Note: I unsuccessful tried to upload this report and video after viewing the Super Bowl.  I decided to submit this report after reading a comment posted on one of my I-Report titled “Dr. Martin Luther King Didn’t Quit, President Obama Won’t Quit, Therefore, I Won’t Quit!”  http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-402318

“I am the daughter of Eula Mae Richardson. My mother dropped out of school in the seventh grade. She quit school after she realized that my grandfather was not a good husband to my grandmother (Granny) nor was he a good provider to their six children.  She stopped attending school in order to get a job to help my grandmother take care of her three sisters and two brothers.  No one asked her to do this; it was just my mother’s nature to give unselfishly when she saw a need.

Momma worked hard on tobacco farms in Quincy, Florida.  At home she cared for her siblings as if they were own children. She was poor but life’s trials had not yet soured her.

One day at work my mother spoke of Dr. Martin Luther King and what would later be known as the Civil Rights Movement.  The next day my grandmother who worked on the same farm informed my mother that Mr. Carter, the owner of the farm, told her to tell my mother not to come back to work.

According to Mr. Carter, my mother was fired because she mentioned that nigger Dr. Martin Luther King’s name on his farm. When granny told my mother the reason that she was fired my mother replied, “no one can tell me who I can and can’t talk about”.  “God made white people and colored people and no one is better than anyone else.” “We are all equal.”

After being fired from Mr. Carter’s tobacco farm my mother moved to Rochester, New York. My mother’s sister Vera lived and worked in Rochester, New York.  My mother decided that she and her youngest child Glenn would move to Rochester with Aunt Vera. She planned on sending for Mary, Ruth and I after she got a job and her own place to live.

She asked granny and my aunt Ruby Dell if they would keep Mary age 9, Ruth age 6 and I age 7, until she could send for us. My aunt Ruby Dell who had three children of her own told my mother that she couldn’t and wouldn’t keep us.  My granny also refused to take care of us temporarily for my mother.

One morning my mother packed each of our clothes in three separate pillowcases. She told me that I would be staying with John Davis a man she identified as my father. Mary was to live with the mother of a male family friend called Bun. Ruth was to stay with her father. 

My mother told me to wait near highway 90 for John Davis to come pick me up. Later that day my mother and my brother Glenn got a ride to the Greyhound bus station. 

I stood and sat on the side of the highway 90 for hours waiting for John Davis to come to get me. I waited in the heat until the sun set.  John Davis never came to pick me up nor did anyone come to get my sisters. Since no one came to get us my Aunt Ruby gathered us together and stated “I told Eula Mae that I was not going to keep you all. I don’t want to keep you all but I don’t have a choice.”  She had electricity installed in my mother’s four-room house and moved in with us. Two of her three girls also lived with us. Her oldest child Betty who was 7 years old continued staying with our granny.

Until May 2006, I believed that my mother was so desperate that she left us alone knowing that her family wouldn’t have a choice but to take us in and care for us.  My Aunt Ruby Dell dispelled that belief when I questioned her.  She told me that my mother had made arrangements for us.  She said that the adults who were supposed to take care of us just didn’t show up.  She also told me that she could have insisted that my mother return but she decided to help her and take care of us.”  Excerpt from a "Case of Racial Discrimination and Retaliation Real or Imagined."

Vera Richardson

Pictures of me were taken with webcam immediately after I recorded the video that I still couldn’t upload with this report.