To future generations,
Since founded in 1829, Decatur Illinois has been a medium sized, working-middle class town that has dwelled on the values of family and hard work. “Back when I moved here, Decatur was very affluent, and was a great place to raise a family,” My great-grandmother Mildred explained. Grandma Mildred was born as Mildred Ligon in Brownsville, Tennessee on October 5th, 1936. It wasn’t until November 10th, 1955 that 19-year-old high school graduate, Mildred and her husband, Albert-Lee, would travel north to Decatur in search of better job opportunities, and to start a new generation of love.
Just days before moving to Decatur, the couple had gotten marriage licenses and declared their love for each other in a small town in Mississippi. To this day, Mildred has no idea why they had to get married in Mississippi, she had no prior knowledge of state, and assumed that it had something to do with limited amount of places for Negros to go and get their marriage licenses at that time. Coincidentally, the time period of which Mildred and Albert-Lee were heading to Decatur was within the same time period of the great migration.
Mildred had no idea that she would be a part of such a migration. To her, she was just moving north for the sake of her husband’s new job. Before she would move to Decatur, Albert-Lee had to first visit Decatur where he would stay with some close friends who had already moved to Decatur from the south. Once Albert-Lee had found a place to call home, and was granted his job at Wagner’s Casting Company, he then travelled back to Brownsville, Tennessee to retrieve his wife. Thus, the start of the Bond family was created.
“Once we got to Decatur, we didn’t have much; we were just as poor as could...
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...He played a key role in the re-development of Mildred’s spiritual being, and taught her everything she needed to know about her presidency of the usher board, as well as the many other leadership positions she would take on in the future. “He always had the best advice about personal issues too,” Mildred added. Bishop Morgan would make often house visits keeping her spirituality and morality true. The bishop would also be the one to assist her with the growth of her two boys as her husband, Albert-Lee would soon pass away in 1993 due to heart failure.
To this day, 77-year-old Mildred Ligon-Bond has been an inspiration, a leader, a disciplinarian, and a mother for many. She is the last living relative of her immediate family, which consisted of her two parents, along with 8 other siblings. The legacy of this powerful woman will live on for many generations to come.
“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, three common goals immigrants came to America seeking with hopes of the promise to prosper and gain success. However, during the Gilded Age it seemed as though these were attainable only for the select few, while others left the land they knew to spend their lives toiling away in pursuit of the American dream, many never understanding how unattainable it really was. While the Gilded Age was a time of an industrial boom and a growing economy, those working by the sweat of their brow to make the success of this time possible, were not actually ever grasping this wealth, but rather putting right back into the pockets of the wealthy. The Gilded Age compromised the American Dream by limiting the chances of the immigrant working class, and thus creating a cycle of missed opportunities keeping the immigrants from progressing much further then when they came to America to begin with.
Xwelas’ had an unstable past that may have contributed to the anger toward George Phillips. In the mid-1800’s, there were several reasons that it was important to marry a person of a different race. “…The threat of slavery, depopulation due to disease, and the breakdown of traditional ways, could have encouraged a young Indian woman to seek relative refuge in marriage with a white man, miles from her home (272).” Xwelas married a man named Edmund Clare Fitzhugh, a native of Virginia who practiced law. After giving birth to two sons, Mason a Julius, Edmund found that home life was dull. He suddenly left for Seattle, leaving Xwelas to herself. However, she married William King Lear, an immigrant from Alabama. After bearing his son, Lear abandoned his family after learning that a relative died. He did not return for more than twenty years. Finally, Xwelas found a common laborer, much less of a public figure than her last two husbands. The authors of the essay write:
Engel, Mary Ella. “The Appalachian “Granny”: Testing the Boundaries of Female Power in Late-19th-Century Appalachian Georgia.” Appalachian Journal 37.3/4 (2010): 210-225 Literary Reference Center. Web. 14 Nov. 2013.
The 1960’s was a time of war, politics, and a trip to the moon. For some it was a turbulent time filled with chaos, while for others it was a peaceful, prosperous time. For my grandfather, Robert Mammini, it was the decade of his life where he would settle down, start a family, and experience a most memorable decade. He was married in 1961 at the age of 24 to my grandma, Mary Mammini. During this decade his family expanded and he had three children. His first born Kim, my mom was born in 1962, followed by my uncle in 1964 and later my aunt in 1966. He and my grandmother lived in Concord, California just several blocks from Clayton Valley High School. It’s weird to think they lived two minutes from where I live now. With my grandma’s hands full with three kids it was up to my grandpa to be the working man. He worked at James Nelson Company, a booming heating and air conditioning company, in San Francisco where he made good wages and was given great benefits. With the good pay my grandfather was able to easily afford a brand new home priced at $22,000, which included 3 beds and 2 baths. This decade was the start of a long ride for the Mammini family filled with incredible world events that we will never experience again.
Ms. Compton was born in Cottonport, Louisiana; at the age of three, she and her family moved to Palms Springs, California. Ms. Compton reported growing up in Houston, Texas. She considers her family’s socioeconomic level to have been middle working class. Her parents are Lucille Perkins and Russell Compton. Ms. Compton described her father as loving and caring. Russell Compton’s educational background was some college and he was a Vietnam Veteran. Ms. Compton loved that her father was accepting and loving. The one thing she would change about her father was for him to have been more active during her childhood. Ms. Compton reported speaking with her father a few times a week and sees him quite often.
In the book Women in the Civil War, by Mary Massey, the author tells about how American women had an impact on the Civil War. She mentioned quite a few famous and well-known women such as, Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, who were nurses, and Pauline Cushman and Belle Boyd, who were spies. She also mentioned black abolitionists, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, feminist Susan B. Anthony, and many more women. Massey talks about how the concept of women changed as a result of the war. She informed the readers about the many accomplishments made by those women. Because of the war, women were able to achieve things, which caused for them to be viewed differently in the end as a result.
Each of these letters provides details about the lives of middle-class married African American women living in the Upper South in the early twentieth century. By looking at these documents along with the finding aids that explain the collections they are a part of one could get a good sense of what life was like for a fictional woman of similar circumstances.
Richard and Mildred Loving were prosecuted on charges of violating the Virginia state’s ban on interracial marriages, the 1924 Racial Integrity Act. The Loving’s violated Virginia law when the couple got married in Washington D.C., June 1958. The couple returns to their home in Central Point, Virginia. In the early morning hours of July 11, 1958, the Loving’s were awakened by local county sheriff and deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom. “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?” Mrs. Loving answered “I’m his wife.” Richard Loving pointed to the marriage certificate on the wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.” In the initial proceedings presiding Judge Leon M. Bazile, is credit with saying “[a]lmighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” the judge attests, “[t]he fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix”(Sheppard 1). Upon the initial trail the Loving’s were sentence to one-year each, Bazile agreed to suspend their prison sentences if they would leave the state for 25 years. So the Loving’s opted to live in Washington D.C. only 90 miles from their rural hometown. After five years of sneaking back to Central Pointe, Mildred wrote to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy asking for help. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which assigned Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop to the case. The Loving’s sought review of a judgment from the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia which held that Virginia Code sections 20-58 and 20-59, which were adopted by to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classification, did not violate t...
In the book Fahrenheit 451 Mildred is the one of the major characters, and she develops a behavior that looked like she did not care about all her problems. Her intent of suicide means that she was stressed, and at the same time she was sad with too much pain inside of her. Although she was looking easygoing inside of her exist a big problem that is increasing conforming is passing the time. But her really feelings are so inside of her thoughts. When everybody see Mildred behavior could not see her true reality, and her really reason of her attempt of suicide. Montag and Mildred meet in Chicago, and they get married when they had twenty years old that was their most big mistake because Mildred get married thinking that her love will be eternal.
After viewing an episode of I Love Lucy, positive aspects of family and financial issues can be clearly seen in the 1950s. The Ricardo's are middle class, Ricky works as a club band leader and Lucy stays home and `poured all her energies into their nuclear family.' (37) This is a positive side of the 1950s because compared to a few decades before, `women quit their jobs as soon as they became pregnant,' (36) and concentrated more on raising children. These families were much more stable and made almost `60 percent of kids were born into male breadwinner-female homemaker families,' (37) which is a important factor for children to have a good childhood.
Most freed slaves were quick to escape their old lives of being slaves. The Urban north offered job opportunities, a fresh start, and endless possibilities. The journey began in the late 1800’s with a man named Tom. Tom was a slave and married Martha, the child of a plantation cook, and plantation owner. The late 1870’s, Tom and Martha were free. The first thing Tom wanted to do was find his siblings because they had all been split up from slavery. This was a really hard task, being that their last names had changed, also due to slavery. Based on Everett Lee’s theory of migration, my family should have motivations for their migration; push and pull factors. The push factors are the reasons why my family left their home land, in this case Mississippi. The pull factors are the reasons why my family wanted to go to the new land, in this case the urban North. Lee’s theory also includes the intervening obstacles of migration, this will be the struggles that Tom and Martha faced while going
Mr. and Mrs. Loving were residents of the small town of Central point, Virginia. They were family friends who had dated each other since he was seventeen and she a teenager. When they learned that marriage was illegal for them in Virginia, they simply drove over the Washington, D.C. for the ceremony. They returned to Virginia and were arrested the following month for violating the anti-miscegenation statute, which was declared in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Commonwealth’s Attorney Bernard Mahon obtained the warrant for Richard Loving and “Mildred Jeter”. Mildred’s maiden name was on the warrant because in Virginia a marriage between a white and black was considered void. In October 1958, the indictments of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were bought before the court and on January 6, 1959, Richard and Mildred pled not guilty to the charges. Changing their pleas to guilty and waiving their right to a jury trial due to fear and optimism for a favorable punishment, the Lovings took the plea bargain. The Circuit Court judge that was presiding over the case, Judge Leon M. Bazile, did not see favor on them and sentenced them to one year in jail. Yet, at the same time in agreement with the plea bargain, Judge Bazile suspended the sentence for 25 years provided that the Lovings would leave the state of Virginia immediately and not return together for the whole period. There was a catch, for when the 25 year period ends they would still face the prosecution of the court if they ever returned. He concluded his decision with this quote:
...one example of how African-Americans were forced to live in big cities and how the North wasn’t as promising as it was supposed to be.
Facts: Two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter a colored woman and Richard Loving a white man, got married in the District of Columbia. The Loving's returned to Virginia and established their marriage. The Caroline court issued an indictment charging the Loving's with violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriages. The state decides, who can and cannot get married. The Loving's were convicted of violating 20-55 of Virginia's code.
Spirit : My Grandma, Mildred Johnson, is a true woman of faith. For as far back as I can remember, my Grandma has been a conveyor of the word of God in developing her family and living her daily life. Never would she miss a Sunday to share the word and love of God. As time moves forward not all of God’s children remain strong enough as before to lead his flock. Nor can all of God’s choir continue to sing quite as loudly as they always have. This is the time when the Lord takes them into his hands to rest their souls as he has now done with Mildred. Make no mistake, however, as the legacy of spirit that she has created in all of us will continue to live on.