Quiet champion for civil rights Memorial planned for activist Rosalie Oakes
http://www.winchesterstar.com/showarticle_new.php?sID=6&foldername=20080924&file=OAKES_article.html By Christine Miller Ford The Winchester Star September 30, 2008 Winchester Born in the spring of 1917, raised to be a "proper young lady" in an Irish family of five daughters in a home on Clifford Street, and remembered by friends and family as quiet, modest, and somewhat shy, Rosalie Oakes might seem an unlikely candidate to change the world. But after graduating from Handley High School in 1934 and heading to Richmond for college, Oakes pursued a remarkable career that included 15 years in South Africa, where she taught leadership skills to black women living under apartheid. Early in her career with the Young Women's Christian Association, Oakes faced off with the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina after the group tried to shut down a YWCA camp where blacks and whites lived and swam together. At colleges in the South in the late 1950s and '60s, she served as a behind-the-scenes driving force as sit-ins and protests began to unravel the Jim Crow laws that for nearly a century had kept blacks and whites separated in schools, movie theaters, restaurants, and other aspects of public life. "In the era we grew up in, most young women didn't veer too far from what was expected," said 85-year-old Winchester resident Farley Massey. "But many of us learned to broaden ourselves as we got older, and Rosalie obviously did that. I admire her for all she accomplished." Oakes, who died this summer at 91, will be remembered Saturday morning at a memorial service in Washington. Her burial is planned for that afternoon in the Oakes family plot at Mt. Hebron Cemetery. Family members say Oakes's health began to fail after Ann Oakes, her only surviving sibling, died in April. Oakes had lived with her younger sister in Arlington since her retirement more than three decades ago. His aunt wasn't the type to broadcast her achievements, said Drew Babb, who lives in Lincoln and is the son of Oakes's sister Lillian. "We found out about a lot of her accomplishments only after she died, when we were looking through her papers and other belongings,'' he said. "She was an absolutely amazing woman, but she never brought attention to herself." Oakes, whose post-graduate work included studying at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa. where Martin Luther King Jr. would earn a Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951 is mentioned in several books as a key mentor in the women's movement and the civil rights movement. "She influenced a lot of people, but she's probably not the kind of woman you've ever heard of," said Casey Hayden, an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin in the mid-1950s when Oakes led the student chapter of the YWCA there. "She was always in the background supporting other people," said Hayden, who helped to organize Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 with her then-husband Tom Hayden. "She wasn't in it for the accolades or the recognition; she was just living her life." Joyce Mims also met Oakes as a student in Austin. She said Oakes knew how to bring out the best in the people around her and to rally them in support of a just cause. "So many people think the civil rights movement started in Greensboro [N.C.] with the lunch counter sit-in in 1960, and that did bring the issue to national prominence," Mims said. "But for years before, Rosalie and people like her were training leaders to fight against racial injustice." Hayden, who lives in Tucson, Ariz., called Oakes her role model. "We called it 'the Y's way to work,' but of course we meant that as a play on words, too it was truly the wise way to work," Hayden said. "She was inclusive, supportive, respectful, a true egalitarian." In 1958, Oakes left Austin for South Africa, where she helped to open community centers where women could take vocational training and learn about health education, infant and child care, nutrition, and other subjects. A decade earlier, South Africa had legalized racial apartheid, a system not fully dismantled until Nelson Mandela's election as the country's president in 1994. Women were doubly repressed, with no access to education and legally unable to own property. In a 1967 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story, Oakes shared her frustration with the ever-tightening restrictions on black South Africans, calling the latest laws "a tremendous setback for human rights." She finished her career in New York City, serving as director of the World Relations Unit of the YWCA of the United States. In that position, she organized extensive sessions to teach women from around the world leadership and other skills. After retiring to Northern Virginia, Oakes took an active role at the Church of the Epiphany Episcopal in Washington. Her religious convictions were a motivating force throughout Oakes's life and career, said Doug Rossinow, a history professor at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minn. He wrote about Oakes a decade ago in "The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America." "Rosalie Oakes acted like a completely fearless woman, living out her Christian faith for decades in a way that people hardly ever do,'' Rossinow said in an interview Tuesday. "She stood on the front lines fighting for a just, Christian social order. I don't think she ever sought the limelight. But we should always remember her, and people like her, as inspirations and exemplars." Mims, who makes her home in Montclair, N.J., last visited with Oakes in June. The two updated each other on the lives of people they knew, including several friends still in Texas. One of the students mentored by Oakes went on to become mayor of Austin and another served as chief counsel for the university. In South Africa, a woman who Oakes met and helped to train as a Y leader, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, now serves as a top government official. "I don't think Rosalie had any idea just how powerful an influence she was," Mims said. "She was a genteel Southern lady, but she was very impatient with injustice. If something was the right thing to do, then she was going to do it. "There's no question about Rosalie's legacy," she said. "Because of her, we've lived different lives." -- Contact Christine Miller Ford at [EMAIL PROTECTED] . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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