During the last several years of my mom’s life she lived in a retirement community that went from ‘independent living’ all the way to a ‘memory care’ wing. Mom was in the independent living wing until the last year or so when she ‘graduated’ to ‘assisted living’.
I was fortunate enough over those last years to talk with mom every day, visit often and to meet many of her friends living in the same community. One of her very special friends at the retirement center was Ms. Mae-Etta. They enjoyed reminiscing, gossiping, and being able to live relatively normal lives as they spent their ‘golden years’ at St. John’s Retirement Village.
Twice each day mom saw Ms. Mae-Etta walk by her window. She’d been retired longer than anyone else at St. John’s, and until the last year of mom’s life she only used a cane to take her brisk walks around the spacious grounds. She wore slacks for walking, but when she entered the central dining facility, she always wore a dress, and not just for dinner either. Ms. Mae-Etta ‘dressed’ for every meal – breakfast, lunch and dinner.
She was relatively tall, her gray hair enhanced her aristocratic appearance, and she always stood out in a crowd of the other residents who were often bent over, shuffled a bit when they walked, or, like mom, were in wheelchairs or ‘scooters’. As Ms. Mae-Etta grew older she had to use a walker, and she still always ‘dressed’ for meals, and she still stood tall!
I was always eager to talk with Ms. Mae-Etta because she had such an interesting story. As a young woman in the 1930’s Ms. Mae-Etta taught school in the Southern part of the USA. During that time in US history schools were segregated, and Ms. Mae-Etta taught in the ‘black school’. During those early years she learned that the teachers who taught in the ‘white school’ made considerably more money than she and her colleagues.
Ms. Mae-Etta was special even then. She decided to get an attorney to see if she couldn’t do something about this injustice. True to her word, she found a young attorney, willing to take on her case as a class-action suit with other teachers from the ‘black school’. He was busy with other civil rights cases during those years as well. They won their class-action suit and her attorney went on to make quite a name for himself in the years to come. His name was Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to serve as a Justice of the US Supreme Court.
Justice Marshall had been gone for almost 15 years while Ms. Mae-Etta continued on her life journey. Justice Marshall received many awards and accolades over the years, including having the Baltimore/Washington International Airport renamed in his honor in 2005, 12 years after his death; Ms. Mae-Etta was still traveling through her world, still walking tall.
During one of my visits with mom, I told Ms. Mae-Etta about being in the Thurgood Marshall International Airport and enjoying the display about his life. She smiled as I was telling her and said, “He was such a nice young man.”
Will your clients, customers, or colleagues have similar things to say about you or your organization when they think about their encounters with you? Will the memories you’re creating today be positive? What kind of a legacy will your story leave? Will it include fighting for racial justice and equality? As a young attorney, Thurgood Marshall began his life’s work fighting for justice and equality. He was obviously more than just “a nice young man” who helped some of the early (1930’s) fighters for civil rights have a better life.
Ms. Mae-Etta was an unusual and special woman – perhaps because of her stature, her enthusiasm for life, her helping attitude, or perhaps her background and history as an early ‘winner’ in the civil rights movement. All of those qualities were hers, but perhaps the fact that she outlived my mom who died in 2011 at 101, still speaking her mind and being a living example of courage and determination because “Black Lives (Then and Still) Matter” was her legacy. Ms. Mae-Etta was 8 years older than my mom and died at 109, shortly after mom.
