the nation was a lot more complicated that I had thought. Maybe living in Denver and going to East High School wouldn't be that great after all.

Want to know more about Colorado, U.S. race relations or anything else?

Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred, with no children and no contact with other nieces and nephews growing up, were baffled by the adult-like conversation about civil rights, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act at the party. My aunt and uncle were vexed by my seeming indifference to all their efforts to prepare my birthday party. When Aunt Clara talked to my mother on the telephone that night, she said she didn't think I enjoyed my birthday. 

"Put her on the phone!" My mother shouted. When I placed the phone to my ear, I could hear my mother yelling. "You have no right to treat them that way! I have to give you a birthday party. You're mine. They don't owe you anything! No one owes you anything in this world. And you'd better be grateful when someone gives you something and they don't ask for something back. I'm asking--no demanding--something back for all that I do for you," she said. "I want exemplary behavior! How dare you act uncivilized!" My mother shouted into the telephone.

It was useless trying to tell Littie I was not ungrateful but was more interested in trying to find out how these kids felt about civil rights. "It does not matter what kids in Denver think about civil rights!" My mother shouted."You are not going to school in Denver! You are coming home to go to school! If it didn't cost so much to change your train ticket, I'd say start packing right now!" I listened, realizing I should have made more of a fuss about the party to make Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred feel good about doing something special for me. But it was too late for that and all I could do was say, "I'm sorry."

I was made to apologize, period, no explanation, right then with Littie listening. "I'm sorry," I said to Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred, who were not trying to get me into trouble or even to complain. Their concern was about their failure to entertain me and my friends. Afterwards, they seemed to regret saying anything to my mother about my reaction. At dinner, we talked about it. 

After I explained, Aunt Clara and Uncle Fred understood why we were doing more talking than dancing and playing games on my birthday. 

"I'm sorry," was not enough for Littie. As long ago as I could remember, she had given me birthday parties in the backyard with my friends. I always had two cakes, a large white sheet cake that she made for the party and a second, a devil's food cake, that Aunt Lucille  made for me every year. To teach me a lesson in gratitude, my mother stopped the birthday parties altogether. Aunt Clara's was the last birthday party I had. The only cake I got from then on was the devil's food from Aunt Lucille, which she made for me sporadically over the years until I was 40-something and had moved out of state.

My mother taught me many lessons during her lifetime and continues to teach me as I think and write about her. As important as my college education and ultimate success was to her, the life lessons she taught me, like the one about gratitude, using her withdrawal of birthday parties as a tool, prove to be the most important. Many years later, she confessed that she didn't miss the birthday parties. She had grown tired of birthday parties after I got older.

© 2012 Sunny Nash. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

www.sunnynash.blogspot.com

~Thank You~

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Education During Era of Jim Crow Laws

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Education was a theme of conversation during the era of Jim Crow laws.

Brown v the Board of Education
& the Civil Rights Movement

Jim Crow legally segregated schools, colleges, libraries and other educational facilities made getting an education difficult. 

When school segregation was outlawed in 1954 by Brown v the Board of Education, school segregation did not end. It took another ten years, Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964, for some states to start desegregating their schools and they dragged their feet into the 1980s in the North and South with lawsuits and counter lawsuits over Jim Crow laws in education. Still, today, there are predominantly one race or another schools.

Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964

Closely related to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law intended to enforce the 19th century 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had done little to change the social status of former slaves. Lyndon Johnson signed the new Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, an entire decade after Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott ended Jim Crow laws that affected segregation of public facilities. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African Americans and other marginalized U.S. citizens were subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests, violence and even lynching to prevent them from organizing a voting block in their communities, particularly in the South where Jim Crow laws were malignant in society.

My mother was offended by segregation but she could not remove me from segregated schools or home school me. My mother worked. My father worked. I was in the care of my mother's mother, my Bigmama, who was probably not inclined to have me around all day, every day throughout the year. So, just shy of home schooling me, my mother sent me to Jim Crow schools. In addition, she bought books, subscribed to periodicals, and developed her own very strict home schooling lesson plan, which was much harder than the lesson plan my schools followed.

With school starting in a few weeks, education should be the topic of the day in all Americans homes. 

When I was growing up, my mother talked about my going to college all the time because education was the most important part of my childhood. She said, "you have a right to an education; everybody does." And she saw to it that I received that right, even before the Civil Rights Movement and Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended Jim Crow laws in education and other public and private services. 

My mother decided to avoid the ills of Jim Crow laws and educate me herself, just shy of homeschooling me. When Brown v the Board of Education desegregated America's public schools on paper, in reality Jim Crow laws still influenced my schools, which remained segregated and did not improve in quality. My mother used the tattered text books and lesson plans, provided by my segregated schools, to give herself a structure for my education, which she conducted at home. 

My mother's plan for my education involved much more than textbooks and teachers.

As wonderful as some of my teachers were. In addition, my mother bought reference books, subscribed to periodicals, took me to museums and galleries in other cities that allowed African Americans, played classical music and jazz on a record player she bought at a second-hand store and, among other enriching lessons, she taught me customs of other cultures, like the Japanese Way of Tea. Besides getting me ready to attend college, my mother had her own plans to go to college one day.

Primarily, though, my education began when the school year ended. The first thing my mother did at the end of the school year was to start preparing to send me away from home so I could experience life outside of Jim Crow laws. "You need to know what's outside of this place," she said. "Knowing is better than not knowing and then guessing about it. But not down South. I am not sending a child of mine down there to be humiliated, dogged and spat upon."

For some reason, we didn't think of Texas as being down south, but more out west, and not as dangerous as Alabama, Mississippi or the Carolinas, where the Greensboro Four staged the Woolworth Sit-ins in 1961 in North Carolina. The Woolworth Sit-ins dashed my childish estimation that South Carolina was worse than North Carolina, just because North Carolina was farther north and anywhere north had to be better than anywhere south. 

But Texas was in the West where African Americans had always enjoyed some amount of freedom, even though segregation was common. In fact, after the Civil War, black former slaves banded together in Texas to form independent black communities in those early days. For many reasons, including racism and economics, these communities did not continue to flourish.

Waco, Texas, 1939 by Russell Lee

However, segregation in Texas was as plain and simple in Texas as it was anywhere else in the United States, including northern and western states that did not have physical signs for separating the races at the movies and other places. Physical signs were not necessary in many cases. 

Entire parts of most cities were segregated, with each race having its own school, facilities and services. People, including white people, knew where they were not welcome. Where this was not the case, in smaller towns of Texas and other southern states, there were hand-written and commercially printed signs to indicate where people of different races entered, sat, rode, ate and waited for services. For the most part, however, people instinctively knew where to go without being directed by "Signs," as my mother said. "Are intended to either degrade people or make other people feel like they may be special."

When I was growing up, the South was in turmoil, but I have to admit, most of the time I did not feel the turmoil, except for seeing it on television or reading about it. Inside our home, there was peace, intelligence and culture.

My mother explained the racial turmoil to me and made me read the newspapers and magazines about it.

I read about Brown v the Board of Education, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Woolworth Sit-ins, Freedom Riders and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So, I knew about Dr. King, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott "stirring up all kinds of trouble for the white people down South," my mother said, smiling and handing me a magazine with the story and pictures. 

"Read this," my mother said. "And learn what your people are doing. They are going to make it possible for you to go to that big white college out there on the outskirts of town. But you must be prepared with good grades and we have to be prepared to pay for it. But no matter what it takes, you have to get an education!" 

In 1963, my family and I watched the news coverage of Dr. King's I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in Washington DC. I had wanted to go, but the march occurred just after my 13th birthday and no one I knew wanted to make that trip and, at the time we had no relatives living in Washington. But I was glued to the news coverage and felt the pulse of the crowds and hung on to all the speeches our TV station allowed to be aired.

Find what you need on 

My mother had relatives and friends nationwide, including the Deep South, but I was never sent down south in summer or any other time. What the Deep South had to teach me, I had already learned. Eastern, Northern or Western United States were my destinations, although those regions had their racial problems, too. I questioned her about racism and she said it is a very personal feeling and only the person can answer for himself or herself. "All I can say is," she said, "That you can waste time worrying and doing nothing about something you cannot change or you can get on with trying to do something about it like Rosa Parks and Dr. King, Go to college. Show that you are smart. Do something with your life!"

MY SEGREGATED EDUCATION and my mother's homework assistance and extra reading assignments prepared me to qualify for entrance and graduation from Texas A&M University, where I was among the first women to earn an undergraduate degree and the first African American to earn a degree in journalism and broadcasting. To honor the achievements of black students in Texas A&M history, the Cushing Library compiled In Fulfillment of a Dream, an exhibition chronicling the presence of African Americans at Texas A&M University. which includes my scholarly portrait. The Cushing Library also included me in another of its exhibition, Intended for All: 125 Years of Women at Texas A&M.

Texas A&M University
College Station

Texas A&M University was established in 1876 in Brazos County under the Justin Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862.

Texas A&M University College Station in began as an all-male, all-white military college of fewer than 100 students when classes first began with primary emphasis on  agricultural and industrial training. When I was growing up and had no idea I would ever go to that school, the enrollment was under 5,000. During the intervening years, Texas A&M went from small, military college to a premier co-educational research university with an enrollment of more than 50,000.

My mother lived to see me fulfill some of her dreams for me--music career; graduation from Texas A&M University; syndicated columnist; national publications; international recognition as a writer and photographer; contributions to hundreds of literary collections and journals; collection by hundreds of libraries and museums around the world; writing, photography and production awards; radio and television positions; published author; and speaking at our state capitol and a  Presidential Library.

Sunny Nash
Wins 2004 Award
Producer of the Year

Bigmama Didn't Shop
At Woolworth's
by Sunny Nash

Sunny Nash is the author of Bigmama Didn't Shop at Woolworth's (Texas A&M University Press), about life in the Brazos Valley with her part-Comanche grandmother during the Civil Rights Movement. Nash’s book is recognized by the Association of American University Presses as essential for understanding U.S. race relations; listed in the Bibliographic Guide to Black Studies by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; and recommended for Native American collections by the Miami-Dade Public Library System in Florida. 

Sunny Nash--author, producer, photographer and leading writer on U.S. race relations in--writes books, blogs, articles and reviews, and produces media and images on U.S. history and contemporary American topics, ranging from Jim Crow laws to social media networking, Nash uses her book to write articles and blogs on race relations in America through topics relating to her life--from music, film, early radio and television, entertainment, social media, Internet technology, publishing, journalism, sports, education, employment, the military, fashion, performing arts, literature, women's issues, adolescence and childhood, equal rights, social and political movements--past and present—to today's post-racism.

 

© 2012 Sunny Nash

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

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