In 1962, I graduated from Booker High School in Sarasota, Florida, proudly as my class Valedictorian. Those years had not been without sacrifice by me. Like my mother, I lived with a relative to complete high school, rather than taking the 50-mile roundtrip to attend Dunbar High School in Fort Myers.
While the perception of a colored school, teachers and students was one of inferiority, I received a superior education that provided me the competency, confidence, and commitment to excellence to go out into the wider white society.
The next natural step, going to college, was not an option for me. The role designed for me as a colored high school graduate girl was simply to do domestic work of some sort. In the early 1960s, I could not become a teller in the bank, a clerk in a store, or an entry-level employee in a government or corporate office.
The reality of what was expected of me as a colored girl was made perfectly clear when I was thirteen years old. Always very proud of her daughter, my mother told a group of white women that I had completed my typing course. One woman, asked my mother if I could come and do some typing for her. Mother agreed because I typed for residents in my neighborhood.
When I arrived at the woman’s house, she guided me not to a typewriter, but to a bucket to wash windows. To say the least, I was shocked. And I assumed the quote colored “performance identity,” moving very slowly at the task. I used some excuse to call my mother. And she immediately came to pick me up.
I left without saying a word to the woman. My mother was angry that the woman had lied. I, on the other hand, felt pity for the woman, a white woman so insecure of her “place” in society that she would be threatened by a 13-year-old child who wanted to learn a skill rather than being condemned to a menial work life.
Now going out into the wider world, all of my experiences, even the inconvenient and sometimes traumatizing ones, prepared me for my life ahead. I was to show the world who I was, the truth of my identity. Not “tragically colored,” but an empowered colored girl ready for the challenges I would face.
"In my life, I have found myself as a colored, a negro, a Black, an African American, and a person of color. This is my reflection as a colored girl." This phrase opens each essay in the series “Reflections of a Colored Girl” from Martha R. Bireda, Ph.D. being aired on WGCU FM. Dr. Bireda is a writer, lecturer, and living history performer with over 30 years' experience as a lecturer, consultant and trainer for issues related to race, class, and gender, working with educators, law enforcement, and business, and civic leaders. She also is director of the Blanchard House Museum of African American History and Culture of Charlotte County, in Punta Gorda, Florida. Bireda was born in Southwest Florida in 1945 but spent the first 10 years of her life in a small town in Western Virginia. Her family then moved back to Punta Gorda, where they have deep roots. This is one essay in her series.
