Dear Irene:

More than a century ago, your parents had begun their family, and your only sister had been born. Now, in the summer of 1989 you are the only one of your siblings left.

To you, we pay homage.

Because of your health, you can’t join us during this year’s (1989) family reunion in Macon. If you were able to, Irene, you could take us back to Bolingbroke. You could tell us about your growing-up years, maybe how you and your brothers and sister ran barefoot through the fields, or how hard all of you worked to help raise the crops, or how sweet your mother was and how stern your father was.

You are our bridge to them and a life we may never intimately know. In you, we see our past. We see that we existed in a time before and that we will live on in a time ahead.

We salute you because you signify the strength of our family. In your life, you’ve had to raise a family alone, to make sure your children had food to eat, clothes to wear and a place to live. You have endured, and you have shown us of the later generations that we can make it.

When you were living your life over the past 50 years or more, you may never have thought that what you were doing really mattered. Those who make history rarely do. You most likely saw it as simply trying to live from day to day. But you were doing more than that. You were creating a way for us. You pried open the door, bit by bit, so that our world would be better than yours.

You lived through Jim Crowism and the humiliation of “knowing your place.” You lived through a period when your life was worth less than a toad’s. You lived through segregation, lynching, poor schools and no schools. You lived through “For Colored Only” water fountains and Woolworth lunch counters that were closed to you because you were Black.

But you also lived through Asa Philip Randolph and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. You lived to see a movement that gave your children and your grandchildren an opportunity to excel in places you never thought possible.

By the time this period in history had arrived, however, you were up in years and could not fully taste its fruits of freedom. So, we feed from its trough in your place, ever mindful that we’re doing it not only for ourselves but for you and our ancestors.

It’s our time to take up the gauntlet that you have passed on to us, Irene, Elizabeth, Guss, Alonzo, Walter, Floyd, Obie and the countless others who suffered the indignities but kept your spirits. We can only hope that we and our descendants can live up to you.

From Janice, Carletta, Cynthia, Robert Jr., Alicia and Gregory McClendon:

Our grandmother is a kind and loving lady, who is also a very quiet person. She’s very religious and is always doing something for the Lord. At 90, she is a very fortunate person to have lived as long as she has. We pray that we can live a good long Christian life just as she has.

We love you grandmother.

This letter was published in the 1989 Howard Family reunion newspaper.