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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
Cindy Lange-Kubick
Columnist
Cindy Lange-Kubick has loved writing columns about life in her hometown since 1994. She had hoped to become a people person by now, nonetheless she would love to hear your tales of fascinating neighbors and interesting places.
In 1952, the Lincoln City Directory listed the occupations of the inhabitants of 2225 S St.
Melvin Shakespeare, production worker at Speier’s Laundry. Rubie Shakespeare, charwoman.
Besides washing clothes and cleaning houses, it did not mention the couple’s other duties. Minister and first lady of the new AME Church in Hastings. Editor and publisher, advertising and business manager of The Voice, a weekly paper.
A paper with Abraham Lincoln on its masthead, membership in the Associated Negro Press and its mission printed faithfully on the upper left-hand corner of Page 2: “Dedicated to the promotions of the cultural, social and spiritual life of a great people.”
A paper that, by then, had been faithfully published for five years.
On the front page of the anniversary edition that Oct. 18 was the story of a young Black Lincoln man — Charles M. Goolsby, who had been recently admitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.
The story noted his parents, the Rev. and Mrs. Lewis S. Goolsby of Columbia, Missouri, formerly of Lincoln.
And his position at Harvard: “At the Ivy League school he has received an appointment as a research assistant to one of the country’s leading endocrinologists.”
The Voice spoke up and out about race relations around the country, reprinting wire stories about Jim Crow laws and voter registration drives.
There were Washington, D.C., datelines: "Dr. DuBois Acquitted in Trial as ‘Foreign Agent.’"
And headlines from the Deep South: "No Chance for Integration in Dixie Guard."
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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
The one-section paper noted anniversaries and funerals, business, civic and educational successes.
”Clyde Malone Attends National Urban League Conference.”
“Butler B. Ivory only Negro of the seventh grade in Belmont school was elected president of his class.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Hugh O. McField came to Lincoln from Kansas City, Kansas, in 1938 and immediately established the McField Cleaning and Tailor Shop.”
Each week, the Household Hints column did just that, mostly in regard to cooking, cleaning and holidays. Spinach Shepherd Pie, Washboard Cookies, Apple Santas.
Letters of praise appeared, at times on the front page: “The public press plays a very important part in our way of life,” wrote Val Peterson. “Your success is measured by the manner you keep your people informed.”
In 1940, at the time of the U.S. Census, both Melvin and Rubie Shakespeare were 34. They had no children of their own but claimed a church family in places such as Beatrice and Nebraska City and Hastings and, after their time in Lincoln, eventually out west — New Mexico, Utah, Colorado.
Melvin and Rubie Shakespeare founded The Voice, a weekly Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The couple used its paper for good, attracting advertisers from Black-owned businesses and from local companies run by whites, too. Many of them sent well-wishes on the fifth anniversary of the paper’s publication.
The Lincoln Journal had already taken note in 1950, praising the paper that started as a hobby and had grown into a full-fledged weekly newspaper. “Providing editorials and feature stories and serving as a reference item on many a school and public library rack.”
The paper employed university students, the editorial said, and at least two who have “taken up journalism seriously as a result of their work.”
It was an impressive endeavor, said Frank Edler, a retired philosophy professor with a lifelong interest in history who researched The Voice and shared his findings with the paper.
“I don’t quite know how they managed it,” he said. “It was remarkable.”
In 1946, an annual subscription cost $2; single copies a nickel. By 1950, a two-year subscription was offered for $7.50, and single copies doubled to 10 cents.
The Voice provided practical information — church services and times — and practiced advocacy journalism: “A representative of the administrative board of St. Elizabeth hospital announced last week that all racial restrictions with respect to patients and nurse training would be removed,” a front-page story began. “The announcement was made to the publisher of The Voice who had received reports of discriminatory practices …”
Among its community-minded efforts toward equality was a fundraiser for scholarships when Bryan Memorial Hospital integrated its nursing program.
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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
Championed by Rubie Shakespeare and Brevy Miller, editor of the Household Hints column, the paper published the Lincoln Voice Cookbook, a spiral-bound, 74 page-volume that included recipes and selected advice gleaned from Household Hints. The book sold for $1 — available at Miller & Paine, Nebraska Book Store and via a door-to-door sales campaign — resulting in two $100 scholarships in 1948.
According to the Journal Star: “One of the cherished projects of ‘The Voice,' Negro newspaper published by Rev. and Mrs. Melvin L. Shakespeare, culminated this month with the admission of two Negro girls to the Bryan Memorial Hospital training program.”
Recently, a collection of the cookbooks sold for $300 in an online auction.
“The recipes offer an uncommon view of African American cookery in the north, rather than the more stereotyped dishes of the South,” the sale bill noted.
During their Lincoln years, Melvin Shakespeare was active in the Urban League and as spokesman of the Northside Council, a group dedicated to equal housing opportunity.
The photo from the Lincoln Journal Star on Aug. 11, 1951, was taken at a public housing meeting where the Rev. Melvin Shakespeare was discussing the "vicious circle" caused by what is today called redlining.
“The Negro is the same as everyone else,” he said, addressing a gathering at the Urban League in 1951. “He pays taxes, consumes goods and works but is still forced to find shelter within certain boundaries, usually in the poorest section of town.”
The Northside group pressured the city council to support low-cost housing options. There was publicity about deplorable conditions in rental houses in the parts of town Shakespeare spoke out about.
And “a hullabaloo” arose, Edler said. “Melvin and Rubie relocated to New Mexico.”
After the Shakespeares departed Lincoln, the paper continued under new leadership. The Voice published its last edition on May 14, 1953.
The publication changed during that time, Edler said.
“You lost that sense of advocacy it had. I think that was a hallmark of the Shakespeares, and that was gone.”
Rubie was 59 when she died in Pueblo, Colorado, where the couple had landed to minister after their time in New Mexico, in 1965. Melvin eventually remarried and moved to California in 1972. His date of death is undetermined.
The Voice lives on in digitized form in the archives of the Library of Congress.
Kay Walter, who served as director of the Nebraska Digital Newspaper Project, wrote a short essay summarizing the paper’s life and times.
She noted its focus on community life, education and religion, which helped “offer a snapshot of post-WWII life of African Americans in Nebraska.”
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The Voice, a Black newspaper in Lincoln in the late '40s and early '50s, offered a snapshot of post-WWII life of African-Americans in Nebraska.
She noted the Rev. Trago T. McWilliams, an early Lincoln civil rights leader named in the masthead, whose words introduced the paper on Oct. 11, 1946, like this:
“A voice crying out to Lincoln citizens at large for greater opportunities in fields of employment that we might live more abundantly. A voice asking for tolerance and fair play. A voice that will not be stilled so long as any group is denied inalienable rights guaranteed under the constitution.”
STORIES OF INFLUENTIAL BLACK LINCOLNITES
Celebrating Black History Month: Stories of influential black Lincolnites by Cindy Lange-Kubick
Columnist Cindy Lange-Kubick devoted her February columns to influential members of Lincoln's African-American community, past and present.
The photographer was born in Lincoln and spent his life in a frame house on A Street, where a red-brick apartment building with long, narrow windows has risen in its place.
He lived with his parents — his father a runaway slave and Civil War veteran — and later with his widowed mother and later yet with his wife, Odessa.
They are still there, in the black-and-white photo. Frozen on the front porch of the family home. It’s an August day in 1918, Odessa sitting in a rocker, her hair in a loose bun, her husband in a tan, summer suit, his gaze fixed in the distance.
John and Odessa Johnson both died in 1953. They had no children.
For generations, few knew the part he’d played in the history of Lincoln’s black community in the early 1900s, the stories he collected hidden in heavy boxes stored in attics.
Until decades later, when some of those glass negatives were held up to the light and studied, and a story emerged.
And the man behind the camera was identified.
Pieces of Johnson’s life story unraveled. That he’d graduated from Lincoln High in 1899, a member of the track team. That he’d attended the University of Nebraska and played football. That he’d made a living performing the manual labor available to African-American men of his time — as a janitor at the post office, as teamster for the fire department, as a drayman hauling casks of beer from breweries to saloons.
And that along the way, he’d picked up a box camera and documented an era.
“Much of the reason we are able to know the history, stories and contributions of African-Americans within the community is because of him,” said Pete Ferguson, coordinator of Lincoln Public Schools' Youth Development Team.
He calls the photographer a “foundation member” of the black community. Introduced to Johnson by Lincoln's historic preservation planner, Ed Zimmer, Ferguson has often used the photographer's story and his images to help illustrate forgotten or unknown parts of Lincoln's blueprint to youth.
And the photographer’s legacy stretches far beyond the city limits, said Doug Keister, a Lincoln native and photographer in California who owns 280 of Johnson’s glass negatives.
“In my opinion, no photographer better captured the ideals of hope, education, inclusion and diversity of the New Negro Movement than John Johnson.”
They are photos that show the full breadth of the African-American community in the days before de facto segregation forced Lincoln’s 1,400 black citizens into smaller and smaller sections of the city.
Beautiful photos, said Zimmer. Historically and culturally important photos. Photos that beg for more information about the people caught in the camera’s lens.
"Many of them are such lovely photos that we forget that we ought to know more about the time and place.”
Brides and grooms on their wedding days. Women in fine hats and men in dapper suits. Backyard picnics, families draped in sunlight, glasses held aloft.
Church members at Quinn Chapel. A hairdresser reading a book. An all-black marching band. Black children and white children posing in front of a bicycle.
“He had a horse and buggy and he went around taking pictures,” said Ruth Folley, who was quoted in a Journal Star story in 2003. The elderly woman was 8 in 1914, when the man she called Johnny had taken her family’s portrait.
Nearly a century later, Keister and Zimmer co-wrote “Images of America: Lincoln in Black and White.” Keister produced “Shadows on Glass,” a 45-minute documentary of Johnson’s work.
And he shared 60 of the negatives with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“They speak to a time and a place where African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens but lived their lives with dignity,” museum curator Michele Gates Moresi told Smithsonian Magazine in 2013. “You can read about it and hear people talk about it, but to actually see the images is something entirely different.”
Johnson’s photos have been viewed across America and around the world. Last year, London’s Daily Mail included 86 of his images in an online gallery that was shared 17,000 times.
Right now, more than two dozen large-scale reproductions of the photographer’s work are part of a traveling exhibit in California, curated by Keister.
Keister would like to see those photos on display again in Johnson’s hometown.
In the introduction to “Black and White in Black and White,” the images are placed in historical context, at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance — a period of promise and hope for race relations.
“No one better captured the essence of this time of advancement than John Johnson,” the text reads.
And then it puts him in his place.
This place. Our place.
“Johnson primarily used his neighborhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, as a canvas to create powerful portraits of dignity and hope ..."
You can see her life’s passion in all the places Leola Bullock stood her ground.
Week after week, year after year, in front of the governor’s mansion: The NAACP Opposes Legal Lynching.
In the streets leading to the Capitol, captured by cameras and memorialized in newsprint: In Honor of Medgar Evers.
In places of power — legislative hearing rooms and school board meetings and community forums — calling out injustice and discrimination and institutionalized racism.
“Leola seems to be someone who was born committed,” said longtime friend Fran Kaye. “She came up here and looked around and saw what needed to be done and did it. It was born in the bone, so to speak.”
It was the bone-hard resolve of a black woman from the South determined to make change in a mostly white Midwestern town.
The woman who cautioned: “Never give up. The struggle is always going to be there, but with struggle you find out who you are.”
And she didn’t give up. Not in the short term, when she arrived in 1950 with her husband, Hugh, and found work hard to come by.
Not in the sorrow that followed the death of Martin Luther King Jr.
Not in the six decades she and Hugh, her quiet comrade-in-arms, called Lincoln home.
Days before she died in 2010, Bullock pleaded with her doctor to hurry his exam. She had a meeting to get to and she didn’t want to be late.
She'd wanted to attend a meeting of the Mayor's Multicultural Advisory Committee and get a civil rights director position reinstated.
“She just never stopped,” said Journal Star reporter JoAnne Young. “Right up to the day she went into the hospital, she was going to meetings and advocating for issues.”
Young accompanied Leola and Hugh Bullock on a weeklong trip to her Mississippi hometown in 2004, six years before the 81-year-old died following surgery.
The reporter wrote a profile of the velvet-gloved civil rights activist, describing a Sunday morning in the century-old church where Bullock had worshipped as a child. The grandmother with the gray Afro, staring at a white Jesus on the sanctuary wall all those years later.
“She grew up believing this image was the true one,” Young wrote, “but now she knows the face is in the eye of the beholder.
“It can be shades of brown or black, like those in the Last Supper hanging in her living room in Lincoln, where … she and her husband have shared a long marriage, raised a daughter and nurtured two grandchildren. Where she’s represented her community by asking tough questions, protesting and being persistent. Where she’s made her mark stressing education.”
The trip to Mississippi was a highlight of her career, the veteran reporter said last week. “All the way down and all the way back, we got to hear their stories.”
The N-word hurled at Bullock as a 5-year-old at a parade. The segregated schools and separate entrances and more.
“Things we (white people) would never go through and she was positive anyway.”
When she got to Lincoln, she protested at the lunch counter at Kresge’s, in solidarity with her sisters and brothers in the South.
She protested discriminatory practices at Lincoln’s department stores and became the first black employee at Gold’s, where she stocked shelves and sold magazines. Later, she’d spend 15 years as a clerical assistant in NET’s instructional library.
She was a staple at Newman United Methodist Church and the Malone Community Center — where she nurtured children who called her Mama Bullock.
She led the local chapter of the NAACP and started the Association of Black Citizens, a group that protested police department actions toward African-Americans and eventually led to the Lincoln Police Review Board.
She took on education — unequal opportunities, disparities in discipline, children’s books that portrayed African-Americans in stereotypical fashion and worse.
She formed Concerned Citizens for Truth in Education. She was a member of Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty and fought for the release of Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter, declared political prisoners by Amnesty International.
“She just waded into everything,” her friend and fellow activist Kaye said. “She was very much working for her daughter and grandchildren.”
She was the grandmother who made cheesecake for her granddaughter, Tenia, and Rice Krispie bars for her grandson, Tyler, in the stands at all their sporting events growing up. The grandmother who was the catalyst behind the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Youth Rally & March, now in its 23rd year.
Brittney Hodges-Bolkovac remembers Bullock returning to talk to each year’s participants.
“To be able to see that this one individual had the drive and the passion to get that started was inspiring.”
Bullock was soft-spoken, said Hodges-Bolkovac, now a teacher. “But she was kind of like that grandma who cusses. She was a real person who laid it out there and didn’t sugarcoat the experiences.”
Bullock’s honors were endless, and one was particularly sweet — an honorary doctorate from Doane College.
Kaye remembers calling her home in Havelock, Hugh answering on the other end: "This is the residence of Dr. Leola Bullock."
The proud husband of a woman who stood her ground and lifted up the sky.
He stood at the front of his classroom, a trailblazer in teacher’s clothing.
Mr. Forrest Stith was a presence at Millard Lefler Junior High, filling the blackboard in his social studies class with words, like a mathematician writing a complicated equation.
Gently reminding his students that using large handwriting to fill the requirement for a one-page paper was not acceptable.
Standing in the hall outside his door between periods, a black man in an all-white school with a love of history and a heart for people.
The teacher had been a traveling minister and an Army chaplain in World War II before returning to Nebraska to break down a barrier in 1955 and become Lincoln Public Schools' first African-American teacher.
He was 45 then. Husband to Daisy. Father to Thelma and Forrest Christopher.
He’d completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years, going to class all day, working until midnight, teaching adult Sunday School and preaching, caring for his sickly wife.
There was no public fuss when he entered the school system, his son said. No newspaper stories. No boycotts.
“It was a major happening and people were unsure if it would work,” said Forrest C. Stith, a retired United Methodist bishop living in Maryland. “There was tension. There was stress.”
But his father worked for good principals, the son says, and being “first and only” wasn’t a flag he waved high.
“You know the world is watching you. But he was just anxious to serve and to work and to teach his pupils.”
And his pupils say that’s what he did.
Deb Haas attended the school from 1972 to 1974.
“He always just brought back warm memories of Lefler,” she said.
Haas and a classmate visited Newman United Methodist Church on 23rd and S streets, where their teacher preached on Sundays — two white girls in the heart of black Lincoln. “He always had a presence,” she said. “Looking back, I know he had the holy spirit in him.”
Doug Keister remembers that blackboard, sentences spilling down the sides, his teacher the first black person he’d ever interacted with socially and among the handful of teachers whose names he remembers.
“I always had this nagging desire to know more about him,” said Keister, a Lefler student in the ‘60s. “I had a sense he had a story to tell that I would benefit from hearing. My memory is he was planting seeds.”
The teacher spent his early life in the Sandhills, the grandson of an escaped slave who’d come to Nebraska to prosper and found life in the sandy soil outside Valentine a struggle. Stith was a boy when his parents — Maggie and Christopher Columbus Stith — packed up their six children and headed for Lincoln, where Stith would graduate from Jackson High in University Place.
He played sports and participated in music in a school, and a city, that was not officially segregated.
“The problem was on the social level,” said his son. “No one said anything, but it was understood that you went to your own church and your own social activities.”
Stith met his wife, Daisy, in Texas. He served black congregations in Kansas and Nebraska. When war came, he ministered to black soldiers in the South Pacific and, later, served on an Army base in Maryland, where officer housing didn’t have a spot for the black officer and his family.
“There was no place for us to live and no schools for us to go to,” the son said. "We slept two nights on the chapel floor."
In 1948, the family returned to Lincoln so Stith could enroll in college on the G.I. Bill. “Lincoln was very segregated and very discriminatory,” the son said. “He could not get a decent job.”
The Army major and minister washed dishes. He worked as a porter, hauling luggage for whites.
“He was struggling to get us something to eat and he went to the Lincoln Journal and Star and that saved us.”
At the paper, he worked as a custodian and a messenger, wearing a tie and white shirt to deliver notices to downtown businesses.
He told his story in two books — biographical accounts of family history — both still on the shelves of Bennett Martin Library.
After retirement, the teacher penned book reviews for the Lincoln paper, focusing on volumes about race. He taught a night class in minority history at the Lincoln High theater, charging an $8 fee for the eight-week term in 1969. He shared a tape of his uncle telling cowboy stories with elementary school teachers for use in their classrooms. He penned articles for the historical society.
Forrest Stith’s 1986 funeral was packed, said fellow minister Jay Schmidt, a college friend of the younger Stith. “I told Forrest once that his father was a saint.”
One of Stith’s early students, Cathy Stump Rauch, remembers him the same way. Kind and stoic, distinguished and highly educated.
Today, the retired LPS teacher and counselor questions the wisdom of placing Stith at Lefler as the city's first African-American educator.
“It’s interesting how far we’ve come,” she said. “I would think we would not squander the opportunity today to put him in a school where he could be a role model for kids of color.”
In 1956: “There were kids who were racist toward him and I heard it. He never got angry. He just marched on, God love him.”
Nearly 20 years later, a girl named Pam Ritchie ended up in Stith’s social studies classroom.
“I think he was overqualified to be teaching rooms full of teenagers who mostly didn’t care about what he was saying,” Pam Ritchie Vermillion said. “As a kid, I had no idea what all he as a black male of his generation had to go through ... to teach predominately white children.
“As an adult, looking back at history, he was living it.”
Lenora Letcher baked the communion bread at her church, the black congregation of Mount Zion Baptist.
She fed members of Beta Sigma Psi at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, nearly all of them young white men.
She prayed for a Nazi when he sent her death threats and terrorized the city’s African-American community.
From the time Letcher arrived in Lincoln in 1944, she knocked on doors and registered voters. She led the NAACP and served the Malone Community Center, counseled mayors and governors, served the Human Rights Commission and Lincoln Action Program, nurtured her grandchildren and an extended family, who called her Mom Letcher, a sign of their abiding respect.
“Her goal was always to make life better for people across the board,” her son Paul Letcher said. “And for people to see more than just color.”
His mother had lived in Kansas City until her first husband died, leaving her alone with two young daughters. Her sister lived in Lincoln, so Lenora packed up her girls and moved. She married Robert Letcher and they had Paul.
She found work as a cook, and for 43 years fed fraternity brothers who would name a scholarship in her honor at her retirement.
Paul Letcher remembers the Beta Sigma Psi men he met at the university — college students whose fathers and grandfathers had also been fed by his mother. They called her another name: Lenora Legend.
“Prejudice is nothing more than ignorance,” the cook told a newspaper reporter in 1989, on the eve of her retirement.
“Letcher said she is the first black person that many if not most of the fraternity members have ever seen,” the story said. “Some have written her letters after graduation, saying how glad they were to have that experience.”
Rod Krogh is one of those men. Letcher was more than a great cook, said the 1989 UNL graduate. “She was appreciated beyond words by everyone there. It was a tremendous blessing to know her.”
She changed people with love, her daughter, Willene Miller, said in 2002. “She wanted everybody to understand that it’s about love. That if you love and respect yourself, you’ll do that for others, too.”
Laws are necessary, Letcher told a reporter in 1993. “But love is necessary, too, and you can’t legislate love.”
So she loved.
The 2012 book “Not by the Sword” recounted her role in the transformation of a Lincoln man and Ku Klux Klan grand wizard: Lenore Letcher, an African-American woman who had been on the receiving end of Larry Trapp’s hatred, prayed, ‘Dear God, let him find you in his heart.’ And that night, the skin on Trapp’s fingers burned and itched and stung so badly he had to take his Nazi rings off.
Trapp was eventually taken in by a local Jewish couple, Cantor Michael and Julie Weisser.
“She was part of the process of his change,” Paul Letcher said. “She had a chance to meet him and talk to him about her faith.”
A faith that was central to her life.
A photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hung on her living room wall, always.
And like King, she spoke truth.
When the police officers who beat Rodney King in Los Angeles were found not guilty in 1992, she had something to say: “It just proves that there is still a lot of racism in this country. When a (minority person) gets in trouble with the law, there’s an overreaction from the authorities … because of biased discrimination. It happens here, too, in Lincoln, Nebraska.”
She made peace.
She was an old woman when she stood in the Capitol Rotunda in 1993 to honor MLK on his birthday, taking the hand of the white woman standing to her left and the white man standing to her right to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the black national anthem, her voice clear and sweet.
She died a few years later, at the age of 83, a grandmother and great-grandmother.
A woman with a beautiful voice who traveled the state entertaining congregations with classical and gospel music. A soprano with a favorite hymn: “How Great Thou Art.” A crooner who backed up jazz groups when she lived in Kansas City.
An actress who stood on the Lincoln Community Playhouse stage, a lone black face in a sea of white.
A civil-rights leader honored by the NAACP with the Lenora Letcher Community Service Award.
A woman of faith, her son said, who considered her work to improve the lives of others her civil and godly duty.
“She instilled in me a deep sense of pride as a black woman,” said granddaughter Roslen Ross. “A love of people, fairness and to see past the color of skin.”
Paul Letcher’s daughters — Kiara Bullerman and Kaleah Latenser — were little girls when their grandmother died. Many of their memories spring from family stories.
But their grandmother's gift to the larger world is apparent when they say their family name — Letcher — in Lincoln.
“People talked about her with such wonder,” Bullerman said. “Her mark and her legacy have left such an impact on my life.”
Her younger sister feels the ripples, too.
“I plan to raise my daughter the same way my grandmother raised my father,” Latenser said. “And the same way my father raised my sister and me.”
Vote for THE MAN, the campaign ad urged.
It was 1969, and that man was Harry “Pete” Peterson, who was running for a seat on the Lincoln City Council.
The ad ran on Page 8 of The Lincoln Star the first Monday morning in May, Peterson wearing a bow tie and a serious expression in the black-and-white photo.
His signature appeared under his political philosophy: Industry Means Growth ... Growth Means People ... People Need Houses ... The City Reaps Taxes ... And Grows Some More!
The next day, the 45-year-old Republican won a seat in city government; the first African-American to hold the office.
He’d serve just one term, deciding to move on rather than seek re-election.
And he would move on to serve as head of the Department of Motor Vehicles under Gov. Charles Thone. To open his own restaurant — Pete’s Chicken ‘N A Skillet — at 14th and O streets.
“My dad was a jack of all trades, master of many,” Donna Waller said from her home in Indiana. “You know the song ‘Candy Man?’ He was kind of my Candy Man, that pretty much was how Daddy was.”
Peterson was a big man with a booming baritone who brought his young family to Lincoln from segregated Missouri in 1946. He and his wife, Kathryn, completed their family here with a son, Jerry.
They settled into a house on Vine Street in a town where African-Americans were barred from most restaurants and bars, public swimming pools and many jobs — and the decorated World War II Army sergeant found work.
As chief cook at the Cornhusker Hotel. Working construction jobs. Filling in as a mailman.
Cleaning out customer cars at the Standard station on 10th Street. (The future city councilman wasn’t allowed to pump gas because the owner feared he would scare away white customers.)
He worked in office buildings part-time as a "sanitary engineer,” Waller said. “He developed a solution that took the stains out of carpets, and cleaned carpets for fraternities and sororities. He developed a solution that took the bugs off your car without ruining the paint.”
The man with the entrepreneurial spirit became a Lincoln police officer in 1955. For nearly a decade, he worked as a street cop in the Malone area, where he became known to the residents of that vibrant community as a firm-but-friendly presence. (He was not allowed in a cruiser, he told The Lincoln Star in 1984, unless he was helping transport a prisoner.)
Peterson patrolled the parking lot of King’s Drive-In on O Street on weekends, steering away trouble and making friends of teenagers who cruised the popular hamburger joint.
King’s owners were so enamored they lured him away from the police department and Peterson spent a decade as a manager and trainer for the local chain.
He made his run for city council during his King’s years.
“He went into civic life at the encouragement of friends,” Waller said. “He was always kind of a politician in his own way.”
His personality drew people in, longtime friend Loretta Russell said. “To know him was to like him.”
Russell met Pete and Kathryn Peterson in the early 1950s when they joined a married couples’ social club she and her husband belonged to.
The family also joined her church — Quinn Chapel AME — and when Peterson sang gospel and old spirituals in his beautiful baritone, it brought tears.
“He had so many gifts and he used them well,” she said. “Whatever he took on, he put his whole heart into.”
Serving the church, serving on boards, serving poor kids — black and white.
Of course, he had her vote in 1969.
The man who served his city well was 83 when he died in 2006. He was divorced and had moved to Colorado and married his second wife, Betty, 17 years earlier.
“He treated everyone with respect,” retired police Capt. Doug Ahlberg told the paper upon his passing. “You were a public servant. The people you served were your bosses.”
After his political career, Peterson talked to a reporter about race relations.
“He remembers all the jobs where other people — white people — became his boss after he trained them."
“He remembers that in 1946 blacks couldn’t swim in the Municipal Pool.”
“He remembers how, at one time, prospective home buyers, who were also black, couldn’t buy homes in certain areas of town, regardless of their income.”
And, he said: “It is worth remembering those things only as a means to chart the progress that has been made ... not that the progress is acceptable. It isn’t. But it is progress.”
Only four African-Americans have been elected to the Lincoln City Council since 1969 — John Robinson, Jerry Shoecraft, Annette McRoy and Bennie Shobe.
Harry “Pete” Peterson — THE MAN — never felt the pressure of being the first, his daughter said.
It wasn’t the way he thought.
“My father lived as Pete Peterson. He didn’t live as black Pete Peterson.”
The newspaper story called her an “old colored lady.”
It said Ruth Cox Adams lived at 410 Second St. in Norfolk. It said she “first saw the light of day from a little Maryland cabin.”
It said she knew John Brown, the martyr, and the abolitionists Stephen F. Foster, Samuel Bowles and Maria Baker.
And one more, Frederick Douglass, who called her his beloved adopted sister.
“Fred Douglass,” the 1894 story in the Norfolk Weekly News said, “is the last of a class of men who, twenty years before the first gun blazed above Fort Sumter, had stirred the northern heart to a realization of the terrible wrong of human slavery.”
Adams — mother, grandmother, widow, freedom lover and former slave — died in Lincoln in 1900, her home in the last years of her long life.
She was a seamstress and a woman of faith who championed the rights of African-Americans and was buried in an unmarked grave at Wyuka Cemetery, where her bones rested for more than a century, forgotten by history.
And then her name appeared in another Nebraska newspaper — a story in the Lincoln Journal Star about a rosewood box lined with soft green and donated to the Nebraska Historical Society.
It had been a gift to Adams from the famous abolitionist, the 2002 story said. The man who had called her Harriet, after his mother and the little sister he’d lost to the slave trade. The man who welcomed her into his home, where she lived as a free woman, reading and penning letters for his wife, Anna, and helping look after the couple’s children while Douglass traveled the world on a crusade for equality.
Douglass had sent a letter with his wooden gift in 1847, postmarked Belfast, Ireland: "My own Dear Sister Harriet, I am not unmindful of you, although I did not write to you by the last steamer. I always think of you among the beloved ones of my family. ... I shall send a beautiful work box to you which I bought in London and gave six dollars for it ..."
Years after its owner’s death, the sewing box went west with Adams' descendants, along with braided locks of hair from Douglass and his children, old letters, a Confederate dollar, a small wooden cross worn smooth.
In 2002, many of the artifacts were donated to the historical society by Alyce McWilliams Hall, a relative of Adams living in Los Angeles. A woman who knew the stories that surrounded that sewing box — taken out and shared by Adams and the women of her extended family, year after year.
“She wanted Nebraska to hold this history for her family in the hope that we would continue this tradition of educating families, communities, and the public in general on African-American history and culture,” said Abigail Anderson, who met Hall as an intern conducting research on the city’s black community of the early 1900s for the Lincoln Planning Department.
Hall would return to Lincoln at the dedication of a bronze grave marker at Wyuka in 2008, a celebration attended by generations.
In the last decade, more has been written about the friendship between Douglass and Adams — excerpts of their letters printed in newspapers, historians exploring Douglass and his commitment to the political empowerment of women in light of his kindred relationship with Adams.
A black woman who spent 30 years separated from her mother and brother, both sold into slavery. A wife who lost her husband in 1869. A mother who mourned the death of a daughter. A widow who sewed to support her two surviving children as they moved from town to town chasing work, finally landing in Nebraska in 1883.
Lincoln would be home for five years. A house in the German-Russian Bottoms. Another at 715 C St., where her preacher son-in-law helped start Christ Temple Mission Church.
When Adams died, her granddaughter shared the news with relatives: “I have learnt many beautiful lessons from her, especially one of patience. Through her four months of suffering not once did she become discouraged or impatient, nor did she ever say one cross word. ... It seems so lonesome now that we hardly know what first to take hold of.”
Douglass had been lonesome for Adams, too, long before her death.
The pair had lost touch after her marriage and travels, but during an anti-lynching speech in Omaha, he read that story from the Norfolk paper — and sat down to write.
“I am now very glad to know that you still live and have not forgotten what we were to each other in our younger days. ... I am now 77 years old — and am beginning to feel the touch.”
He invited her to come east and live once again with him and his family.
She gratefully declined.
“I thank you very much in deed on the kind offer you maid me to make my home under your roof as long as we both shall live ... but my dear Friend that is too much happiness for me to expect now in this life for I too am growing old ...”
Douglass died the following year.
A famous man who had read a small-town newspaper story that called his Harriet’s declining years happy ones.
“She is tenderly cared for by her daughter and son-in-law. For fifty years she has been a member of the church, always looking cheerfully forward to the time when the Master makes the final summons for her to join the friends of years ago who devoted their earthly career to the freedom and elevation of the colored race.”
He wore sunglasses when he ran.
He won six NCAA track titles in those shades during his college career at the University of Nebraska, a seven-time All-American who took home bronze and gold medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
The year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The year Bobby Kennedy was killed. The year race riots spread across the land.
Charlie Greene didn’t raise his fist on the medal podium, like U.S. teammates Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who reached for the sky with black-gloved hands and bowed their heads in silent protest during the national anthem.
But he talked about it afterward, after the two black sprinters were sent home.
He’d heard people talking, he told The Associated Press that October. Fans asking: What’s wrong with those runners? Don’t they know how lucky they are to live in America?
“They said we’ve never had it so good,” Greene said then. “My reaction was to reply, ‘Why don’t you accept half freedom and see how you like it?’ But I just didn’t argue.”
It’s been 50 years now.
He talked to Smith last year, two old sprinters catching up. They talked about Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protest he started, taking a knee during the national anthem.
“I said someone should tell Kaepernick it will be 50 years before people realize what he was saying,” Greene says. "The public display by Tommie and John was to bring to attention that America was lying. Lying about how they treated their own citizens."
And then he says this: “Every generation of African-Americans have a part to play on the shoulders of the ancestors we stand on.”
His voice is weak.
Once the world’s fastest man, he's slowly getting stronger after a kidney failed — the donor kidney he got eight years ago, his own worn out from years of diabetes and high blood pressure.
He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt; a Husker stocking cap and a Husker scarf around his neck.
He’s wearing black-framed glasses, like the young man in the black-and-white photo from his freshman year at NU. Same thick frames. Same clear-eyed look.
Barrels of ink have run dry covering the life and times of Charlie Greene. The kid who grew up in Seattle was “born fast” in Arkansas and came to Lincoln on a track scholarship.
An improbable choice, but his high school coach hailed from David City and convinced Greene’s mom that Nebraska would be a good fit.
“I grew up in the day when your mother said something, you didn’t have a lot of choice,” Greene says.
Greene is 73. Glad he came here. Happy to call Lincoln his home.
The best thing he got from being a Husker: “A college degree.”
After college and the Olympics, after he married Linda — a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter he met in Mexico City — Greene left Lincoln for a 20-year career in the Army.
He rose to the rank of major. He lived in Korea and West Berlin. He served part of his career in the military’s equal opportunity and race relations program.
He became an executive for Special Olympics in Washington, D.C. Then he came home to UNL and worked in student affairs, the discipline guy, striving to be fair.
He and Linda had raised two daughters by then, Mercedes and Sybil.
Those girls?
Better than a gold medal.
“Both of them are college-educated, both of them have good jobs with the federal government. Both of them own their own homes; that’s the American dream, isn’t it? Own your own little piece of the rock.”
His proudest accomplishments, he says. “Along with their mother.”
Greene finds a red folder. Old clippings of other accomplishments, gathered by a friend. His place on the list of top 150 Nebraskans, praised as an inaugural member of the Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame, the guy who tied the world record in the 100 meters three times.
No. 131 on the list of 150, he says. Not bad.
He takes out a copy of a story from Jet magazine, newsstand price 20 cents. The sprinter in his sunglasses, muscles gleaming. “World’s Fastest Human,” the cover says. “‘Shades Digs Girls, Jazz and Hard Rock Music.”
His Olympic bronze medal in ‘68 came in the 100; his gold in the 4x100 relay.
His best time in the 100-yard dash was a world record-tying blur: 9.1 seconds. “That and a nickel will get you a cup of coffee,” he says.
It will also get you a place in history.
“Here’s a guy who was a world-class sprinter and he’s at the University of Nebraska,” said Mike Babcock, the Hail Varsity editor who attended NU during part of Greene’s college career. “This is a big deal, this gives Nebraska track and field credibility.”
He remembers Greene’s sunglasses, the shades he called heat shields. He remembers that Greene belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity. That his big brother there was Bob Brown, the Husker who would go on to NFL fame.
The 6-foot-4 lineman and the 5-8 sprinter. Years later, Babcock would interview both of them, focused and successful men outside the realm of sports.
Greene was an amazing athlete, said Chris Anderson, an associate athletic director for community, governmental and charitable relations. An even better man.
Anderson met Greene in 1984 when she was a sports information department student assistant working track meets. Greene was a buddy of her boss, Don Bryant, and he'd invite her to his office: Come talk to the fastest man in the world!
She did. The brash runner was long gone, replaced by a storyteller and good listener, always willing to meet with athletes and letterwinners and staff.
"He touched so many hearts and souls and lives," Anderson said. “He just is the perfect gentleman, always with a big Husker heart.”
Greene volunteered in NU's Life Skills program. He motivated the Husker volleyball team. He befriended football players. He volunteered with the track team at Lincoln Northeast, trained kids from Lincoln High. He traveled the world, lending a hand to help athletes move their feet.
“He coached from Day One,” Linda says. “Charlie was always engaged with kids.”
Greene remembers one kid, a black teenager from a poor family, a football player who went on to play in college. Quicker from Greene’s training.
I owe you, Coach, the young man said. I owe you for helping me.
You don't owe me, Greene answered.
“I told him, 'You gotta do the same thing for someone else.' That was my way of giving back.”
The world’s fastest man is looking ahead now, looking for ways to stay relevant in the world.
He’s working hard in physical therapy. He’s on limited dialysis and he won’t get a new kidney.
He looks out from those black-framed glasses, a mirror of the kid born fast.
He has an idea.
“Let’s title this story once upon a time,” he says. “Once upon a time. Slow.”
Nate Woods walked the streets of the neighborhood that summer.
Knocking on doors, delivering a message: Hey, the Malone is open again! Come on by ...
In 2003, Woods was long removed from his youth, a husband and grandfather, an Army veteran who’d returned home to Lincoln after years away.
A man who had found himself drawn to a small, yellow building at 20th and T streets in the mid-'70s — the outdoor basketball court, the friendships forged in the heart of the black community at an institution his grandfather had a hand in forging.
And now he was back, helping revive a place that had seen hard times and would see more during his tenure.
It was a matter of pride and of giving back, he says.
It was a matter of children.
“The kids at the Malone (Center), they became my kids,” Woods says. “I tried to fill a hole for them.”
Woods grew up the youngest of four kids, raised by their mother, raised to be tight.
But he knew that hole.
His job was more than a job. The more he gave, he says, the more he got back.
So he organized basketball challenges and chicken wing fundraisers, computer classes and Halloween parties, youth nights and Juneteenth celebrations.
He scrubbed floors at the center, now a bigger building at 20th and U. He tiled the kitchen, installed carpet, fixed the roof. He enlisted volunteers. Pinched pennies.
He transported students to the after-school program.
He brought them home. To his home.
“Sometimes parents had to work late,” remembers Woods’ wife, Sandra Woods. “He’d bring kids home with him and they’d stay for supper.”
Then he’d deliver them to their homes and start all over again in the morning.
Woods left the Malone Center last May after 14 years. He works at National Able Network now, helping older adults entering the workforce. He’s a few months from a human-relations degree from Doane University.
He’s a great-grandfather.
A great guy.
“He’s just a good person,” his wife says. “A good father, a good husband, a good man.”
The 58-year-old was a basketball star at Lincoln High, an all-city forward in 1978. He's wider now than he was in his playing days, gray in his stubble.
He’s a music guy. A guy who talks to strangers at the supermarket.
He served under five executive directors during his time at the Malone Center.
He shined the floors, chased bats out of the gym and dust out of the air vents, spruced up the building for its re-opening in 2003 — shut down after a director had been accused of misappropriating funds. The United Way pulled its funding and the center lost its child care license.
He was there to help the center recover.
“He came in after a rough time,” said T.J. McDowell, the Malone Center’s director from 2006 to 2011. “He was the consistent person during all that transition.”
He was connected, said longtime friend Jake Kirkland. “He found ways to bring money in. He’d go out in the community and get free water, door prizes, whatever he had to do.”
And he had a lot to do. He licensed the vans. Hired employees, supervised Husker gameday parking, directed programs, spoke to college students.
Cared.
Malone kids listened to him, said his older brother, Millard Woods III. He was direct with them, honest. The caring came through, he said.
“And I think Nate is a big kid at heart, so they related to him.”
Their paternal grandfather started Lincoln’s Urban League, the precursor to the Malone Center. Millard Woods served as the league's first executive director; Clyde Malone its second.
“Amusements such as cards, checkers, dominoes and other games are provided,” said a 1935 Lincoln Star story touting the dedication of the league’s first community center. “In addition, two playgrounds are supervised by the league, one at Seventeenth and Y and the other at Twenty-first and T.”
Millard Woods’ portrait hangs in the Malone Center today.
“Nate following in his footsteps made me really proud,” his big brother said. “I’m super proud of the man Nate turned out to be, and I think I speak for my sister as well.”
McDowell is impressed with the Woods family history, too.
And with the founder’s grandson.
“As far as I’m concerned, the reason the Malone Center is still open is because of Nate Woods. And he did it as an act of love.”
The mother sat on the superintendent's front steps.
She waited for Steven Watkins to get home.
She was patient and she was determined.
A new elementary was opening and she wanted her children to attend Clare McPhee, a laboratory school near the Capitol.
Back in 1964, most black children in Lincoln went to Elliott, but Bernice Bowling had already pulled her daughter from the school after discovering the teacher didn’t seem to know who Alice Ray Bowling was or how she was faring in class.
This new school looked promising.
“If that’s where the opportunities were, that’s where I wanted them,” she said Wednesday morning. “Because I loved my kids and I wanted them to have the best.”
The divorced mother of five spoke to Dr. Watkins. She spoke to the school board.
The Bowling kids enrolled at McPhee.
More black families followed.
“It was mom who led the pack,” said Sue Bowling Hill. “And she just kept going.”
She got to know her children’s teachers and principals and coaches.
She fought to remove racist children’s books from classrooms, joining other determined women like Leola Bullock, Lela Shanks and her friend Joann Maxey -- tossing copies of “Little Black Sambo” to the floor.
The 85-year-old still remembers the face of an African-American boy in class as the story was read aloud, looking like he wanted to disappear.
“It made you angry,” she said. “Because the teachers were not sensitive to it.”
She’d arrived in Lincoln from the segregated South in 1958 with her first husband and their children.
A few years later, the couple divorced and Bernice moved to a house on Y Street, later joined by her mother and brother.
She didn’t drive. She worked two jobs. She was at Christ Temple Mission Church anytime the doors were open, a deaconess who babysat for young mothers, ministered to prisoners, knitted lap robes for the infirm, quietly gave and gave and gave.
“God keeps me going,” Bernice told the newspaper in 1994. “He’s my all in all.”
She’d married again on Feb. 25, 1967. His name was Obasi Onuoha. An honorable and charming man who loved the Lord.
He called her honey.
She called him honey right back.
The woman from Texas and the man from Nigeria would have three children together, a family with eight children that grew and grew during their 50-year marriage.
When Obasi died last year, his obituary stretched to list them all -- 19 grandchildren and spouses, 10 greats. It included their adopted families, too: The Browns and the Davises, the Haynes and the Joneses, the Lawrences and the Mardenboroughs, the Maxeys and the Kirklands.
“They just took me in as one of their children,” Dolores Kirkland said Wednesday.
The Lincoln Public Schools counselor had arrived in Lincoln from New York for graduate school in 1975 and met Bernice and Osabi at church.
“Even with a houseful of people, there was always room for somebody else,” she said. “They loved us like we’re part of the family, and it just continues.”
Every Tuesday, Bernice hosted a dinner -- spaghetti and chili, meals that would stretch. She invited her kids and grandkids, church family and girlfriends, packed them all into the modest ranch on Woods Boulevard.
When her oldest grandson was a Husker, football players filled the folding chairs.
“They all called her grandma then and still do today,” Jon Bowling said. “One thing I learned from her is that in our culture, family extends out into the community.”
There were two boys and six girls in the Bowling-Onuoha family, and lots of boyfriends.
“My parents said, ‘We don’t care who you are dating, as long as they are of good character,’” Bowling Hill said. “We’ve always had all colors in our family.”
Those colors show in the family photos on the mantle.
Bernice and Obasi helped integrate a white neighborhood in south Lincoln -- despite a petition drive to keep them out. “She paved the way for people of color in Lincoln and beyond,” said granddaughter Michelle Wirth.
Being one of the few black faces in school? “It gave us the opportunity to teach other people we all bleed red,” Bowling Hill said.
She never wanted her kids to settle, Bernice says.
“I told them, ‘There’s no such thing as you can’t do it.”
She led by example.
When she applied for a job at Lincoln General and they offered her a housekeeping position, she fixed them with a stare. Pardon me, that’s not what I’m applying for.
When she went to the Kresge’s store downtown and passed the written test and a white woman -- who hadn’t -- got the job, she returned to ask why.
In 1964, she sat on the porch of a school superintendent’s house -- night after night until she caught him at home.
And her grandchildren know the stories.
“The lessons she taught my mother and her siblings live on in her grandchildren and great-grandchildren,” Wirth said. “We do not accept the status quo. We continue to advocate for our children, our communities and for a better society as a whole.”
There’s a portrait of Barack Obama under the American flag in Brittney Hodges-Bolkovac’s classroom.
There’s John Lewis near the pencil sharpener — the civil rights hero during his Freedom Rider days, in shades of black and white and blue.
The Dawes Middle School teacher met Lewis when he came to Lincoln in 2004. She talked about him that January in her speech at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Youth Rally and March.
About how young Lewis was when he protested. How young he was when he was beaten and jailed fighting injustice and racism.
She said he was an example of a person who took action and inspired others.
She spoke in the crowded Capitol: If you take one thing home today, I hope it’s the motivation to go out and become part of something in your community.
That young leader from Lincoln High is 31 now.
She’s part of something in her community.
She’s mom to Kendyll, 8, and Michaeli, 16 months.
She’s working on her second master’s degree. At Dawes she teaches Spanish and Language Arts; coaches basketball, volleyball and track. She has a summer job with Upward Bound. She leads the Spanish Club at Kendyll’s elementary school. She’s an adult volunteer helping plan the annual MLK rally — the rally she helped lead as a teenager.
Find a way, make a way, she says.
This is Hodges-Bolkovac’s second year at the school on Colfax Avenue, her fourth year in a classroom.
Wednesday, she’s wearing black pants and a royal-blue shirt. She’s walking past desks in tall, gray boots, a black educator and role model in Room 232.
Some of her students call her Miss B.
Some call her Coach B — like the eighth-grade boys on the A Team, the girls who play basketball and volleyball under her direction, the kids who run track.
B-Razzle is the nickname one of her fellow coaches scrawled on the thank-you note on her crowded bulletin board. I’m so glad you came up to the north side of town to be a part of Dawes ... your knowledge of the game and coaching experience shine through, not to mention you’re just really funny!
She’s also really smart, said her principal, Angie Plugge. “She’s got conviction. She’s confident in what she does and she is going to communicate her ideas.”
Plugge was a science teacher at Lefler Middle School when Hodges-Bolkovac was a student who spoke her mind.
A student that some teachers thought of as difficult, the same stereotypical lens through which some adults still view her.
“There’s an internal bias in some people, especially when you’re a strong black woman,” Plugge said. “People are quick to define who you are, and there’s so much to Brittney Bolkovac.”
All of it positive: “She’s a huge force, inside and outside the classroom.”
Wednesday, Miss B strolls her classroom, her eyebrows rising like a question mark when students fumble an answer or appear to not be paying attention.
The teacher grew up in Lincoln. She and her two brothers were raised by a single mom, who worked long hours but found time to shuttle them to sports year-round.
Her mom is white; her father black, but the daughter went out the door every day knowing the world saw her as only one color.
“My mom was well aware that society was not going to view us as white even if that was half of who we were.”
Her world was female-centric, says the mother of two young daughters.
“I saw my mom working hard and if there wasn’t a way, make a way,” she says. “I grew up being told my voice shouldn’t be the quietest one in the room.”
So she used that voice in school, questioning teachers. Columbus Day? Christopher Columbus stole this land.
She spent time at in-school suspension at Lincoln High for her questions, called obstinate and insubordinate.
She once got kicked out of Lighthouse, the after-school program for teenagers. She went back and stayed.
She’d go on to be part of the staff there during college. She briefly had a job at the F Street Rec Center, too, working with neighborhood kids.
It was a job tracking students at risk for entering the juvenile justice system — or kids who were already there — that led her to the classroom, one of three black teachers at Dawes.
“Three strong,” she says.
She gives credit to mentors and sounding boards: Pete Ferguson and TJ McDowell; Joan Mendoza Gorham and Jake Kirkland Jr.
"Here's a young lady who had a vision," Kirkland says. "People along the way helped shape and direct her and we're very, very proud."
She’s the mentor now.
“She’s that person you can go to for direction,” says Azcia Fleming, 16. “She continues to give back because she loves it.”
“She’ll give it to you straight forward,” says Jaden Ferguson, a junior at Southwest and MLK rally participant. “She always says if we have the opportunity to have our voices heard, we should take them.”
The message is bigger than you, the teacher tells them.
Miss B has a mission for kids.
It’s why she coaches, why she goes to her daughter’s school, why she returns to help with the MLK march.
It’s why she teaches at a school where half the students get help paying for lunch, where kids are white and black and Hispanic and Asian and Native and biracial.
“They need to know someone has their back,” she says. “I want to see how many times can I see these students each day and remind them: They are someone.”
Melanie and John Ways met in Camden, New Jersey.
John was 7. Mel was 5.
One day Mel looked at her big brother’s friend and said: I’m going to marry you someday.
Someday was Dec. 19, 1964.
In the wedding picture, she’s wearing a pillbox hat, a veil trailing behind her. He has a white carnation pinned to the lapel of his black tuxedo.
They’re smiling big.
This is their secret, Mel says Monday, in her south Lincoln living room with her husband of 53 years.
“I tell people nobody ever said marriage was going to be easy. You have to try to outlove each other every day. Even on the days you want to kill each other.”
Mel smiles.
John puts it another way: “Sometimes you have to get down on your knees and submit to the Lord God Almighty.”
Mel and John have lived in this home — How long, John? — 38 years in March.
There’s a wooden sign in the living room: Grandma and Grandpa’s Nest. And a mantle lined with grandkids photos: Gabbie, Jordan, Olivia, Aaron, Essence, Mataya, C.J., Spencer, Zander, Lela, Brianna.
They lost their first grandchild. Angel was her name.
And Jordan is sick, a 19-year-old with soft-tissue cancer.
“We drive the poor guy crazy praying,” Mel says. “He’s such a great kid, every time I think about him I start praying again.”
The couple who live by faith arrived in Lincoln in 1971 via California, where John had been stationed in the Air Force.
Kathi Vontz, Mel’s best friend there, was moving back to her hometown and Lincoln sounded like a safe, smog-free city.
The Ways made this home.
They made Lincoln better.
They'd already made Vontz better. She hadn't known any black people when John and Mel invited her and her then-husband to dinner in California. She was apprehensive.
When John came out of the kitchen holding an electric knife she opened her mouth: That looks like it would be good for cutting watermelon.
"John looked at me and said, 'What makes you think I like watermelon?'"
Then he laughed. And he put her at ease, she said.
"That set the tone for the rest of our relationship. Just knowing them and being friends with them has changed me tremendously."
They were kind, despite the prejudice Vontz witnessed in California — the apartment that was "rented" when Mel went to visit, but available when she called to inquire.
They came to Lincoln and settled in. They mentored the troubled. They took in foster children and adopted one of them — fitting the baby seamlessly into their home and completing a family of seven.
John led the NAACP; he lived through threats from the KKK. He served as a Lincoln police officer for 20 years, a resource officer in the schools, an honorary lifetime member of three PTAs.
“He was wonderful,” says Deane Finnegan, whose kids went to Prescott Elementary School. “He knew every child by name.”
Mel was his anchor, an ER nurse and then a stay-at-home mom who helped other moms nurse their babies as a La Leche League leader.
And she helped families find homes, too — the only African-American realtor in town when she started in the mid-'70s. (John and Mel would become the first black couple who worked as realtors when John got his license and sold houses to supplement his police income.)
“The question was, ‘Will white people patronize us?’” Mel says. “And that was absolutely not a problem.”
Eventually, the couple opened their own brokerage — Melanie Ways Real Estate — closing when the market went bust with 18 percent interest rates in the mid-'80s.
But the Ways found another path and, in 1991, crossed the Doane College stage together.
John went from the police department to the State of Nebraska; Mel eventually became human resources manager at Duncan Aviation, where she had two nicknames: Mama Mel and Hugs Lady.
“We’re forever running into people who knew her from Duncan,” John says. “She’s hugging all these people in the restaurant and the supermarket.”
Everywhere they go, people remember John, too.
“When the kids were growing up, we could hardly go anywhere without somebody stopping us,” Mel says.
Even now, they hear grown men call out: Officer Ways!
Mel and John both retired in 2014. Mel serves on the Human Rights Commission. John still holds bible study every Sunday at the county jail, the way he’s been doing for 25 years.
John is 74. Mel is 72.
They still love each other.
They love. Period.
“They’ve had a lot of tragedy in their life,” Finnegan says. “But they have an incredible faith that holds them steady.”
John and Melanie show me to the door.
Mel opens her arms for a hug.
“The first time you come you’re a guest,” she says. “The second time, you’re family.”
Reach the writer at 402-473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
On Twitter @TheRealCLK
Cindy Lange-Kubick
Columnist
Cindy Lange-Kubick has loved writing columns about life in her hometown since 1994. She had hoped to become a people person by now, nonetheless she would love to hear your tales of fascinating neighbors and interesting places.
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