Diverse Workplace: Articles

EDUCATION, PERSEVERANCE AND RESPECT A speech in Boston delivered on Martin Luther King Day 2010 by Gwen Cochran Hadden I am Gwendolyn Louise Cochran Hadden, a daughter of the South, having been born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia with ancestry rooted in Scotland, Portugal, Africa and the native peoples of America. I didn’t know Dr. King well enough to have dinner with him or his family, but my family and I were involved in the civil rights movement in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. In 1948, in a speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia, Dr. King Jr. said “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically... Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.” Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who believed strongly in the value of education. He was the child of educated, Negro parents who believed that the best way to better oneself was through education. Negro parents of this generation had very specific ideas about what comprised a good education: complete secondary school, matriculate from a college and then either work providing services to others of the race or continue to pursue degrees until ready to provide those services, teaching, social work, the ministry. How do I know this? Because I grew up in the same environment as Dr. King. I remember these life goals well because I come from a Negro family who believes in education. But life doesn’t always afford us the opportunity to pursue an education in such a formulaic way, and perhaps that is a gift toward the pursuit of a different kind of education, a more personal one. Today, I would like to illustrate the many ways that one family fulfilled their dreams through education; that family is my family. My mother and father were born in the second decade of the 20th century. They both attended and graduated from Booker T. Washington high school, built in 1924 as the first high school for colored children in Atlanta. They graduated on the cusp of the Great Depression. Had either of them been born a little earlier, they would not have gone to high school for there were none in Atlanta that they could attend. For some reason, it had always been a dream of my mother’s to get a college education, a strange dream for the child of a father who had once been a sharecropper. Not knowing how she was going to do this, she applied to Morris Brown College, a Methodist college for Negro students and was accepted in 1931. Thus began her ten year journey for her college degree in business administration, an ambitious major for a Negro woman in the 1930’s for women were expected to be secretaries or teachers, not administer a business. My mother would attend school for a year or six months and then work for another 1 or 2 years until she had the money to go back to school. She graduated from college in 1941 at the age of 28 and began work as a secretary in an elementary school in Atlanta. Later she put her education to use by managing the business operations for my father’s dance band and being an administrator in the Senior Services programs in Atlanta. My father was a natural born musician. He had perfect pitch and could play just about any instrument. He wanted to be a classical pianist. This was a more fantastical dream than my mother’s since not only was he a Negro in the segregated South but also had severe disabilities as a result of having had what was then known as “infantile paralysis’ or polio. He had the use of three fingers and the base of his thumb but not together. Even as a child, Daddy wanted to play the piano badly and his mother searched for a teacher who would teach him. No one would help him learn to play classical music; the best that he could get was a teacher to teach him the basics of reading music. The rest he had to do on his own. My father’s education was a lifelong one of teaching himself aided by his considerable talents and perseverance. In 1935, he won a prize on the Town Hall Tonight amateur contest in NY and was on the bill the night that Ella Fitzgerald was discovered at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. He began his professional career with his own band as the young Negro Eddie Duchin, the most successful dance orchestra in the US for many years. For many years, Daddy played up and down the Eastern seaboard in country clubs, colleges and for debutante balls, all in White environments. He was successful enough to raise five children and make sure that all five received an education beyond high school on his earnings as a musician. But he never stopped learning more and more about music. [continue to page 2]

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