DoT’s Place
Once upon a time, a Black family in Union point Georgia decided to leave. Being descendants of enslaved Africans, life in Georgia tilling land owned by this family had become untenable.
Impossible.
So the father, his wife, and their 2 daughters joined the Great migration, landed outside of Chicago in a wealthy bedroom community called Evanston, Illinois. Evanston was the home of many Northwestern University professors. Black people who landed there generally worked for those white people as domestic chauffeurers and other servants.
The father, Alfred Parham, had one year of college education under his belt but had left school when his own father died to tend that farm in Union point. In Illinois he became a chauffeur and later a steel worker.
His wife Emmie was 16 when she had her first child, Mary. In Evanston, she had two more children: Dorothy Louise followed 5 years later by Alfredine (four daughters and counting my grandfather was taking no chances on squandering his opportunity to have a namesake). Emmie took in laundry for white people, and raised a total of four daughters all of whom went to college.
Dorothy Louise was the tomboy in the family. At age 15, her father Alfred forbid her from continuing to play tackle football with the boys. "They're not tackling you for the right reasons, Dorothy" he said according to our family legends.
Dorothy had a dream of becoming a farmer. It was her plan to return to that land in Georgia and farm it. However, in 1940s America, CHARITY from the Coca-Cola Corporation scuttled all those dreams. In her senior in H.S., Dorothy went along to emotionally support a friend taking a merit test in downtown Chicago. This test had a full ride scholarship to Howard University the Mecca of HBCUs as a prize for the person with the highest test score.
Dorothy accidentally won the Coca Cola scholarship.
Which would not be a bad thing, except that it put her on the wrong side of the Talented Tenth/ Booker T. Washington debate.
Farming land-- getting dirt under one's fingernails--was not something black people who won scholarships to prestigious schools ought to be considering...ESPECIALLY NOT BLACK WOMEN.
So Dorothy Louise Parham went to Howard University on that full scholarship and majored in botany. There was no training in farm skills at the black man's Harvard. For that, she would have needed an Agricultural and Mechanical School.
Somewhere along the way during that 4-year adventure in college, Dorothy got pregnant and had an abortion. So did at least one of the other 3 Parham sisters--my own mother. My mother's abortion left her psychologically scarred and unable to return to college after the date rape that had resulted in that unwanted pregnancy. BUT she was able to eventually have three full-term pregnancies, birthing three healthy children.
Dorothy was not so lucky. Her abortion left her unable to carry a child to term. When she married, she tried at least a dozen times and was only able to carry her last pregnancy to a heartbreaking five months.
Dorothy's college degree allowed her to find a job as a switchboard operator (with her nice white sounding voice) for "Ma Bell". She married a self-made man with a high school degree, rose to become the first Black manager with AT&T in Los Angeles and solidly settled into a Black middle class lifestyle in the Baldwin hills area of Los Angeles.
Having had no children when she died, she gifted me and 9 other people of her choice with a phenomenon rare in Black America; access to inter- generational wealth, from the sale of that Baldwin hills home.
And that is how DOT'S PLACE came to be.
MAY IT MOVE FORWARD IN ITS NEXT INCARNATION AS A SPACE IN NATURE TO BE ENJOYED BY MANY, with an ongoing reparations awareness. Many "more melanated people" have often found ourselves excluded from leisure time in nature and from programs that educate us about our relationship to our natural world.
Thank you for being a part of a dream where Black people get to go Back To The Land and re-connect with nature, too!