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"A Mother's Day 2020 Tribute to Mrs. Ruth Alexandra Cox," my late foster mother. Watch the video through the video thumbnail to the left of the story title or on YouTube.

HuROP: The Path to Greatness

From roots deep in struggle, in stories untold,

A new path is carved, a vision unfolds.

HuROP stands tall, a beacon, a guide,

Lifting young kings, restoring their pride.

Through the fire, through the storm,

We shape their futures, we keep them warm.

A brotherhood formed, a circle unbroken,

Where dreams are nurtured, and truth is spoken.

A Calling, A Rite, A Journey Begins

Not just a program, but a sacred rite,

A passage from shadow into the light.

We teach them to lead, to rise, to strive,

To walk with purpose, to truly thrive.

They sit with elders, they stand with peers,

They learn from wisdom passed down through years.

Bankers and builders, the leaders of trade,

Entrepreneurs with empires made.

Not just words, but action in kind,

A sharpened vision, a disciplined mind.

They pitch, they plan, they build, they grow,

Their own foundations, their seeds they sow.

A Shift in the Story, A Change in the Tide

Where some saw limits, we craft a way,

A future bright as the break of day.

No chains of doubt, no fear, no shame,

Just bold young men who know their name.

From classrooms to boardrooms, from courts to the stage,

They rewrite their story, they turn the page.

Impacting their families, their mothers’ embrace,

Restoring the hopes once lost to the race.

Beyond Themselves, A Community Thrives

Their rise is not theirs alone to hold,

It spreads like fire, fierce and bold.

Each step they take, each choice they make,

The ground beneath begins to shake.

They uplift brothers, they break the mold,

They fuel their schools with knowledge untold.

They build their blocks, they mend the cracks,

Giving back, never looking back.

A cycle shattered, a world remade,

By hands once doubted, by paths once swayed.

Yet here they stand, against the odds,

Men of greatness, men of God.

HuROP: More Than a Dream, A Destiny Claimed

So let the world watch, let the world see,

What HuROP builds, what men can be.

Not just a moment, not just a phase,

But a legacy forged in passion and praise.

For every young king who walks through our door,

He leaves prepared to do so much more.

To claim his power, to own his space,

To stand in triumph, to elevate.

This is HuROP, this is our song,

A call to greatness, deep and strong.

And as we rise, as we ascend,

The journey continues—our story won’t end.

February is a time we often look back at the “Great Migration” and what it has meant to be members of the tribe of descendants of those who survived the brutality of slavery in the United States. Looking back has the potential to reopen deep and painful wounds. This remembering also brings great stories of strength, survival, and resilience. The story I want to remember and don’t want the world to forget is my family’s. It belongs to my grandmother.

Many families moved North. But my family moved West to California. I don’t know if California was the location of choice because my grandparents thought it would provide more opportunities for their growing family or if they were following family members who had already relocated to California. Some families moved to locations already settled by family and friends if we remember correctly.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time visiting my grandmother. During those visits, she would tell me about her life and what it was like for her and her brother, my Uncle Jesse. My great-grandmother had eight children, but these stories and memories were always about Grandma and Uncle Jesse. I think she had experiences and relationships with the others, but they were not mouthy fighters like Grandma and Uncle Jesse, which prevented them from being characters in the history she gave me. Her other siblings had already been conditioned to keep in line with their heads down to keep from drawing attention to themselves.

As a little girl, I knew Grandma was special. She was smart, funny, and quick. But women were not supposed to be those things then. As a 53-year-old woman, I often wonder what life could have been for her if there were opportunities for women. The same opportunities that are being eroded today.

You probably wonder what makes my grandmother’s story so different from all the other stories of the women of her time. In many ways, nothing, yet in many ways, everything. My grandmother was born into a family with the ability to pass for white, but they chose to embrace whatever African heritage they possessed.

Growing up, she and Uncle Jessie found themselves in constant fights around their ethnicity. They were always ready to fight those insisting they were white. While she had a tremendous dislike for white people, she managed to find a place of pride regarding her slave- holding ancestors. She would always want me to know she was a descendant of General Robert E. Lee. As I gained an understanding of what that meant, I also understood my grandmother and her children were at a loss for the meaning of how that played into her appearance as white or how she as a black person could be his relative. She once tried to suffocate a white girl in mud for calling her white.

Perhaps this is why she chose to marry my grandfather. He was a very dark-skinned black man, about the color of garden soil or freshly ground dark roast coffee beans. Grandpa was dark enough that it was not safe for him to be married to my grandmother and continue living in the South. There was no way my grandparents could continue living in the South without the constant threat of violence because they would have been perceived to be a biracial couple. Each of my grandmother’s sisters married brown-skinned men, but none of them were as dark as my grandfather. However, each sister migrated to California. I think they followed my grandparents in hopes of experiencing life in ways that were not possible in the South.

What my grandmother found was she traded the pain of life in the South for the pain of life in California. In each place, she was fighting for her voice and her autonomy. In the South, she fought for her understanding of who she was. In California, she fought for who my grandfather said she could be.

My grandmother experienced mental, emotional, and physical abuse at the hands of life and the hands of my grandfather. I remember her excessive drinking of beer, wine, and gin growing up. They were her way of dealing with the cards life dealt her.

I can only imagine what it felt like to be a domestic working in the homes of white women when she looked like she should have a housekeeper of her own. There was something about her skin that made it easy for white women to put their guard down with her. She managed to develop a level of friendship with the women she served. Every day, she would come home drunk or nearly drunk after spending the latter part of her day drinking with her employer/friends.

Grandma didn’t fully fit into their world or Grandpa’s. When the domestic work for the day ended, the domestic violence for the night began. My mother has shared with me her resentment towards her mother for being “sloppy drunk” and falling down the stairs. She didn’t use the word resentment; she made it clear she never wanted to be like her mother. Grandpa was Mom’s hero, and he could do no wrong in her eyes, including abuse her mother. To this day she is still a self-proclaimed daddy’s girl and she is proud to be like him.

I don’t recall Grandma going to church much when I was growing up, but my grandfather went every Sunday. My grandfather wore his fancy suits and Stacy Adams shoes and drove his Cadillac to church without fail. Grandma couldn’t go to church and have dinner ready when Grandpa walked in the door, so, like Cinderella, she stayed home preparing his Sunday dinner. Even though she didn’t attend morning worship, I remember Grandma engaging in private worship with God as she sang over every meal she cooked. She always cooked enough for everyone including the neighborhood kids playing with us when dinner was served. I think singing when I cook is something I learned from Grandma and it’s the ingredient that makes every meal taste good.

Grandma never learned to drive. She was dependent on him until that dependence needed to be shifted to us. She seldom left home, even to go to the store. She lived as confined as one suffering from agoraphobia. On most occasions, someone was sent to the store with a list. Whatever money she had would have been given to whoever was given the task of shopping for her. When I was a child, there were times she would go to the slaughterhouse with Grandpa but that didn’t happen often, and ended by the time I was an adult.

One would think her complexion would open doors for her that would have been closed to my grandfather. I only remember Grandma socializing with family and one church couple they were friends with. During her isolation, Grandpa worked as a longshoreman and was a member of a Masonic lodge. Perhaps that’s where the alcoholism came in to relieve the pain of depression and isolation.

Too young to understand what I was hearing, I remember overhearing conversations my grandfather was having or had an affair with the wife of that couple from the church after the husband had passed away. That couple was the opposite of my grandparents. The husband was fair and could pass for white and the wife was brown-skinned. Her complexion was not as dark as Grandpa’s but it was clear she was a black woman.

Grandma was never the same. I can imagine her pain. He chose to have an affair with a woman who was everything she was not. Because the woman was married to a kind, nurturing man, she was outgoing and had a freedom my grandmother never knew. My grandfather chose to show her the kindness he withheld from Grandma, even though Grandma was the mother of his eight children. I don’t know if he had compassion for the emotional toll of giving birth to a stillborn baby on my grandmother. I don’t know if many of my family members understand the emotional pain she carried.

My grandparents raised seven of the eight children they conceived. None are as light as she or as dark as he was. My mother and all of her siblings have a similar red complexion with freckles. After the birth of their third child, Grandpa told Grandma that they better not have a child any lighter or darker than the three they already had, as if she could control that. Yet, there have always been conversations about skin color, who had good hair, who had nappy hair, and who had long hair. We don’t have conversations about integrity, education, God, or who God has called us each to be.

I began this story by talking about survival and resilience. We remembered some of the reasons migration was good for our people and some of the reasons it was necessary for our people. For my grandparents, it could have been the difference between life and death for one or both of them.

I stated that everything and nothing makes my grandma’s story different. My grandmother had a challenging life, but it was equally as beautiful. I learned about how to truly love unconditionally from my grandmother. I learned how to be strong and resourceful from my grandmother. I learned how to skin cats from my grandmother. She would always say, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” As I have gotten older, I have taken on that mantra as I have begun skinning cats of my own. I recently asked my mother if my grandma was a cat skinner. In her frustration with me, she said, “Megan, NO. I don’t know what you are talking about!” I told her that Grandma always told me, “There was more than one way to skin a cat.” Cat skinning is a form of resourcefulness and resilience. When you come to a closed door, you look for a window.

I don’t know if my life has been as painful and challenging as Grandma’s life was. Some days, it feels like I have experienced more pain and challenges than good. But I had a beautifully amazing grandmother who taught me how to cook, how to laugh, how to think, how to be strong, and how to be Megan.

Maybe she could only teach me those things through her pain. And maybe I could only understand them and live them out in my life through my pain. Black women come in all shades and shapes, and we know all levels of suffering. I am coming to believe our suffering often works like a tenderizer, softening our hearts in ways that allow us to continue loving those who injure us. It gives us the patience to share the wisdom we have collected with future generations. It allows us to access the heart of God in ways that prevent us from storing up hate. In many cases it is like the pain of childbirth; it is forgotten or minimized in severity once causation ends. We learn to reframe it in our hearts and minds and forgive.

INTRODUCTION

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topek, Kansa. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools violated the 14th Amendment and was, therefore, unconstitutional. The case is considered a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education marked the end of Legal Segregation in Public Schools. The case inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited voting, education, and discrimination in public facilities.

“While the 1954 U. S. Supreme Court Landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely racially homogeneous. To address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.

The struggle to desegregate the schools received impetus from the Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was to end legal segregation in all public places. The movement’s efforts culminated in Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. President signed the three laws to end discriminatory voting practices and segregation of public accommodations and housing. The importance of these three laws was the injection of both the legislative and executive branches joining the judiciary to promote racial integration. In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the federal government to cut off funding if Southern schools and districts did not comply and to bring lawsuits against school officials who resisted. Many may have thought the struggle to desegregate schools was happening only in Southern schools. This was not the case at all. The battle was happening in Northern school districts as well.”[1]

One argument against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that opponents of the proposed legislation found particularly compelling was that the bill would require forced busing to achieve specific racial quotas in schools. Therefore, it was argued that busing (instead of simply increasing funding to segregated schools) was necessary for achieving racial equality.

Desegregation busing (also known simply as busing, integrated busing, or forced busing) was an attempt to diversify the racial makeup of schools in the United States by sending students to school districts other than their own. [2]

In September 1968, my brothers, cousin, and I were bused from our all-Black community in Brooklyn, New York, to integrate into an all-White community public school 13.3 miles and 40 minutes away from our home. My brothers and I went to one school. My cousin was sent to another. We were not allowed to attend the same school. My heart aches as I write my story of that dreadful day.

Ordinarily, an alarm clock is designed to alert an individual or group of people at a specified time. Dah! But an alarm clock was not the primary time machine to wake me and my brothers that morning. “Wake up!” “Get up.” '`Today is the first day of school!’ “You’re gonna ride the yellow school bus!” “You can’t be late!” “Get up, get up!” were the echoing and series of word sound waves from my mother’s mouth to the ears of Carlton, Craig, and me.

We did not need a mommy alarm clock. Besides, we hadn’t slept through the night anyway. Though my brothers and I did not speak to each other during the night, we talked to each other nervously as we tossed and turned our little bodies repeatedly under the sheets.

That night morning, the rustling sheets spoke for us. Neither mommy nor daddy saw or heard the bodies of their children rustling in the night under the sheets. We had to get up in the night morning in a New York City neighborhood and catch the yellow school bus in this darkness.

Without a desire, my brothers and I got out of bed, dressed, ate breakfast, put on our coats, hats, scarves, and gloves, picked up our book bags, and headed out the door to catch the yellow school bus.

The moment we opened the front door of our home and stepped out, we stepped into the night morning and encountered moving masses of cold air. That was the coldest wind I had ever felt. I wanted to cry. But I could not. For me to cry because I had to ride the yellow bus to school was not all there was to cry for that night morning. So, my breath cried for me.

With every push of air coming out of my mouth and intermingling with the masses of cold air already active in the night morning, my air turned into what looked like floating ice tears. And why wouldn’t they?

Someone, something, needed to cry for me, my brothers, and my mother.

She was, after all, like Moses' mother, who sent her son in a basket down the River Nile to protect him from the Egyptian mandate to drown every male Hebrew child; my mother put me and my brothers on the yellow school bus to protect her Black children’s equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

But, like Moses’ mother, my mother as well did not want her children to live or die in the aversion of discriminatory practices of those who believed they were superior to us because of the color of our skin.

Well, I guess my little brother couldn’t take the cold of the night morning any longer when he said with a loud, piercing cry, “I’m cold.” He cried out loud for us all: me, Mommy, and my older brother.

This time, Mommy heard us. My brother’s cry communicated our needs and feelings. Without any hesitation, Mommy cried back, “Cover your mouths with your scarves!”

We were all walking and running harder in the cold night morning to get down Hull Street to the corner of Rockaway Avenue and Fulton Street to catch the bus. The corner streetlight and the whole circle bright moon shone upon the boarded-up and gated neighborhood stores and homes, lighting the street so we could see our way.

Large cats came running from the alleys and the vents, blowing warm air through the large metallic cylinders on the sidewalk next to the street. Once the cats ran off, we also walked on the vents to stay warm.

We never stopped looking back to see if the yellow bus was coming or for strange persons who might have been roaming the night before looking for trouble. In retrospect, I feared many unknowns walking in the night morning to catch the yellow school bus.

We walked holding hands, shivering, and watching or strange and potential dangers whenever a cat scurried across our path or heard other children's and their parent's footsteps.

Holding hands doesn’t just have a romantic connotation and is associated with support, solidarity, affection, friendship, reassurance, and consolation.

I was eight years old. I had never been out in the nights of the morning in the streets of New York City. This was new and scary.

My stomach felt sharp, like pins and needles poked in it. I now know it was anxiety. All I know is that the feelings I was experiencing were not what I generally felt preparing for the first day of school. I loved school so much that I played school with my brothers more than I played house with my girl cousin next door.

I was supposed to be excited. But I was not. I was supposed to be excited about riding the yellow school bus. But I was not. I was supposed to feel “no difference. I am Black” because I was going to get the same education as my White peers. But I did not!

The streetlight was going dim and about to go off simultaneously; the moon was going down, and the sun was rising. Finally, the night morning was turning to morning. I could see the bus stop corner ahead. Walking forward, while looking back, I saw what looked like a large yellow creature penetrating through the night morning, turning to morning.

I heard a loud noise from the creature, quite different from the honking noise I was familiar with from the bus driver’s bus. The funny thing is mornings. The funny thing is I saw the bus and was afraid. I stopped walking until I heard my mother screaming, “Run, run. The bus is coming. You’re gone-na miss it if you don’t run faster!” Like Superman’s flight, flying at the speed of a speeding bullet (no presence of guns that morning), my brothers and I took off running.

Mommy was running, too! Everybody walking was now running. What a sight that must have been for any of our neighbors watching us running to catch the yellow school bus. Anyone watching didn’t know missing the bus was not an option. The doors opened. My brothers, I, and the other neighborhood children began climbing the steel stairs into the bus. My mother looked so at ease, watching and helping us get onto the bus, but she was not.

I could feel her hand pat my body, and I saw her hand pat the bodies of my brothers as well. I heard her whisper a prayer, “Lord, watch between my children and me while we are absent one from the other.” I’m not sure who entered first, me or my brothers. We got on the yellow school bus in fear and trembling in the cold, dark morning.

The bus driver pulled on the long steel stick attached to the door and squealed the loudest second unfamiliar noise I had ever heard from a bus. Maybe the squeal wasn’t as loud as I thought I heard. In hindsight, the yellow school bus was no more minor or significant than the city bus we rode on Sunday to church.

The sound was different for many reasons. One reason was that the United States Supreme Court did not mandate riding the bus to integrate the Black churches.

We didn’t have to walk to the bus stop at night. Sunday School began at 10:00 a.m.; by then, the sun was out so we could walk in the light. Most importantly, I rode the bus on Sunday mornings with my father, mother, brothers, and community.

During the long ride to school, I did not speak. I was thinking and praying. And praying and thinking. I told God, remember the painting on our church's wall; you know, that large mural on the wall when you enter the building? The mural where only happy white children are sitting around on the rock as you talk to them. Today, No Black children were there. None of us were sitting with you and the White children around the rock. I asked, where are the Black children? I ask every time I step into the church and look at that picture, where are the Black children? But you don’t answer. Are all the Black children on the bus? My Sunday School said that in the Bible story, when the children were sitting with you on the rock, the adults didn’t want the children there and that you told the adults to suffer, not the children to come to you.

Were you talking about the Black children, and maybe the painter just forgot to put us around the rock with you? God, I really need to sit with you around the rock. I am scared. I am unhappy and need a seat around the rock, not a seat on the yellow school bus.

I kept asking questions. I did more asking questions than I did praying. What will become of me and my brothers in white schools? When I get off the yellow school bus, will I be escorted by police past angry grown men old enough to be my father, except for the color of their skin? Will I have to watch angry dogs unleashed by old white men, who probably have children of their own, tear my brothers’ limbs from their bodies one by one as police water hose the remaining crying Black children against the school building?

Would I have to sit in the colored section of the classroom, lunchroom, and library? Or worse, was I going to have to use the colored-only bathroom outside the school building only to re-enter the building being subjected to violent White adults? I was asking God question after question. In remembrance of this day, it’s amazing none of the Black children on the yellow school bus heard me. Come to think of that day, none of the children were speaking. I guess all of us were asking God questions because no one spoke to the other. Now, that was strange. We were the loudest mouths on the block, especially during hopscotch or jumping rope. Thinking back as I write my story, we were noisy children. During weekday junior choir rehearsal, my mom, who directed the junior choir, always asked us to be quiet and listen. But, during this ride, “mum” was the word. Silence. Hmm?

In my head, I had a vivid and violent image of what my first day at school could be. The violence and death of a black person, including children, at the hands of white persons, mainly white men, was no secret or hidden image.

Sunday dinners and gatherings were fun until all eating and dishes were washed when the elders reminded us of all of us, adults and children that we were valuable persons in the eyes of God and each other. But hated by others whose skin was white. The violent, horrific stories were constantly reiterated around the Sunday dinner table, at Woolworth’s department store, sitting and waiting for care at the doctor’s office, and even in Sunday School.

Any person of color, parent, uncle, aunt, or neighbor church elder would create an event or experience that presented a good opportunity to learn how you act in white space.

However, there were never any guarantees that you would be safe from violence and possible death. Remembering these talks, I realized I was a Black child about to enter a White child’s classroom space for an integrated education.

The sages, the wise people of my community, said that if black people want to see change, they must step up to the plate and do it themselves. Well, I hadn’t voluntarily stepped up to riding the yellow school bus, but I decided to go to school in the hope of the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; that one day I will live in a nation where I will not be judged by the color of my skin but by the content of my character. Even so, my hope was overtaken by the remembrance that just a few months before I rode the yellow school bus, Dr. King had been assassinated.

CONCLUSION

Riding the yellow school bus, me and my brothers had earned our place in the civil rights movement. Now that my mother complied with Brown v. Board of Education’s landmark decision by The Supreme Court ruling, had she realized that her family was making history, Black History?

And while the well-intended decision to integrate public education had been made by the law and my mother, with all the hatred and violence surrounding this decision, was attending a white school the only way for black children to matter? All my mother wanted was a better life for her children.

She did not know that her decision would sever our sacred space, black culture, the place where Black people came together and united through the existence of a common origin. It’s no secret that people who share the same beliefs and traditions tend to bond, influence one another, and excel together quickly. Yet, It did not appear that my mother had any thought about how her decision would impact black culture and the souls of her black children in an integrated educational setting.

I think most people thought the racial violence was just going on in the South. Racial tension was going on in the north, too. And Brooklyn, New York, was no different. Many white people didn’t want their white children going to school with black children. South or north, they didn’t see a child.

All they saw was the color of their skin. The children were black, and that meant black children didn’t matter. As the mural in my church vestibule projected, I was not one of the children surrounding Jesus sitting on the rock. But I was sitting with Jesus surrounding me on and off the yellow school bus. The Divine presence of the Spirit was with me, and I flourished in those precarious times of school integration.

Looking back, the yellow school bus carried me to a field of learning and sacred spaces beyond my culture and ethnicity.

Unbeknown to me, the yellow school bus was my time capsule, a container on wheels, divinely marinating me in the complex narratives of faith, education, and radical social change buried for discovery in the future. My lessons and experiences, from 3rd grade through 12th grade, set the precedent for the rest of my life.

After that decision and my parents’ compliance with the law, my life in school and church changed forever. School was the most violent space I had ever entered. Ms. Rothberg, my White, 3rd grade teacher, marked my first report with straight red Fs for failure in every column. When my mother questioned why she had done so, she responded, “Because if I give colored children any grade above an “F,” they would think they were smart.”

I don’t think Ms. Rothberg knew I heard her. But I did. I decided that on parent-teacher conference night, I would be a teacher, and I would never grade any student, mainly a Black student, an “F” in red ink. Yet, in that same space, my White 5th-grade teacher, Ms. Bloom, showed me her commitment to teaching all black or white children. I saw in her the love of teaching. That’s when I understood that education expressed God’s care for me. During that same time, the church acted as my pillar of resilience. What I remembered about the Black church was the way the church congregants nurtured and comforted me amidst the threats of violence because of the color of my skin. My family, church, and community regarded my getting an education as part of the struggle for freedom and liberation of Black people.

I became the first person in my family to graduate from public school, go on to college, graduate college, and, over the years, earn three college degrees. I became an educator and committed myself to fulfilling the Gospel by caring for those in the field of education for 30 years.

I will continue to work until my eyes close in sleep, connecting children and families to educational instruction, resources, and supports, monitoring services, crafting timely and relevant academic programs, and developing community partnerships for social change.

References and Notes

[1] 2024. Desegregation Busing. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegration_busing.

[2] Desegregation