By Eleni Schirmer, Photo: Jovelle Tamayo/The New Yorker, The New Yorker, July 27, 2022
On a warm October evening, in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood in a baseball field in Pittsburgh, delivering an impassioned speech about passion’s improbable subject: the federal budget. “Sometime, somewhere in this campaign, I have got to talk dollars and cents, and it’s a terrible thing to ask you people to listen for forty-five minutes to the story of the federal budget, but I am going to ask you do it,” he told the crowd. In the back of the park, a two-year-old Black girl named Betty Ann sat on the shoulders of her father, Robert, as he strained to point out the man he was sure would become President. Robert was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican—his grandfather, an enslaved man from Virginia, had been emancipated by President Abraham Lincoln. Still, he felt compelled by F.D.R.’s message. Hard times had meant he had started to pay the reporters of Pittsburgh’s Black newspaper, which he ran, out of his own pocket. Much to his distress, his wife had taken to standing in relief lines in order to feed Betty Ann and her sisters. A few weeks later, when Robert cast his ballot for F.D.R., he wept, aghast to vote against the party of Lincoln. Thereafter, he became a devoted Democrat and jumped into local politics with fervor until he fell ill, five years later. He had two dying wishes: for his wife to take over his role as a Democratic ward chairperson, and for Betty Ann and her sisters to go to college.
The family made good on both: as ward chairwoman, Robert’s wife maintained the family home as a community backbone, and Betty Ann, who asked that she and her family members be identified by first name only, grew up with a steady stream of neighbors flowing through the house. Although her mother had no money, Betty Ann was a strong student and earned enough scholarships to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education. In the next few decades, she worked as a public-school teacher in Pittsburgh and Harlem, in addition to raising two children as a single mother. But she grew increasingly frustrated by the marks of educational inequity—moldy lunches, low-grade reading materials—that plagued her classrooms. “I thought the only way that I could change things was to have a higher degree,” she told me.
Comments (1)