NPR host Michele Norris to share shocking stories of black history
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Michele Norris will speak here on Monday.
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For Michele Norris, co-host of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," seeking the truth is second nature.
But when this veteran journalist set out to better understand the lives of her family, some stories she verified shocked her and left her with some questions that will remain unanswered.
Author of the 2010 memoir "The Grace of Silence," Ms. Norris will speak at 7:30 p.m. Monday in Oakland's Carnegie Music Hall. Joining her will be Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns." The writers' appearance will be the seventh of 10 literary evenings sponsored by the Drue Heinz Trust.
Ms. Norris' maternal grandmother, Ione Brown, was among an army of women deployed by Quaker Oats to play Aunt Jemima while cooking up pancakes for grocery shoppers and promoting the company's product.
A 1950 newspaper account of one of her grandmother's appearances at a market in Minnesota is reproduced in the book. The headline reads, "Only Negro Alexandria High Graduate Portrays Version of 'Aunt Jemima.'
In 1950, Ione Brown was 47.
- Where: Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland.
- When: 7:30 p.m. Monday.
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Tickets:
$15 and $25; www.pittsburghlectures.org
or 412-622-8866.
"I'm not saying that it was easy to imagine her in that hoopskirt. I understand it at a much deeper level because I got to know how she did the work," Ms. Norris said in a telephone interview.
"Quaker Oats keeps no information about this group of women. ... They did it their own way. They were able to buy homes and send the next generation to college. Many of them, like my grandmother, refused to speak in the slave patois," written in a script handed to them by Quaker Oats, Ms. Norris said.
Her grandmother was determined to make a good impression in her public appearances. Since the book's publication, Ms. Norris has heard from lots of women who played Aunt Jemima. She plans to post some of their stories and pictures on her website in February, which is Black History Month.
If you look back one generation in many African-American families, Ms. Norris said, you'll find someone who held a subservient position as a slave, sharecropper, cook, maid or Pullman porter.
Instead of running from that past, Ms. Norris said, people should embrace it because it was "one rung on the ladder. Don't let people make you ashamed of your history. That's what I hope people take from that chapter."
In 1946, her late father, Belvin Norris, returned home to Birmingham, Ala., after serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was shot and wounded in one leg by a Birmingham police officer and spent a night in jail.
But he never told his daughter about the shooting, which left him with a slight limp and prompted him to leave Alabama for Minneapolis, making him one of the 6 million African-Americans who fled the segregated Jim Crow South for a better life during the 20th century.
Learning about her father's past led Ms. Norris to the little-known story of Isaac Woodard, a 27-year-old black Army veteran who was still wearing his military uniform while returning home to South Carolina on a bus. After a verbal dispute with Woodard, the bus driver summoned police. Batesburg police Chief Lynwood Shull struck Woodard with a billy club, blinding him in both eyes.
Shull was tried and acquitted, but the assault prompted President Harry Truman to name a commission on civil rights in 1946. The commission's report led Truman to issue Executive Order 9981, which integrated America's military.
"This man is such an integral part of American history. This man's story prompted Harry Truman to stand up to his family, stand up to the generals," Ms. Norris said. But few people remember him today, she said, adding that on a book tour of 60 cities, there's never more than two or three people in an auditorium who know his name or story.
Ms. Norris agrees with her mother that blacks need to be more like Jews.
"Jewish people, and Jewish Americans in particular, talk about their history even when it's painful because there is this belief that it must be talked about because each generation needs to understand it, so it never happens again."
Black History Month may teach youngsters about leaders of the civil rights movement, Ms. Norris said.
That struggle, she said, wasn't just about "the people who soared so close to the sun."
It also was about "the people who lived close to the ground and walked among us."
Correction/Clarification: (Published January 29, 2012) Michele Norris, co-host of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns," will speak a 7:30 p.m. Monday at Oakland's Carnegie Music Hall as part of the Literary Evenings series sponsored by the Drue Heinz Trust. An article on Ms. Norris in Saturday's editions listed an incorrect date.
First Published January 28, 2012 12:00 am
