13 Years old and sentenced to death
A Multi-generational Migration from the Cotton Fields of the Jim Crow South to the Design Departments of the Space Shuttle’s Lead Manufacturer
13 Years old and sentenced to death
A Multi-generational Migration from the Cotton Fields of the Jim Crow South to the Design Departments of the Space Shuttle’s Lead Manufacturer
Overview
In 1916, my 13-year-old father fled by train and rode nearly 1,000 miles as a homeless fugitive. His crime was initiating a conversation with a White girl, which put him on the hangman’s list.
In 1900, my maternal grandmother married at age 12. She and her husband ran away from the plantation where they labored in order to escape grinding poverty and abuse.
Over a half-century later, I traveled nearly 3,000 miles by plane from Detroit to Los Angeles to assume a position as a design engineer in the aerospace industry.
13 Years Old and Sentenced to Death unites these stories and more from my family’s history. My family’s journey from cotton to space was a part of the Great Migration, the movement of approximately six million African Americans north.
This nonfiction memoir chronicles our journeys through the poverty of the sharecropping economy, the violence of the Jim Crow South, and the virulent aftermath that has plagued the United States of America since slavery. It ventures into my father’s stint as a child soldier in the Canadian Enemy Alien Concentration Camps of World War I. My mother’s impoverished, tuberculosis-ridden childhood in Black Bottom, the section of Detroit were African-Americans were restricted to living is also journaled. These experiences fueled my parents enormous obsession with education for their children. They saw it as a ticket to a better life.
My story is the fruit of their visions. I was an outcast who, with the support of my family, overcame tremendous challenges and became an engineer. I experienced elements of the workplace harassment chronicled in Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, decades later in the aerospace industry. I have woven in stories such as the tale of Nigger, the space shuttle engine test facility’s black pet cat. I was introduced to him by name, by my boss, my first day on the job.
The public execution of George Floyd has launched an awakening to racial inequality and persecution in America. Many people ask why these problems continue to exist. It is my hope that, after finishing this memoir, readers will have a greater understanding of some of the root causes behind systemic injustice.
Like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and Jenny Torres Sanchez’s We Are Not From Here, this work is a story of the perseverance of individuals who have thrived while living through powerful personal and societal upheavals. It is a legacy that I hope will be an inspiration for others. This is our journey.
Sharecropper’s Daughter, Former Aerospace Engineer, Chemistry and Physics Teacher and Retired High School Principal
Overview
In 1916, my 13-year-old father fled by train and rode nearly 1,000 miles as a homeless fugitive. His crime was initiating a conversation with a White girl, which put him on the hangman’s list.
In 1900, my maternal grandmother married at age 12. She and her husband ran away from the plantation where they labored in order to escape grinding poverty and abuse.
Over a half-century later, I traveled nearly 3,000 miles by plane from Detroit to Los Angeles to assume a position as a design engineer in the aerospace industry.
13 Years Old and Sentenced to Death unites these stories and more from my family’s history. My family’s journey from cotton to space was a part of the Great Migration, the movement of approximately six million African Americans north.
This nonfiction memoir chronicles our journeys through the poverty of the sharecropping economy, the violence of the Jim Crow South, and the virulent aftermath that has plagued the United States of America since slavery. It ventures into my father’s stint as a child soldier in the Canadian Enemy Alien Concentration Camps of World War I. My mother’s impoverished, tuberculosis-ridden childhood in Black Bottom, the section of Detroit were African-Americans were restricted to living is also journaled. These experiences fueled my parents enormous obsession with education for their children. They saw it as a ticket to a better life.
My story is the fruit of their visions. I was an outcast who, with the support of my family, overcame tremendous challenges and became an engineer. I experienced elements of the workplace harassment chronicled in Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, decades later in the aerospace industry. I have woven in stories such as the tale of Nigger, the space shuttle engine test facility’s black pet cat. I was introduced to him by name, by my boss, my first day on the job.
The public execution of George Floyd has launched an awakening to racial inequality and persecution in America. Many people ask why these problems continue to exist. It is my hope that, after finishing this memoir, readers will have a greater understanding of some of the root causes behind systemic injustice.
Like Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and Jenny Torres Sanchez’s We Are Not From Here, this work is a story of the perseverance of individuals who have thrived while living through powerful personal and societal upheavals. It is a legacy that I hope will be an inspiration for others. This is our journey.