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Foreword
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Foreword Hayward Farrar Jr. It has been said that the past is a foreign country. If that is true, then Kibibi V. Mack-Shelton’s Ahead of Her Time in Yesteryear: Geraldyne Pierce Zimmerman Comes of Age in a Southern African American Family gives a grand tour of a world utterly foreign to our present-day sensibilities. That world is of the African American middle and upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century . This was a world circumscribed by strict racial segregation, exclusion, and oppression. Yet, despite the immense disabilities placed upon them, many black families, such as the Pierce family, created a social order of pride and dignity and relative prosperity that gave their children the character and skills to be agents of transformative change. From this social order came the Civil Rights/ Black Power movements that dismantled Jim Crow in the South, rolled back racism in the North, and paved the way for the election of Barack Obama. The world brought to life by Professor Mack-Shelton’s book emphasized the values of hard work, fidelity, patience, prudence, perseverance, delayed gratification, and chastity to an extent almost unbelievable today. It also emphasized subtle but effective resistance to racial dehumanization. The Pierce family and many others of that era refused to internalize the values of white supremacy and black inferiority and conducted themselves insofar as possible as the equals if not superiors to whites. They refused to raise their children as racial inferiors; nor did they stifle their aspirations. At the same time, through strict parenting, the Pierces instilled in their children the values and character they needed to survive, flourish, and eventually bring about enormous social change. They had a strongly optimistic outlook and raised their children to struggle against and eventually push back the structures of white supremacy. xii Foreword The restrictions placed on “Jello” Pierce, especially regarding sex, by her family and by Fisk University are unimaginable today. Though she did rebel somewhat against her strict Victorian upbringing, her rebellion never went far enoughtomakeherlifedysfunctional.Infactthisupbringinggavehertheinner strength not only to endure the soul-destroying strictures of racist and sexist oppression, but to overcome these strictures and to live a most satisfying life as an educator, social activist, wife, and mother. Geraldyne “Jello” Zimmerman was a trailblazing educator, one of the few women, black or white, to become college professors of mathematics anywhere in the United States in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. She became one of the pillars of South Carolina State College as a mathematics professor from 1948 to 1976. She also contributed immensely to the black community of Orangeburg, South Carolina, through her founding of black Boy Scout and Girl Scout chapters. She established black women’s civic organizations too numerous to mention and worked with her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. The black world that produced Jello Zimmerman also produced such giants in the community as Dorothy Height, John Hope Franklin, Lena Horne, Kenneth Clark, Whitney Young, Jackie Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Benjamin Hooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, and others too numerous to mention. I contend that the African Americans born between 1910 and 1930 have been black folks’ “greatest generation” as they lived through and in many ways triumphed over the Great Depression and World War II and established the foundations for the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements. Against all odds they created relatively stable families and communities that became a force for transformative social change. In 1949 I was born into that world. While my parents did not live as affluently as the Pierce family, they and others lived by the values that the Pierces exemplified. My father, Hayward Farrar, was born in 1917 to Kenneth and Virginia Farrar in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. He was unable to receive a high school education in rural, racist Southside, Virginia. Still, he had the drive to migrate to Baltimore to better himself, acquiring skills as a carpenter and barber. He fought bravely and well in World War II, coming out a disabled veteran. He married my mother in 1945 and fathered me in 1949 and my brother, Ricardo, in 1953. He fit the stereotype of the uneducated, hopeless black man, yet he refused to live down to that stereotype. He had high hopes for my brother and me and literally worked himself to death to support our family, succumbing to hypertensive heart disease while working as a barber at the age of thirty-eight in...