An interesting bit of trivia
One day I will actually post a web-live version of my family's genealogy, but this tidbit is amusing, since I work at a university.
There are a few black fraternities that claim members of my family as members, but when my mother still lived in Austin, she was afforded a certain reverence I hadn't really seen anyone give to her. In this time of the Trent Lott unpleasantness, I present:
My family's contribution
to African-American History
(Not to suggest that this is the only one, it's just the only one I'll be examining right now.)
My mother's family tree has some weird branching. Her great-grandfather had four daughters. Two of the daughters had children, the other two did not. The two daughters that had children gave them to their two childless sisters, who legally adopted them, and the birth mothers returned to Alabama (this was in the '50s, my mother's family is currently researching how, in that time, four black women managed to be property owners in Alabama). So my maternal birth great-grandmother is Susie McDonald, one of the co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city of Montgomery (Browder v. Gayle) that eventually desegregated the buses after the Rosa Parks arrest.
But that's not what I'm angling at.
The sister she gave her daughter, my grandmother, to, was a member of a racially mixed community in Ithaca, New York. My grandmother, then, went from a birth name of Helen Mary McDonald to Mary Kirkpatrick Singleton, a name chosen by her aunt and newly adoptive mother, Annie, and Annie's husband, Archie Singleton.
The significance of this, you wonder?
My adoptive great-grandmother and her husband owned the house at 411 East State Street, in which the first black Greek fraternity (meaning first ever), Alpha Phi Alpha, was founded by seven black Cornell University students in 1906.
It's another event and even more people for Trent Lott not to realize the significance of.
Since Annie Singleton is considered one of the Mothers of Alpha, my mother, who is formally her granddaughter but biologically her grandniece, was regularly paid visits by members of the Alpha chapters at both universities where she worked.
I have a shirt for the fraternity I joined (Mu Phi Epsilon, a professional fraternity for musicians) but it's not done in purple and white, Mu Phi Epsilon's colors, rather in black and gold, Alpha Phi Alpha's colors; my big sister in my frat was accommodating an obsession I have with black clothing. When I'd walk across campus and pass Alphas, they'd do a double-take. I'm not sure my mother ever saw the humor in it.
Next up (whenever I feel the urge, or another politician high-kicks his foot into his mouth): my second cousin, jazz legend Coleman Hawkins.