What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [129]
In 2006, thanks to Lee’s nomination, Betty was honored by the National Women’s History Project in Washington, D.C., as one of the nation’s “builders of communities and dreams sustained.”
But because she believed that Betty had still more to contribute—that the park service, in fact, needed Betty’s peerless ability to identify who to contact in the community and how to best approach them—the following year Lee offered the eighty-six-year-old a new wardrobe, Smokey the Bear hat included. Betty put a side her reservations, and accepted. After a brief period feeling awkward about it, Betty now wears her government uniform with pride and rarely goes out into the community dressed otherwise. She loves the look in little girls’ faces when they see her, and she imagines that they are seeing another possibility of what they could become. There is, too, another aspect. “Life has placed a soapbox under my feet. And as the number of female home-front workers grows smaller each year, I feel a growing responsibility to a generation that helped save the world from Nazi imperialism—the same generation for whom my right to a place in the workforce was questionable at best.”
To meet the challenge of that paradox, Betty created an innovative bus tour to introduce visitors to the national park as a place critical to both the Allied victory and the history of civil rights in America. On the tour, after a park ranger discusses the importance of a particular site, an older African-American, incognito until then, speaks up and says something like, “Ah, honey, that was for the white folks. Colored folk weren’t allowed to go in there.” Unfailingly, people on the tours begin to share stories. “We’re having conversations that weren’t possible ten years ago,” Betty said. “Henry Kaiser was not a social reformer, but, when he built the shipyards in Richmond, he brought together white privilege and black expectation, and together those forces changed the whole nation. Another story of emancipation was born.”
Betty’s amazing journey speaks not only about the evolution of the nation’s attitudes toward race, it also demonstrates how far we have come and how we can continue to grow and develop beyond anything we once imagined. As her story and the others in this book testify, with passion and purpose, we can, at any age, empower ourselves to do things that change the world and change history in ways subtle and significant.
So it was that Betty came to sit in the audience on January 21, 2009, as President Obama was sworn into office, the nation’s first African-American commander in chief. As he spoke of how his father might not have been served in a restaurant sixty years earlier, tears came to her eyes. “And the kinship with power rained down. I recognized that he was one of us because he had lived the black experience,” she said. Despite her ambiguous skin coloring, she, too, had lived the black experience and surmounted its hardship. “That can never be erased, no matter how long I live,” she said. “My children and grandchildren will confront their own time in their own ways. I pray that I’ve provided them a model of how that might be done and that, however they identify, it will be with pride and dignity.” Betty reached for her cell phone and called