A Family Formed by Loving Lessons in a Tougher Time

The children of Franklin Parish, La., left home, but home never left them.

Those small, country towns of their birth refused to be forgotten, to fade and then vanish, a distant point on the horizon. Even when they found new homes in Los Angeles, New York or Chicago, they lived close to their beginnings, still hearing the voices of the town’s parents, teachers and ministers.

Nearly half a century later, those fresh-faced teenagers and young men and women who journeyed here from Louisiana are still looking back at the place of their beginnings.

Looking back is a part of growing older. We look back because even though things were tougher, life was in some ways better then. People were kinder. Life was sweeter. But there are times when reaching back is more than melancholy or nostalgia, times when people reach back with an eye toward the future and a clear purpose for younger generations.

“This teaches them that unity is there and friendship can last forever; this is not a fly-by-night thing,” said Annette Mills, a member of the Franklin Parish Families Club, a Los Angeles organization of families who migrated from Louisiana decades ago but still maintain their ties.

The families gather--more than 300 Southern Californians--for annual picnics. They collect money for members who are sick and grieve together when one dies. They select days to worship together and they support a scholarship fund.

And in July the Franklin Parish Families Club played host to their high school reunion. The alumni and teachers of Wisner-Gilbert High School traveled from Louisiana and all over the nation to Los Angeles.

“You just don’t know the joy it brings . . . to see my children,” said Anita Ernest-McCohn, a former Wisner-Gilbert teacher, as she sat at a reunion breakfast surrounded by alumni.

Los Angeles is a long way from Highway 15 where the old school sat, midway between a town called Wisner and another called Gilbert. For Ernest-McCohn’s many children, leaving was an act of survival, as it was for other African Americans who left the South in the decades after World War II. They were pulled by the prospect of opportunities for employment, a shot at a better life.

In Louisiana the living was anything but easy. Between 1889 and 1918, the state was home to the fourth-highest number of lynchings in the nation. After World War II, African Americans continued to live under a brutal system of economic exploitation, smack under the heel of Jim Crow. That system offered a recipe for a black child’s failure. The black community had another future in mind. Bertha Douglas-Cooper of Los Angeles, president of the families club, still remembers, as if it were a mantra, the words of her parents.

“Whatever you are, I want you to be the best,” said Douglas-Cooper, who spent years working in corporate America as a manager. “There’s a little voice in me saying the same thing now: Do it so well, no one can come behind you and do it better. That still motivates me now.”

Nobody had much back then, but they received hearty doses of the message that they were capable of great achievements.

“It was amazing that you didn’t know that you were poor, because life was abundantly given to you in love, in things that made a difference in your life,” said Verdine Williams, 54, of Monroe, La., who is past president of the national Wisner-Gilbert Alumni Assn. “Where we come from has made such a difference in who we are now.”

Back then if a child acted up in public, any adult within hearing could correct and punish, Williams said. Every mother was your mother. Every father was your father. Nobody relied on biology to determine how much they would care or for whom.

“It was for the betterment of every child,” he said. “We knew our limits; we were held to them.”

Those limits--respect for elders, dignity, enterprise and hard work-- expanded the possibilities of a child’s life. Teachers played a crucial role in that kind of life training. At this summer’s reunion, held at the Marriott Hotel in Torrance, the teachers were the VIPs.

In a ballroom, classmates check the name tags of old friends, just to be sure time is not playing tricks. Women go by hyphenated names, explaining who they were before marriage.

But everybody knows the teachers. They sit at the head table. There is a banquet, and a talent night, and the last day is a worship service. The teachers are the stars of the affair, hugged and kissed and praised: Coach Donald Moore, Edmonia McClain- Williams, Mary Ervin and Ernest-McCohn.

Emma Scott of Pasadena remembers the way the teachers taught them to view the world. “No goal was too high,” Scott recalled. And no aspect of a child’s development was too small for the teachers to correct.

“In the city, you all don’t speak,” Ernest-McCohn, who lives in Louisiana, explained. “See, we country people speak. Good morning. Good evening. How’s everyone?”

A child would enter her class, frowning and silent. “I’d say, ‘I didn’t know you stayed at my house last night,’ ” Ernest-McCohn said, a sly smile on her face.

“They didn’t know what I was talking about. They’d say, ‘I didn’t stay at your house last night.’ I’d say, ‘You must have--and you spoke to me when you got up this morning.’ ”

The child would smile, then laugh, and the missing “Good morning, Mrs. McCohn” showed up.

Along with English and science, the teachers taught students how to carry themselves as men and women. The expectations for behavior and discipline were high. But so was the teachers’ belief in their students’ abilities.

Bobbie Phenix Gipson of Toledo, Ohio, still remembers that McClain-Williams listened to her read aloud in class, then proclaimed that she could one day be a great speaker. “It helped me be able to stand in front of people and speak and feel that confidence, because I remember she told me I could do it,” she said.

The children grew up to achieve in every field of endeavor imaginable. There are doctors, chemists, teachers, social workers, law enforcement leaders and working-class people. They are grandmothers and grandfathers-- and some are relatives of this writer--who have remembered to look back and to honor their past. At the reunion students prayed over their teachers--the way their teachers once did for them.

“I cannot explain,” McClain- Williams said. “This is what I really needed. It’s going to help me, my mind, my memory. This has added years to my life.”

The Los Angeles club was founded by members of the Class of 1958 who got together to socialize, but had such a good time that they decided to continue the get-togethers, to invite everybody and make it a family affair, said Douglas-Cooper, who organized the club with Mills, Pearlean Baylor and others.

On designated Sundays they worship together, rotating among the churches that members attend. When one member needed surgery, the club raised funds to help.

William Foster, 6, delivered the welcome at the reunion banquet. He is the grandson of Mills and a liver transplant recipient. Club members know him well because they have prayed for him, kept up with his progress, encouraged the family.

“He knows that the closeness is there,” Mills said. “He always tells people, ‘These are my grandmother’s friends.’ ”

Club members look back, but they also look forward. The world is still harsh. A child going out to meet it still needs a community of people behind him, preparing him, praying with him, whispering things he will always remember. A child still needs to know and believe in his legacy, enough to survive in spite of it all.

This is what the families club represents. It is like having a bit of the South--the best part--right in the city, a piece of the past that has been pulled, lovingly, into the present.