Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton, MA ACHEBE BETTY POWELL Interviewed by KELLY ANDERSON JULY 6 and 7, 2004 BROOKLYN, NEW YORK This interview was made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation. © Sophia Smith Collection 2004 Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Narrator Achebe Betty Powell (b.1940) was raised in Florida, graduated with a B.A. from The College of St. Catherine and an M.A. in French Language and Literature from Fordham University, and has resided in New York City for the past 40 years. Powell has been an activist since high school, when she joined the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Powell was a self- possessed and mature young woman—from her activism, to living abroad with her father, to being one of the only black students at a Midwestern Catholic women’s college. As an adult, Powell was poised to take leadership in many liberation struggles. Powell was a key player in the Gay Academic Union, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the National Gay Task Force. She was a founding member of Salsa Soul Sisters and the Astraea Foundation. Powell has been a professor at Brooklyn College, a social worker, and an employee at Kitchen Table Press before she went on to diversity and anti-racism training, work which has taken her around the globe in the struggle for human rights and liberation. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. An epilogue regarding Powell’s name change—from Betty Jean Powell, when the interview took place, to Achebe Betty Powell—follows the transcript. Interviewer Kelly Anderson (b.1969) is an educator, historian, and community activist. She has an M.A. in women’s history from Sarah Lawrence College and is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Abstract In this oral history Powell describes her extended family network and roots in the African- Methodist-Episcopal church. She details living in Germany with her father in the 1950s, her conversion to Catholicism, and attending college in St. Paul, MN. Powell recounts her introduction to activism, through the National Council of Christians and Jews, and the climate of racism and anti-Semitism in the mid-century South. Powell describes her coming out—both politically and sexually—during the 1970s, into both the gay and lesbian and feminist movements. She recounts her affiliations with the Gay Academic Union, the National Gay Task Force, the National Black Feminist Organization, Salsa Soul Sisters, Kitchen Table Press, and the Astraea Foundation, shedding new light on the politics of race, class, sex, and sexuality. Powell also describes the origins of her international feminist work and Betty Powell Associates, Powell’s consulting and training agency which does organizational development work with a focus on anti-oppression diversity. Restrictions None Format Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Interview recorded on miniDV using Sony Digital Camcorder DSR-PDX10. Five 60-minute tapes. Transcript Transcribed by Luann Jette. Audited for accuracy and edited for clarity by Revan Schendler and Kelly Anderson. Transcript has been reviewed and approved by Achebe Betty Powell. Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms Video Recording Bibliography: Powell, Achebe Betty. Interview by Kelly Anderson. Video recording, July 6 and 7, 2004. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Achebe Betty Powell, interview by Kelly Anderson, video recording, July 6, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2. Transcript Bibliography: Powell, Achebe Betty. Interview by Kelly Anderson. Transcript of video recording, July 6 and 7, 2004. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Achebe Betty Powell, interview by Kelly Anderson, transcript of video recording, July 6, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, pp. 23–24. Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 1 of 86 Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA Transcript of interview conducted JULY 6 and 7, 2004 with: ACHEBE BETTY POWELL at: Brooklyn, New York by: KELLY ANDERSON ANDERSON: This is Kelly Anderson and Betty Jean Powell at her new home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on July 6, and this is the first day of interviewing for the Voices of Feminism Project, so that’s what we’re doing, for the record. And we’re going to start, really, by going through your family history today. Like I said on the phone, we’ll do a full life history with you and so I really want to get a sense of the entire chronology, not only of your life but a little bit about your background. So why don’t you first start by talking about your grandparents on either side. POWELL: My grandparents on either side. My grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side were, um, very present part of my life for, initially a short 0: period of time that I can recall, maybe from about two years old until I was about five, when my grandfather died. But for those three years — my grandfather, who’s name was Johnny Harris, had had a stroke, stroke or heart attack, I’m not sure. I know he died of a stroke, and came to live with my mother, one of his middle children. And I just remember — not just — my grandfather was just a major part of my life, at least this is the narrative that I tell of myself and I have no reason to disbelieve it. The absolute facts of it all might not be — you know, if you went back and had in fact some way of looking at the history — but the experiential, what I took in from his presence, was someone who was very exacting and very, sort of, taken with me, so that the two combination was so I got that kind of exacting thing of he wanted me to, like, you know, stand tall and speak, in particular, the speaking. He had been a minister himself. In those days, it was called — he was an AME preacher, African-Methodist-Episcopal preacher, and he was very much a rhetoritician. And he was, I think, feeling a loss of not being able to be in the — he was in a wheelchair the whole time that I knew him. And a little bit loss of speech, I think. But for the most part, I just remember him talking to me really clearly. So, he taught me, anyhow, my first Bible verses and little poems, you know, by Whittier, Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 2 of 86 or whatever. And I’m, like, three, you know. I can remember, like, three and four years old. And he had his cane, so he must have gotten up at times and walked, but I don’t remember him walking. But I just remember him sort of saying, “Stand up. Stand up, daughter. Stand up.” And he’d be in his wheelchair, so I’m just a little at his knee, and he used to take that cane and lift up my chin. “Put your head up. Put your head up. Put your chest back.” And he’d — I could feel the poke, just so gently, of his cane and that little rubber tip poking me to stand up straight. And project, he’d say, “Project.” So, my grandfather, who came from that line, in terms of tracing my history, his father was — came out of slavery in North Florida and had actually been a preacher in the slave tradition, that is, so that he was taught — and that was not the big thing the family emphasized when it told the story, it was that, and because he was, they had made him a preacher, given him the slave Bible, you know, with its selected passages and whatever. He was taught to read and write. And the story that we get in our family is that when great-great- grandpa came out of slavery and made a beeline for the Freedmen’s Bureau to “learn figurin’,” is how everybody said it, which was, they didn’t teach him math. And so he wanted to know math because he wanted to own his own store, general store. So that’s what he went for, and the story is he actually had a general store in what would have been Live Oak Houston, Florida, up there on the border between Georgia, there, during the time of Reconstruction. And it was fairly successful, so he moved it to the crossroads, in a time where the stage wagon came through and they came through from the mill and so forth, the intersection there in town, and became, the term used was Postmaster General of North Florida, which meant he got to sort the mail and by what was then not zip codes but whatever, by farm plots, and deliver it to folks. But that actually was — I always take that as an important piece of signaling a desire and the possibility of coming into full citizenship, of being a part of community, of really — the kind of thing that even to this day in some — in ways that are not a given, not that it doesn’t happen. I mean, I just got off the phone with the post office and, you know, black people work in the post office and there are postal, you know, managers and all kinds of stuff. But in terms of taking leadership in community, it was just so clear that that’s where he was headed in being a merchant and all that. And I say that that’s where he was headed because came, I guess it was the Compromise of 1890 or just before that, even, where it was clear that the Southerners were saying to them, to the North, get out, and the North was beginning to pull out. Jim Crow laws were already being put in place and lynchings were beginning to take place. The story of my family is that my great-grandfather’s store was burned down to the ground. He was told to go back, that he wouldn’t be lynched because, in a sense, the system needed him and they didn’t say it in these words, but Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 3 of 86 he was to go back to preaching and sort of keep his folks in line. And it seems that that’s what he did. And he had five sons, my grandfather was one of them, and five daughters. His sons were all preachers. The daughters — I think three of them were teachers. So that’s — My grandmother that I knew — I didn’t know my biological grandmother, my mother’s mother, she died in childbirth with the last child, and there were seven children who came out — but my step- grandmother, who I never thought of as my step-grandmother, she was Mama, but the stories of hers are just so dear. Um, do you want all of this? ANDERSON: Sure. I want whatever you want to tell me about her that’s important to you about your life. POWELL: It’s about the family and it’s about — you know, because it’s about her. It’s a portrait of the family to tell about how my grandmother came into our lives. So, my biological grandmother dies and my grandfather is a preacher but he’s more, kind of an itinerant preacher at that time. He goes from one community to the other on different Sundays and preaches but he really, his real work was pine sap. He bled the trees of the pine sap and the resin and all that sort of things, and all the products that came from that. So that was his work and he had these — but he had these children, seven children, including a baby. And um, he tried to keep them and he tried to have a woman come to take care of the kids and I guess there were two or three different ones and they didn’t work out, and the last one was, you know, obviously this was a very poor woman and needy herself, and she would take food and the kids would say, my aunts and uncles would, and my mother, “Papa, you can’t have this lady, she’s not nice to us and she takes our food.” Blah-blah-blah. OK. So, but it’s just interesting to have all these little details of the story, which I got more details of it from my mother after Roots, when I went home and put the tape under her. I said, “OK. Talk.” And I would tell the little, the lead lines of these stories that we would hear and I would get more, I got more details, so, this is how I have some of this detail. And so, she said, so then, he took them and he took them up to Live Oak. They were in one of the smaller towns around there, and split them up between the different relatives, the aunts. And the kids were, you know, extremely sad and he was, totally, just grief stricken, the thought that he had to do it, because he had promised his wife, my grandmother, that he would not separate the children. She — Sally was her name, Sally Harris — and she had made him promise on her deathbed that he would not separate the children. And so, but he did. So now — and this is really a story but I can only believe it, at least, how people have experienced it, no matter what you call it — the story is that my grandfather, one night, after he had taken the children and put Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 4 of 86 them around with the various relatives, that as he was sleeping, he felt one side of the bed go down and he woke up, or, in his dream, he turned, and it was my grandmother Sally, and she said, “Johnny, you separated my kids. You can’t do that.” She said, “You’ll have to get a wife and bring my kids back together.” So my grandfather, sure enough, started really actively looking for a wife and — you put it out in the church and the whole thing. And obviously, I don’t have all the details of that but somewhere it got back to, you know, that little — I forget my now my step-grandmother’s last name, it’ll come to me, or not — but anyhow, my grandfather started courting her and the kids kind of learned about it because he’d go and visit them and they said, “Oh, papa, papa, marry her!” Or whatever. And as it turns out, he brings the kids back home and he is getting ready to marry her. My oldest uncle, AC, he, you know, has them dress up one night. I’m assuming this is a Saturday night or something and come with him to town and tells all the others to go to sleep. And so, his oldest son is his best man. And they come back home but the kids are all sleeping, so it’s the next morning that they wake up and they — and they come downstairs and the older son, Uncle AC, said to them, you know, “Come down.” And they had to, like, stand up straight and everything. And he says, and this line just always knocks me out, he says, “We have a new mama now. Come down and say good morning and mind your manners.” And my mother says, each one of them came down and did a little curtsey: “Morning, mama. Morning, mama.” And that’s how my step-grandmother came into our lives. ANDERSON: Did she bring her own children into that marriage? POWELL: No, none whatsoever. As a matter of fact, she and my grandfather had one child together, which she was my Aunt Naomi (Na), my mother’s younger sister and my mother practically raised her. They were like this. When my mother migrated to Miami in her late twenties, my Aunt Naomi, who was her baby sister, followed us a few years after. And so Mama was my Mama until she died at the age of 90 in California about 10, 15 years ago. ANDERSON: How did she end up in California? POWELL And the way she ended in California, my — so my grandfather’s — so there they are with us, but I’m now 3, 2, 3, 4, 5 years old, my grandfather dies, and so I remember vividly his funeral, and um, within a year or so, my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Mary — Aunt Mary and Uncle Strickland, had ended up in California and I never have gotten this story straight. I keep trying to get it from my mother. I think it’s that my Aunt Mary’s father went to Africa looking for diamonds in the 30s. It was like a big deal. They were fairly successful but not so much so in Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 5 of 86 coming back in through California and they stopped in California. It was the Depression time. California was supposed to be a better, you know, place. So that’s how part of the family ends out in California. My Aunt Mary then says to Mama, “Come out.” In terms of her grief, and so forth, and loss, and just try to. And she came, she wanted Mama to stay, and Mama said, “Oh, no, no. My life is back home. I have to go back.” But Aunt Mary kept on and asked her to come again and told her — there was another couple of years, a year or so, and said, you know, that she had a husband for her. In those kinds of days, it was kind of an arranged marriage. Like, I have a husband for you. You need somebody to take care of you. So my grandmother went down and she actually did marry again. This guy was part black and mostly Native American. It was not a happy marriage, but — and Mama worked much harder than she’d ever worked in her life. Not that hard work was a bad thing, I mean, they had a farm and everything, even when my father — my grandfather was a minister. He became a very successful minister and whatever, whatever. So, but then, my grandmother lived in California all her life. And others, like my Aunt Naomi moved to California at a certain point. I had a cousin Lois who went out to visit Aunt Naomi and then she stayed. She was a teacher. She lived in Riverside, California, until she died. She died young, I mean, young in that I think Lois was a little older than I — maybe 67, 68, like that, when she died. It was about ten years ago. So we’ve had a California connection ever since then. I remember, I was eight, so it was only three years later that I’m going to California. At eight, that was my first trip to California. And Mama – ANDERSON: Sorry. And many of the siblings did stay in Florida, though? There was a sizable – POWELL: Yes, a sizable number who stayed in Florida of my mother’s — yes, oh, yeah. ANDERSON: So that still feels like – POWELL: Lots of family – ANDERSON: where your roots are on that side. POWELL: My roots are, on that side, are definitely in Florida. Florida, and then Georgia. My father was from Georgia, Macon. And my father’s father I never knew. He and my grandfather on that side were separated from my grandmother when I was born, so I never knew him. But my grandmother on my father’s side, ooooh. She was the matriarch. She was the matriarch of both families. It was like, Old Lady Kelly, they called her. [laugh] Ella Kelly. [laugh] Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 6 of 86 And it was not always very pleasant for my mother because, in fact, I was actually a love child. My mother and father were not married, and part of that was my grandmother’s doing, is that she did not want my father to marry my mother. My mother was older than my father, by ten years, and my grandmother was very much a — I came to live in Germany later in my life because my father was in the military, and I learned the word “streber” which means striver, and it’s beyond, it’s like, with intensity, and real — my grandmother was a streber, you know, it was just about climbing the ladder. So she had plans for her son and it was not about marrying an older woman who was, at that time, a maid, a housekeeper. So she came from a good a family and all that stuff, and preachers, but still, it was not the right match. ANDERSON: Was your dad’s family more middle-class? POWELL: They were working-class. They were working-class blacks. But working-class, solid, that looked like middle class in the 1940s, for black folks. And with, of course, aspirations for going higher and higher, which they did. And so, my father was in the Army from almost the time I’m born. In 1941, he goes in. I’m born in 1940. I think they marry and it’s — but my father’s gone immediately and so for all intents and purposes, they were never really together and my grandmother actually arranged where she got the allotment checks that would go to — she got everything, you know. And she would dole it out to mother. She was very fair, but she had to control it all. And in all fairness to her — how shall I say it? This is for the historical record. Do I say she was a good woman? Yes, of course, she was a good woman. We all have goodness. And, but she — her intentions were all good. She wanted the best for everybody around her. It’s just that she got to determine how that, what that looked like. And so the best for me, was — I had this loving family on my mother’s side and the best for me was, from her point of view, was that — and I would definitely have the experience of this loving family, the Kelly’s, and so I had to be brought to her every Friday afternoon, and I stayed through Sunday, and it was with — everybody went to the same church, our families went to the same church, and that was a major part of our lives. It was an organizing principle. St. Paul A.M.E. church. So my mother saw me again on Sunday morning in church. My cousins on that side, who, you know, helped raise me and my older cousin Ella, is, like, ten years older that I, so, Ella, Julius — Julius unfortunately died. I mean, he didn’t help raise — Julius was older than I, so there was — he was 14 years old when — again, I’ve never been able to understand what it was that killed Julius, but it was very sudden. My image of Julius is holding his hands out to take me from my brother when my brother would bring me every Friday, there with my little Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Achebe Betty Powell, interviewed by Kelly Anderson Tape 1 of 5 Page 7 of 86 suitcase and whatever, whatever. So that, kind of being taken into Julius’s arms and he’s only 9 or 10 years old, whatever. This image. And the second image that I have of him — what? I just haven’t talked about my family in so long — I’m sorry but I’m going to tears on this. Just very precious memories. And the other — the last memory I have of Julius is when my brother would come. This is my younger brother, David, younger — he’s older than I am, by three years. David would spend some time playing with Julius, and I’m remembering my last memory of him, maybe I’m 7 or 8 or something, is Julius and David throwing a football back and forth, and Julius literally, I mean, you could almost take a photo, a classic photo of a kid going up in the air to catch the ball. And then he was dead. It was some heart something or something. Some childhood thing. OK, so. But this part of the family, the Kelly’s, was very much an instrumental part of my life. My aunt in that family — in that household lived the grandmother and my father’s sister, my Aunt Jo and her two children, those are my cousins, Julius and Ella, and my Aunt Jo had, of course, the training of her mother, was this streber thing in her — my Aunt Jo, you just, she was a — everybody was a maid. She was a maid. And then, she learned upholstery and then she knew that she wanted to be a nurse, and she always said to me that I was going to be a doctor. She just told me, “You’re going to be a doctor.” Medicine was her big thing. But this is how I got all this streber thing in that household. It was, like, you will go far. And my Aunt Na, actually, my Aunt Jo, pardon me, actually ended up, as I’m sitting here in Crown Heights, moving over into Crown Heights, that was my — she ended up, when I’m in graduate school, come to New York graduate school, so I’m 20 years old, she ends up coming to New York because the Manpower Career and Development Association offered nursing programs for people who didn’t have a full formal college education, and they gave you part college and so forth. And she became — she lived, she brought her children up here. My youngest cousins, it was her second set of kids, Joyce and Beverly, when they’re like, 11 and 12, or 9 — not even that, 10, 11, and they stay for two years and she does this incredible nursing program, becomes a practical nurse, goes back to Florida, then gets her RN and become a cancer specialist nurse, and then unfortunately, she probably practiced for ten years and she died of cancer herself, much too young. But that’s my father’s side of the family. That’s enough. So, I think I’ve told a lot about family. ANDERSON: Was your dad the only boy? POWELL: He was not. He had two other brothers, Uncle Leroy and Uncle Michael. Uncle Michael and my dad were both — went into the military. My grandmothers steered them in that direction, almost like today. Despite the segregation of the Army and so forth, I would say much more hope Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project