Open Wide The Freedom Gates

I was born in Richmond, Virginia, on March 24, 1912, to Fannie Burroughs and James Height. My mother was over forty—I was, as some say, a "second life" baby—so for me, she was never really young. Perhaps that is why I have always enjoyed being around older people. Even as a young child, I found it interesting to talk with them, and they seemed to enjoy me. They took me seriously because I took life seriously. I was shy, and I loved to get off by myself to read. I never enjoyed doing nothing. I always liked a challenge. If it was jumping rope, I wanted to go on to Double Dutch. My older sisters explained me by saying I was an "old folks" child.

My grandparents died long before I was born, so I knew little about them, but I'm told that my father's family was part Native American, from North Carolina, and my mother's people were from Virginia. Both my parents had been twice widowed, and both had children from their previous marriages. I have known two of my father's children well—his daughters Golden and Minnie. And all my mother's children were very close to me. She had three by her first marriage: Willie, the oldest, Bennie, and Jessie. In her second marriage, there was Josephine. My sister Anthanette and I were her two Heights. Although we were actually half-sisters to the rest, I always felt we were "whole" sisters and brothers. It seemed to me that I came up in a large, loving family.

Josephine had to look after me when I was small because Momma worked long hours as a nurse in a Negro hospital in Richmond. A friend of Josephine's also had the care of a younger sister, and Josephine used to tell how we two little ones always seemed to be in the way of our older sisters' fun. So one day they took us to a nearby bridge with the idea of simply dropping us out of sight into the James River. When they got to the bridge, they saw a neighbor coming toward them and made a beeline back home. Josephine often said she was glad they thought better of it.

When I was four years old, we moved to Rankin, Pennsylvania, part of the Great Migration of southern Negroes to the North. At the time of my birth more than three-quarters of the black population of the United States was still providing cheap labor in rural areas of the South. Nearly fifty years after the Civil War, the ravages of slavery remained. But by 1916 that was beginning to change. Booming industry in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh drew great waves of Negroes—along with immigrants from Europe—to work in the mines, mills, and factories that promised a better life.

Though our family had no relatives to receive us up North, my parents, like thousands of others, were willing to risk everything for a new start. As a building and painting contractor, my father knew that Pennsylvania would be much richer territory for him. It was a different story for my mother. While many northern hospitals admitted Negro patients, none would employ a Negro nurse, so she had to make do with household work. But she made that transition with a grace that was a wonderful example to me. And eventually, through her own ingenuity as a household worker and the relationships she established with her employers, she was able to put her nursing skills to use taking care of private patients.

Rankin was a lucky choice. My parents had heard a great deal about the appalling living and working conditions that many were forced to endure in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Housing often was the worst kind of tenement, with more than one family crowded into a unit. What were called "multiple dwellings" were really just plain slums, usually owned by wealthy absentee landlords.

Rankin was different. It was a small borough of Pittsburgh, nestled in the rolling hills along the Monongahela River. The low land along the river made a perfect place for steel mills, as well as for the railroad tracks that had come into the area in the 1850s. Most people counted on the mills for their livelihood, though many worked in the nearby coal mines. As World War I drove up the demand for steel, Rankin flourished.

The population was largely foreign-born. On almost any evening in our neighborhood, you could hear Italians singing on one side of the street and Croatians or Germans on the other side. The one prominent Jewish family owned the butcher shop. I have many happy memories of being together with people who were so different from one another. My date for the high school junior prom, for instance, was a Croatian boy who was the president of our class when I was the class secretary.

But with all the joyous celebrations that we shared, there was always the struggle to earn a living—and that meant certain economic tensions among all those groups searching for a better standard of living. There was a clear hierarchy. First in line and always on top economically were American-born whites, though they were a minority. Then came the foreign-born—the Italians, the Croatians, the Hungarians, the Polish, the Czechoslovakians, and the Yugoslavs who had fled war-ravaged Europe and comprised the bulk of the population. Negroes from the South were the last in line. Whites born in America looked down on white Europeans. And with the Great Migration, thousands of white ethnic families collided with the influx of southern Negro families.

During the First World War, when the steel industry desperately needed more laborers, the steel and mining companies would make deals with the railroads to offer southern Negroes free railway passage north. They called it "the Transportation." It wasn't exactly slave labor, but the wages were only marginally better than what the Negro workers could earn in the South. Even so, since the North was perceived as the region of opportunity, folks didn't think twice about moving, and our house became a meeting ground for many who came after us, especially those from Virginia and North Carolina. Many were willing to work twelve hours a day under terrible conditions. As a young child, I saw "last hired, first fired" in living reality.

I was eight years old when my aunt, Sally White, came up from Virginia to visit her son, Lincoln, who worked in a nearby mine. She was the oldest of my mother's three sisters, and she was the only one among the four who never learned to read or write, although she spoke perfect English. Unlike her sisters, she had little schooling because she had become a wage-earner as a very young woman. She was a great pastry cook, working her magic touch with flour, shortening, and sugar for wealthy white families in Prince William County, Virginia.

Lincoln sent his mother a train ticket to Pennsylvania, hoping that after a good visit he could convince her to come live with him. Aunt Sally had barely arrived when Western Union delivered a telegram to our house. She could not read it, so when I came home from school, she handed it to me. The telegram said that Lincoln had been lost in a cave-in at the mine where he worked. I didn't know what to do, but I knew this was shocking news. I also knew that Aunt Sally couldn't read it, and that she probably thought a child my age couldn't read it either. I folded the telegram and told Aunt Sally that I would give it to my mother to read to her.

When my mother came home, she sat Aunt Sally down and read the telegram to her. Through her tears, Aunt Sally let me know that she appreciated how I tried to protect her from the awful news. An instant bond developed between us. Aunt Sally told my mother lovingly that she had a "little old lady" in me.

It was a terrible moment when Aunt Sally had to go to the mine to identify Lincoln's body. It was so final. Everything they had planned together and waited for was suddenly gone. I learned then the risk and impact of the coal mines on families all around us. Families had such feelings of hopelessness after each cave-in, yet they went back to work, knowing they had to make a living. Many accidents never made the news, but word got around the community. Whole families were devastated by their losses. Years later no one ever had to convince me that John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers Union were fighting a crucial fight. Whenever I heard his voice staking his claim on behalf of the workers, I remembered Lincoln and that day with Aunt Sally.

McClintock Marshall was the largest steel mill in Rankin. Every day it belched out red-hot flames and smoke that floated like clouds above us and then rained down iron-ore dust over our backyard. My mother insisted on washing our curtains every other week just to get the soot out. No one had heard of antipollution laws then! When we studied anthracite, iron, or bituminous coal in school, it was very real to me.

The whistle of the steel mill seemed to control our lives. It blew at seven in the morning, at noon, at three, at seven in the evening, and at eleven at night. In good weather, we children would sit out on our back porch in the evening and play a great game. We counted the mill workers. The winner was the one who could count to the highest number before the last man on the evening shift came out of the mill. When the mills were flourishing, the numbers were so great that the men looked like ants, all moving in the same direction. As jobs began to disappear, we realized that the numbers were dwindling. And then there came a time when it was easy to count those who came through the gate. There were no bright flames gusting out of the stacks. The smoke diminished, the ore dust settled. It was the post-World War I depression.

My father was always self-employed. Highly skilled, he was a building contractor, a master at house painting, decorative painting, several kinds of refinishing, carpentry, and building, and he was much in demand. He was acclaimed for his stencil work on the walls of the Syrian Mosque as well as for his work on the less glamorous walls of the morgue in downtown Pittsburgh. He even had the contract to paint the yellow lane-divider lines down the middle of Rankin's streets. He often tested his paints on our porch, so I never knew what color it would be when I got home from school. For my father, it was not just a test but also an advertisement.

My father provided work for many young men coming up from the South, and as the depression deepened, more and more young men came to our house seeking employment. My father did what he could, but he had to turn many away. Men out of work often would stop me on my way home from school and say, "Please, tell your father that if he needs help, I can do anything he needs." I knew some of these young men and came to see how precious work is for people. I understood that what I had seen from the back porch was connected to what was happening on the front porch. People were desperate. As a woman in Harlem said to me later, "This was a time when a dollar was a dollar and Negroes didn't have any."

My father was also active in Republican politics. After all, those were the days when the Republicans were still the party of Abraham Lincoln. Our dining room table could tell many stories of decisions made, of candidates chosen or nixed. In truth, however, neither of the political parties offered much advancement for the Negro, for whom unemployment and lynching were realities of everyday life. On the local, state, and national levels, Negro Americans gained ground through the kind of self-help that had characterized our struggle since slavery—by creating our own organizations to meet our needs. My mother was very active in the Pennsylvania Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, founded in 1895. She took me to every state and national meeting. There I saw women working, organizing, teaching themselves. I heard a lot about uplifting the race. Years later I would have a better appreciation of how much women had done through those clubs to provide basic services that white people took for granted.

It was in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when I was thirteen years old, that I saw and heard for the first time a Negro woman who was an elected official. Her name was Maude Coleman, and she was a member of the state legislature. Her address to the girls' group of the state federation kept me awake most of the night. The words haunted me, so I found a way to get them from Representative Coleman. To this day I go back to the poem she recited at the end of her speech:

I went to these meetings because my mother wanted me to, although I didn't like the fact that many were held on holiday weekends. One Fourth of July, when all my playmates were getting ready to shoot their fireworks, I was packed off to a women's church meeting. I never admitted to my mother that the reason my eyes were so red that Saturday afternoon was because I had carried a Thunderbolt with me into the ladies' room and tried to set it off. I suppose it was fortunate for all that it simply backfired in my face and did not blow up the building. There was no water cold enough to stop the burning that stung my eyes all weekend. But most of the time I enjoyed whatever festivities the women of the Pennsylvania Federation of Colored Women's Clubs put on. Since those early days, I've never doubted my place in the sisterhood.

As a household worker, my mother earned three dollars a day plus carfare. The carfare was important because Rankin was almost an hour away from downtown Pittsburgh. I remember best a family named Johnston, for whom my mother worked over the longest period. My mother felt very close to Mrs. Johnston and her daughter Mary, but my feelings were decidedly mixed: I both liked and hated Mary Johnston. On the one hand, it seemed that during every important event in my life, my mother had to be at Mary's house, and that bothered me. On the other hand, Mary was about my age and size and had beautiful clothes, many of which I inherited. Once, when I won an impromptu speech contest, Mrs. Johnston sent me a beaver coat that Mary had outgrown. Beaver coats were very elegant, and everyone at school knew that only rich girls could have them. That was one of those moments when I loved Mary Johnston!

In 1974, when the Ladies' Home Journal