Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper, 1938-1989

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments The adage it takes a village to raise a child is also true for a book. I started with Mildred Brown: I visited her grave, formally introduced myself, and asked for her permission to do this project. Then I contacted her relatives, who were scattered throughout the United States. They extended courtesies to me far surpassing Mildred’s southern hospitality roots. I cannot say thank you enough to her great-nephews Andrew Battiste and William Brown; her nephew Bennie Drew Brown Jr.; her cousins David Winton, Druella Borders, and William Taylor Breeding for their mental and physical guided tours; her exhusband ’s son, Shirl Edward Gilbert II, and daughter, Rosalyn Gilbert; her othermothered son, Marvin Kellogg Sr.; and grandsons, Marvin Kellogg Jr., Dale Kellogg, and Kenneth Kellogg; sister-in-laws Catherine Phillips and Harriet Hannah; and nieces Kathryn Battiste and Marguerita Washington. Their familial stories and reminiscences of Mildred gave me a fairly good idea of her. But Mildred, also known as Miss Brown and to a special few as Millie, was a complicated woman. It took more than 150 interviews to reconstruct her. Many of the interviewees were in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, but they graciously spoke with me for hours at a time and shared their memories, photographs, diaries, and, of course, Omaha Star newspaper clippings. The North Omaha cooperation was substantial, and I need to thank several people individually, such as Rudy Smith, Matt Holland, Robert Armstrong, Archie Godfrey , Buddy Hogan, David Mason, Warren Taylor, Tommie Wilson, Mary Green Parks, La Veeda Banks, and Cathy Hughes, for consenting to multiple interviews; to give a heartfelt hug to Bertha Calloway, xii Acknowledgments Robert Samuels, Gwen Foxall, Royce Keller, Shirley Harrison, Katherine Fletcher, Bob Rodgers, and Korea Stowdarski for inviting me into their homes and lives; to acknowledge the factual and spiritual guidance from Reverends Reynolds, Vavrina, McSwain, McCaslin, McCullough, and Menyweather-Woods; and to offer an upward posthumous thanks to retired attorney Truman Clare for unraveling pages of Douglas County Courthouse legal jargon with me. I could not have accomplished this book without each named person and the trust and assistance of many others, such as academic mentors Drs. Margaret Jacobs and Harl Dalstrom; archivists John Allison, Joellen ElBashir, Gary Rosenberg, Gordon Rieber, and Les Valentine; Metropolitan Community College’s Randy Schmailzl, Jane Franklin, Dennis Smith, Edie Sample, Jim Van Arsdall, Art Durand, Mary Lyons-Carmona, and Linda Milton; and University of Nebraska Press history acquisitions editor Bridget Barry for believing in my project, associate project editor Sara Springsteen for supervising it, and eagle-eyed copyeditor Susan Silver for making it a joy all over again. The community village was filled with numerous industrial and supportive residents. BLACK PRINT WITH A WHITE CARNATION ...